Local Ledger - 29th March at Raylab, London with Lara, Lisa, Teresa, Alexei, Pete, Amit, Mikey, Ruth

These notes are incomplete - please improve - page 5

Lisa

how do you have social process where people understand that there is universal benefit to society of educatoin How do we arrive at a strategy that counters the Hobbesian view of intrisic individual desire to be for growing power and wealth There might be an earmarked percentage of the budget - up for grabs by these scenarios Brixton Pound - currently lacks strategy

Amit

Hi all. Sorry but I'm typing on my phone. Thanks for a great day: here are my two pence s. There are major and minor events happening through the block chain. Because finance capital has been the first to hegemonize the (set of) algorithms that constitute the interfaces of the blockchain. What this mean is that the overall libertarian cyberworld has become newly financialized through the block chain. So here are my questions:

• What is the social history of council tax, how would the block chain disrupt and so usefully change this history?
• What can the blck chain do to our habits of both social relations and economic relations?
• The block chain individualises and captures even through consensus even though consensus itself is always a collective process. This how do we affirm the collective nature of consensus in an individualising technology?

I think alexei's idea is powerful: reterritorialize the block chain in a new assemblage of information, services, direct (consumer?) democracy, and experiment with what this new network can do what else? I'm very interested in how the block chain facilitates a new politics of ? What political formations are possible? I think the question of services is an important one especially as it functions as an interface and mode of capture by the state. The model that Alexei's proposed idea would be in a kind of direct competition is the gig economy.

The probable and the possible are already given in the actual, it is the virtual (potential capacities) that exceeds them both. Also, what's the relationship of this new interface with the whole smart cities policy/discourse geared toward innovation? Greece has already developed subaltern responses to austerity with similar technologies and autonomous movements: Yet many people in Greece have responded with their own brand of austere innovation to the austerity measures imposed by the EU. Recent reports of Greece’s local strategies to deal with their ‘debtocracy’ include an alternative to the euro, the ‘tem’ or ‘local alternative unit’.8 The system operates through combining digital online networks with local trust networks – skills, odd jobs, market produce, home cooking are freely exchanged without euros or other currency. The system automatically limits debt to 300 tems and savings to 1200 per account to discourage the sorts of marketeering and excess that caused the financial crisis. Braving the hostility of the IMF and EU the Greek Parliament passed a law encouraging these exchange networks as ‘alternative forms of entrepreneurship’ and an innovative response to austerity. --Innovation: Innovation and a Global Knowledge Economy in India Thomas Birtchnell, page 2