Mutual Staking

Description

ECSA:

“Risk, both social and financial, should not be eradicated (and to do so would stifle social change), but we can think about ways of ‘risking together’ (financially organizing the relations of risk differently); not so that individual choices and decisions are subordinated to some collectivised determination, but so that the economic and social context in which individual decisions are executed in token markets is itself collectively ordered while being transparent to its individual participants.

The key to this market for co-operation by risking together is the issue of stake: that a distributed collective endeavour is expressed by everyone holding a stake in each others’ positions. This is not the equity ownership of capitalism, which we know to be one articulation of polarization of wealth and power. We are proposing mutual staking as a means to express interest in others’ performances, and hence in collective performance. Unlike capitalism, mutual staking cannot lead to concentrations of power because all staking in a distributed economy is reciprocal: stake cannot be taken in without also being dispersed. We see staking and the sharing of stake as an economic network equivalent of social media - we call it economic media. It advances the (r)evolution of social media, while maintaining its familiar and simple ‘user interface’. (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TuTnsh50jtB710D5YwEuIxPG-bT1ZkokCLErV0l8Z60/edit)