Cryptoeconomy of Affect

* Interview: A Cryptoeconomy of Affect. By y URIAH MARC TODOROFF. The New Inquiry, May 2018

URL = https://thenewinquiry.com/a-cryptoeconomy-of-affect/

Interview of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi conducted by URIAH MARC TODOROFF.

Description

URIAH MARC TODOROFF:

"WHY would two anti-capitalist philosophers create a cryptocurrency? Erin Manning and Brian Massumi were given a challenge by the Economic Space Agency—a global collective working to create a network of noncapitalist, blockchain-based economies—to reconsider value in financial terms. Dismissing the prevailing free-market libertarian discourse, they identified the radical potential of the blockchain’s ledgering system for creating decentralized organizations built from a network of public, automated contracts. They’re working on reappropriating the technology to invent a cryptoeconomy that can create and sustain what they call “emergent collectivity”—the type of energy palpable in groups learning together, making art together, or building a political movement together.

...

Named after Guattari’s notion of the three interconnected “ecologies” of the mental, social, and environmental, the Institute’s project is to digitally codify offline qualities and affects so that they can then be tokenized as a unit of the cryptocurrency, and in turn exchanged for fiat money—generating cash from a reading group. Much of the platform has already been conceptualized, but the key obstacle remaining is to invent what they call an affect-o-meter: the specific computational mechanism that can turn a quality that hangs in the air into the binary quantities of machine code. I sat down with them to talk about what they have accomplished so far, and what work remains to be done." (https://thenewinquiry.com/a-cryptoeconomy-of-affect/)