Society of the Electronic Indies

Description

"The “Society of the Electronic Indies” is the cooperative through which the Indiano communards enter the market. If you want to know more about our lives in the market, our clients, and the services we provide, visit the page dedicated to our commercial history. On this page, we don’t want talk to you about the cooperative, but rather the egalitarian community that gives it life and shape.

Our origins: We “Indianos” are the product of a long evolution that starts with the first virtual communities in Spanish and Portuguese at the end of the ’80s. They were the birthplace of the first online literary groups and the first European civil-rights association on the Internet.

At some point, we realized two things: in the first place, that this rich online conversation between people that lived on different continents was what made our life interesting; we learned, we contributed, and we felt useful to others.

Secondly, we didn’t forget that the whole experience was very fragile: without an economy of their own, our capacity Wired 2002to transform our surroundings and maintain a way of life where learning was ongoing was not only very limited but, with everyone being in different parts of the world, our serenity depended on states and markets that were more and more unstable.

We were clear that we didn’t want to abandon our permanent conversation to become a traditional business, but also that our activity had to be productive, and that our autonomy would come from thinking about the market in a different way."

Discusssion

How we make a living

Our income comes from our activity in the market. We design and carry out projects of innovation that seek to empower all kinds of organizations, both in their surroundings and in their internal working. For their relationship with the world, the market, and risks, we design, develop, and implement tools of public intelligence; to strengthen their internal capacities, we develop programs and tools that enrich their community dimension. The common element is a long experience in technology and networks.

Fourteen years after creating the “Society of the Electronic Indies,” we’re proud, above all, of four things:

What we’ve learned about the big changes of our time and the place that the communal, the free, and the distributed occupy in them.

• We’ve summarized this learning for our friends and readers in The Communard Manifesto.

• Our internal egalitarianism. In Las Indias, we live in the community experience we always wanted. We function by consensus on the solid base given by permanent deliberation. We share among all responsibilities, economic activity, and the income that it produces. We all learn and improve ourselves to contribute, and with everyone’s work, we satisfy everyone’s economic needs. We explain this model in The Book of Community.

• The Indiano community in the broadest sense. Beyond the “communal life,” many ways of being an Indiano have appeared over time. Las Indias allows different levels of commitment and activities, which are connected by the tools that form our cooperative group, from participating in or promoting debates, workshops, and cultural activities with the Las Indias Club to creating and cooperatively producing all kinds of things in The Art of Things. The result is a living community based on a permanent dynamic of conversation, learning, and production that constantly enriches the life of all.

• Our place in the market. We’ve turned what we value most into commercial products: what we have learned—and continue learning—in conversation; the debate of all these years, which you can discover in our books; our contextopedia, and our blog. Thanks to that, not only do we continue to be an egalitarian community that is alive, creative, and constantly learning, but we’ve consolidated a small but healthy group of cooperatives with ever-greater social impact.

Our goal:But while our lifestyle provides us with economic serenity, feeds the best in our surroundings, and provides us with an interesting life, we have a larger goal.

The world we live in is at a crossroads. On the one hand, the crisis, driven by the gigantism of corporations has multiplied social decomposition; on the other hand, the tendencies toward a new world with other values that are already expressed through new forms of production and consumption like the direct economy and P2P production are stronger and stronger.

That is, in spite of all the miseries of the crisis, the growth of inequality and war, our world, thanks to the development of knowledge and the extension of distributed networks, is closer and closer to making the old dream of our species possible. It’s a broad goal, but less utopian than it seems, that we explain and link to changes that are developing before our eyes in the The Communard Manifesto.

The Indiano way of life

In the end, Las Indias is a way of life guided by the pleasure of learning and the idea that our surroundings—real people, with first and last names with whom we work or converse, and our affections—our families, peers and friends, are much more important than any “imagined community” or any national or cultural “belonging.” Being consistent with this has led us to learn and explore all kinds of things, from languages synthetic to the game of Go. Learning and exploring is our way of enjoying.

We also realized that we had to “translate” what we learned in these years into knowledge and practical experiences that we could share, show, and make available to other people who, like us, would have realized that internal egalitarianism, the passion for everyone’s learning, and competition in the market are perfectly compatible, and what’s more, that together, they offer the possibility of having a life that is interesting and committed to others." (https://english.lasindias.com/what-is-las-indias)