Las Indias
= a community with a set of cooperatives, a contemporary example in prototype form of the network form of Phyles
Old URLs = http://lasindias.coop english-language blog What is Las Indias ? Las Indias organizational chart
Description
(Status update 2025: Las Indias has gone 'underground' and has largely scrubbed its material from the open internet)
Las Indias consists of a democratic association, the Las Indias Club, the outer core; a crafts-oriented production cooperative, El Arte de la Cosas (the Art of Things), and at the heart, a egalitarian community in the form of a worker coop, Sociedad de las Indias [1] (the Society of the Electronic Indies).
The group is mainly based in Spain.
0. Antonio Blanco-Gracia
"Las Indias Electrónicas says that “Las Indias is a transnational egalitarian and productive community. We live according to the ‘hacker ethics’ of work: we enjoy learning, we love discussion and we don’t limit ourselves to any specialization”. They currently are six members; four women and two men. One of the women is the elected “Gobernadora” of las Indias, which is the only “position” one can have in the community. The Gobernadora is the legal administrator, that also is in charge of giving coherence to the business strategy of the cooperative group, and the one that makes decisions in times of crisis or scarcity in which a quick decision has to be made, and deliberation only is possible afterwards. There is also an “external position”, called “Dogo”. The Dogo is a non member prestigious intellectual that has the right to speech and vote in the assemblies, who’s mission is to advise and bring an external and critical perspective to their deliberations, and above all, to help them to avoid that the logic of market prevails over the logic of the community. The cooperative group is formed by three organizations that they consider tools and not ends by themselves (Los Indianos, 2016b). The first is La Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas, which is a worker cooperative ... , oriented to promote the experience of cooperativism and communitarianism by accepting “collaborator members”. Its aim is offer the space and infrastructure for launching self-consumption production (i.e. craft beer) or direct-economy projects, usually but not only oriented to culture consume. The third is “El Club de las Indias”, a conversational and learning space (both on-line and in-person), in form of association/society, in which peer-learning activities are organized and most of the projects of El Arte de las Cosas have born. As intentional community, they have develop an array of symbols, myths and rituals that give a distinctive identity to the group as an “actual community”, which they fiercely oppose to the imagined communities (Anderson, 2016) that they consider that block the way for the construction of alternative worlds. In order to overcome them, Las Indias have developed the concept of phyle as “a confederation — which is to say, a network with no higher structure — of conversational communities with their own companies, which share a series of common funds in a transnational space: basically, ‘social security’ and mutual economic support systems" (de Ugarte, 2015). Las Indias took the term phyle (ancient Greek for tribe, clan) from Neal Stephenson’s novel “The Diamond Age”, and develop it also from Bruce Sterling’s sci-fi projections of the Mondragon cooperative movement in his novel “Islands in the Net”. Other organizations such as the additive manufacturing consultancy firm Tikoa in Murcia Region, or the P2P Foundation claim to be oriented towards a phyle, and cooperatives such as Talaio and Olatu in the Basque Country have taken ideas from the phyle concept for their own development.
1. David de Ugarte:
"Precisely because there is a phyle awareness – that is, the awareness of being a community with business and not a business community or a community of people working in that business – all Indianos are partners in the two cooperatives which constitute the cooperative group.
As a result, interconnections and ideas multiply and fly: if you follow the Indianos throughout their blogs, you can see how one season they take up the tasting of natural wines as an inspiration to think about new activity lines, or how they rethink their own myths in order to talk the reasons for a new clothing offer.
Thinking about the ideas of community and interconnection, Sonia Carbajal, while commenting on her experience as a group apprentice, pointed out that one of the things which this period of reading and living alongside other had led her to was the discovery that at the end of the road lay not her incorporation not into a specific business or activity, but integration, from personal autonomy, within a community." (http://deugarte.com/gomi/phyles.pdf)
Source, the Book: Phyles: Economic Democracy in the Network Century. by David de Ugarte
2. David de Ugarte:
"We are not a cooperative, we are a not very big phyle: we are a community who organize their economy democratically through 4 workers cooperatives, 1 NGO and the participation in 3 more projects developed by non-members.
The activities of our coops - and then the origin of our incomes - are: consultancy (Sociedad de las Indias), Psicology (Instituto Storge), Free Software programming and services (Enkidu) and business and product incubation (El Arte).
But you can see a little better the difference between a group of coops and a phyle (who own a group of coops) in our «Foundation» (a kind of Constitution of the phyle) in http://english.lasindias.com/foundation/
SEE:
- Phyle's wiki http://lasindias.net
- Las Indias' Cooperative Group http://grupolasindias.coop
- Las Indias' Blog http://lasindias.com
- Las Indias' Blog in English http://english.lasindias.com
Status
2025: Las Indias has gone 'underground' and has scrubbed most of its material from the internet.
Ten Years of Las Indias
David de Ugarte:
"October second of this year will be the tenth anniversary of the Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas, the founding business of the Grupo Cooperativo de las Indias. Even though it only had three members back then — Natalia Fernández, Juan Urrutia, and me — “the Indies,” as it soon became known, was the result of a long evolutionary process in the cyberpunk movement in Spanish. In fact, in 2002, Nat and I refounded Cyberpunk itself as an association in defense of civil rights on the net. We knew that, especially in the beginning, we would need a broad intellectual environment. The objective of the business was never to get rich, but rather to gain autonomy experiencing and living the new possibilities we perceived and theorized about on the network in a new field: the market.
It wasn’t an idealistic objective. It was result of our experience: just one month earlier, the three of us had closed Piensa en Red! [Think in Networks!], our first business. It had more than a few successes: it was the first European business that did programming for PDAs and smartphones, it created the first programs and structures for the distributed management of hospitals, and even for a satellite connection between doctors in hospitals and wounded on the battlefield. We also created the first blog written on a mobile device, installed the first wi-fi network on the peninsula (which was also public and open), and founded the second largest Iberian hosting business. But we closed. External problems with the investors revealed that not all of the twenty workers — who were also shareholders — nor the biggest investors had enough commitment to the project. We were — and still are — friends, but we weren’t a community. When it came time to make the hard choices, the majority in both groups preferred to divide up the capital and close the business. In fact, the project leaders preferred to work at other businesses with the advantage of the experience they’d earned with us. And we learned an important lesson: internal democracy doesn’t work without a true community. But three of us decided to give up our part to the less qualified workers and start over… from zero.
In 2001, Juan Urrutia had published his well-known essay “Networks of people, the Internet, and the Logic of Abundance” in the theoretical magazine Ekonomiaz. Distributed networks appeared as the basis of new P2P relationships and an ever-growing diversity. We cyberpunks recognized in this essay the basics of of the new economic theory we needed to be able to “export” the new freedoms we were experiencing on the network to new parts of life. That was when we started calling the Internet “the Electronic Indies.”
In Iberian history, “the Indies” was the name of the new territories, of the New World discovered by Columbus and soon conceived of, because of its abundance, as the “original paradise.” But precisely because it was a paradise, because it was a country that knew nothing of “original sin,” the king soon prohibited “new Christians,” who were 70% of the population, from travelling there. To be able to take a boat to the Indies, one had to demonstrate “purity of blood.” This time, we thought, we’ll find the abundance first, and not remained locked up in old borders designed by the powers-that-be.
But even though the dream was abundance, the new beginning wasn’t easy. Our three thousand and seven euros in capital weren’t even enough to pay our incorporation costs and the first month’s rent on a micro-office. The solutions we choose then were important, and gave shape to the nature of the project itself, changing our life right up to today.
The most urgent short term objective was to find clients. But we didn’t have money to buy ads, or social relationships in the corporate world. We needed new tools to talk about our experience, to show, in the darkest days of the dot-com crash, that our small business was viable, and that we had real contributions to make to traditional businesses. We looked online for business blogs all over the world… and we didn’t find a single one. There was no model to follow. We began to write, and on the seventh of October, 2002, el Correo de las Indias [the Indies Mail] was born, with Bitácora de las Indias [Log of the Indies] in the masthead. It was the first business blog in the world, and later would also be the first whose posts, thanks to a well-known publisher, would be published as a book. The blog was the way we found our clients, but, more importantly over time, the current indianos.
On the other hand, during the time when we had no clients or we had few sales, the two worker-members, Nat and I, recieved no salary. We didn’t have enough money for that. I slept in the office, Nat worked some hours outside of the Indies, and we had just enough to eat each day and pay the rent on the office and a room in a shared apartment where Nat lived. Later, when clients started coming in, we decided to take the minimum amount of money neccesary to support a normal level of consumption and comfort.
The business would be the economic structure of the community we were creating, and as such, would have all of the the sources of wealth and income; we would not have — and still don’t have — savings, properties, or personal clients. The cooperative is our community savings and the only owner of all that we enjoy. With the passage of time and the growth of the Indies’ community and economy, the first Indies headquarters appeared with the same spirit: wide-open common facilities, with accomodations and offices, personal and common spaces all as property shared among everyone. In short: economically, we’re closer to a kibbutz than to the big cooperatives at Mondragon.
Of course, the new cooperatives and businesses in the group choose their own economic system, but even now, the members of the Indias community, los indianos, are only those in the cooperatives that are part of the original system and who apply it internally as well as between themselves.
Like the cyberpunks we were, we knew that “under every communication architecture, there hides a power structure.” Understanding the power of network topologies was our principal point of differentiation, both in theory –in dialogue or as cyberactivists — and also in the market. We were conscious that the things we offered were “carriers of worlds, social projects, and moral values.” Producing and selling is also a way of changing the world. As a consultancy, we have the opportunity to bring businesses new business models, forms of internal organization and a new work ethic that really makes the difference, and then, as activists, we can apply the generated knowledge to social projects.
Later, each cooperative in the group strengthened the model. Today, the consulting business is the group’s main source of financing. And creating and organizing new cooperatives and businesses constitutes our principal activity.
This September, we’ll found two new businesses in Bilbao called Gaman and Fondaki. Gaman will make free software. Fondaki will be the first Public Intelligence business in Europe. Both will create jobs — based on a new values system, with products designed to strengthen the fabric of small businesses — for a dozen people, in the middle of the most important crisis, with the highest unemployment rates, in all of Iberian economic history.
Both foundings are the best demonstration of what “the Indies” are and what we indianos do. But above all, they will be the best possible commemoration of our tenth anniversary." (http://english.lasindias.com/the-indies-and-the-indianos-ten-years-later/)
Interview 1
Conducted by Michel Bauwens, Neal Gorenflo, and John Robb, with co-founder David de Ugarte:
Michel Bauwens: Explain to us what Las Indias is, and where it comes from, and what makes it distinctive?
David de Ugarte: Las Indias is the result of the Spanish-speaking cyberpunk movement. Originally a civil rights group, during the late 90s it became strongly influenced by Juan Urrutia's “Economics of Abundance” theory. Very soon, we linked “abundance” with the idea of empowerment in distributed networks. We are very clear on this point: it is not the Internet by itself, it is the distributed P2P architecture that allows the new commons. As one of our old slogans put it: “Under every informational architechture lays a structure of power.” Re-centralizing structures – as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Megaupload, etc. do around their servers – weakens us all. The blogosphere, torrents, freenet, etc. are tools of empowerment.
Cyberpunk was mainly a conversational / cyberactivist virtual community. It became transnational quickly and contributed some very good discussions and theories that helped us understand the social impact and possibilities of distributed networks.
But in 2002 three of us founded Las Indias Society, a consultancy firm focused on innovation and networks dedicated to empowering people and organizations. Our experience soon became very important in understanding the opposition between “real” and “imagined” communities, and the organizational bases for an economic democracy. After the cyberpunk dissolution in 2007, the “Montevideo Declaration” openly stated that our objective will be to construct a “phyle,” a transnational economic democracy, in order to ensure the autonomy of our community and it members.
Now, we define ourselves around five main values:
- Distributed network architectures as a way of generating abundance, empowerment, and to ensure the widest plurarchy – the maximum of individual liberties – for the members of our community.
- Transnationality (which means a rejection of national identities as well as universalism) as a consequence of putting the real community of persons who live and work in Las Indias at the center of our work
- Economic democracy as the way to build personal and community autonomy through the market
- Hacker ethics as a way to foster community knowledge generation, common deliberation, personal passion, and a collective pleasure in learning
- Devolutionism: all our production of knowledge – books, software, contents, even recipes – is returned to the commons, generating more abundance
Neal Gorenflo: What is the vision of Las Indias? What would the classic, most developed form be in the future? What are you after in terms of how it can transform individuals, interpersonal relationships, and the world?
Our vision is not a universalist one. We don't proselytize and we really believe that diversity is a desirable consequence of freedom.
But we have a vision for us – the phyle – and a wish: to see the birth of a wider, transnational space of economic democracies. We imagine networks of phyles generating wealth, social cohesion, and ensuring liberties for real people rather than the governments' power and their borders and passports.
We are not naive nor utopian. Distributed networks gave our generation the opportunity to build a new world. But this new world, based on the commons, communities, economic democracy and distributed networks isn't complete at birth. And the old world, based on the artificial generation of scarcity, corporations, inequality, and centralized networks isn't dead.
It is very symptomatic that European crisis manifests as a debt crisis. Governments are suffocating society in order to feed privileged groups – big corporations, some sectors dependent of public money – who have captured state rents or ensured it through monopolistic law. So, the main objective and the main vision now is to stop these decomposing forces in our environments.
MB: How does Las Indias work internally? How is it funded?
There are different levels of engagement and commitment. As a phyle we are really a network. In the periphery there are individual entrepreneurs with their initiatives. In the core there are the associated cooperatives, and at that core. the indianos. We differentiate between the community (the core of the phyle) and the Cooperative Group.
Indianos are communities that are similar to kibbutzim (no individual savings, collective and democratic control of their own coops, etc.). But there are some important differences like the lack of a shared national or religious ideology, being distributed throughout cities rather than concentrated in a compound, and not submitting to an economic rationality.
John Robb: What kind of coops are in the Las Indias network? What are the synergies between the cooperatives?
At this moment we have four coops: Las Indias (a consultancy dedicated to innovation and network analysis); El Arte (a product-lab where we develop products from books to beer to software); Fondaki (global and strategic intelligence for small businesses) and Gaman (educational tools and campaigns).
All of them are expressions of our members' different passions that answer different needs of our community and environment." (http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-future-now-an-interview-with-david-de-ugarte)
Interview 2
Neal Gorenflo interviewed David de Ugarte at OuishareFest 2014:
"The idea of Las Indias is that it is a community with cooperative businesses, not a community of cooperatives. It seems like a subtle point, but it’s very important: the community, and we, the people who form it, have our own logic that we have to put ahead of the pure logic of development of each business or the cooperative that makes it.
So, there is a logic and a common strategy that is built among all, as peers, based on knowledge that we develop together, and not just coordination between cooperatives.
One is integrated into Las Indias… and after supporting different cooperatives and projects, after learning and sharing, if you have an idea, and you earn money with it, you end up seeing up another… or others. And that new cooperative can be with other Indianos, or with other people from your surroundings, and you can remain in the Group of Cooperatives or go out on your own. It doesn’t matter to us. A real community varies, mutates, and transforms itself as it learns new things. The important thing is that it serves everyone’s development and creates well-being in the real surroundings, among the people around us, wherever they are. Because transnationality is another fundamental element in Las Indias — we have almost as many different passports as members."
OS: WILL THERE BE A NEED FOR ORGANIZATIONS LIKE OUISHARE OR LAS INDIAS WITHIN 10 YEARS?
What I want and see as possible is a world with phyles, more than a world of phyles. Phyles are necessary vectors to expand this whole new economy without creating new regional differences, creating spaces of well-being and opportunities to skip over borders that are more and more damaging, both socially and economically.
Will OuiShare or Las Indias be necessary? Almost certainly.We must not fall into the individualist mystification that has sterilized the concept of the market and let it impoverish our view of the network.
The traditional Mediterranean market wasn’t just a place for buying and selling. It was also a space for political and social interaction and — this is too often forgotten — the place where teachers, poets, philosophers were found with their disciples and judges arbitrated conflicts. The market is not exclusively a monetary relationship, but above all, a social and cultural relationship based on exchange, but also on donation. There’s no market without a non-market setting, without “gratia et amore” and without “love of the Art,” since Art was technique and technology, but also the community of artisans itself.
In the same way, the network is not only the relationship that unites us with the knowledge commons through communities of purpose. The network is, above all, conversation, and therefore “clumps,” preferences, choices, networks of communities that people cross out of a desire to share and be with others. The network is made up of communities that are also spaces of affections. It’s not just a network of individuals who only relate to each other “for” something. Because of this, and because our capacity to emotionally link to others is limited by time and by our own inheritance as a species to relatively small groups, always there will be groups, clumps, real communities that are differentiated in the great space of the network." (http://magazine.ouishare.net/2014/10/david-de-ugarte-p2p-production/)
Discussion
Antonio Blanco-Gracia (2017):
"For many reasons, phyles must also be distinguished from powerful ecosystems of cooperatives such as Mondragon. As David de Ugarte of Las Indias stressed when he explained its conceptualization, a phyle is “a community that develops an economic structure based on economic democracy in order to ensure its own autonomy. The order of the terms is important: phyle is a community with firms, not a community of firms, nor a community of people who own some firms” (Gorenflo,2012). Phyle-making is the support to communities to develop a productive project that eventually can allow the community to federate with a phyle. Phyles “won’t have any special ideology” other than what they call Neo-Venetianism, that is, a vision of the “phyle-making as the natural evolution of their communities in order to make its conversation, its deliberation, autonomous of the political or economic decomposition of the states and the markets they live in” (de Ugarte, 2015, emphasis mine). There are, however, more key differences. Phyles are becoming as a result of transnational conversations, which represent a rupture with localist and nationalist perspectives related to cooperativist tradition, in order to create a global network of support that makes it more resilient to the collapse of a particular state-nation or market. Also, conversations are held between diverse conversational communities themselves that have different ideas, narratives, symbols and rituals of cohesion. Those communities wanting to federate in a Phyle must 1) have a productive and competitive activity (be it in the form of cooperative or any other kind of firm ruled by principles of economic democracy), 2)avoid to think of themselves in terms of imagined communities, and 3) be committed to achieve autonomy not by relying upon public money or state rents such as those attained through intellectual property (de Ugarte, 2015).
The Indianos warn of two obstacles to the emergence of a phyle: the temptation of promoting productive projects following the values of the promoter instead of those of the community that have to run them (scaling your own community instead of federating communities), and the excessive projection to the future by trying to depict the form of the future phyle instead of trusting in its distributed nature. The two obstacles are rooted in the dualistic and fixed nature of the logic of identity (whatever is, is). The unavoidable plurality of ethics required by the phyle or a netguild as a result of the diversity of its members can be articulated (that is, become a coherent plurality) in the logic of doing/producing and the dialectics of having, notin the logic of identity and the dialectics of being (see Table 1), as can be seen in their manifestos (Levi, 2012b; Los Indianos, 2016a). The point is not being the same (identity) but owning what you are not (the alterity); nor sharing the same worldview, but the same practices of work for whatever your life purpose is if it is not in contradiction, in the case of phyles and netguilds, with the axiological principles embedded in their symbolic framework. In fact, the name “indianos” is taken as a radical openness to the Other (Bey, 2003; De Ugarte, 2007), and X of X-Net, as X that could be anyone, any Other."