…or how Faircoop could be fairer
I’m writing this because I think it could be the beginning of a story which with Stacco Troncoso at the P2P Foundation and Lynn Foster from Mikorizal we have for a long time half-jokingly said must be written: P2P Failures.
Bettermeans was a web based project management platform for managing community projects democratically, launched around 2010. It is a perfect example of one of these failures. It proposed a way small local communities or groups could create a project and shared tasks, and distribute remuneration to participants in a democratic way for what they had done. At the time, collaborative platforms like Ushahidi were already starting to show that another world was possible and that people could collaborate for very disparate reasons and objectives, using coordinated people power to go where until then only larger organisations had gone. To quote Bob Haugen, also from Mikorizal,
The way bettermeans did it was that upfront, for each proposed process, people would come up with a number of credits that it was worth. Then when it was finished, the people who worked on it would each vote on how many credits each one of them should get. They had an algorithm that combined everybody’s opinion, discounting your own opinion of how many credits you should get, and that decided how many credits each person got in the end.
Bettermeans failed in a particularly ugly manner, too…”
The reason for this cataclysmic failure wasn’t this quite democratic and generally approved credit distribution system. It was because Bettermeans founders sought venture capital. Things went south when this promise of money from the devil came in to the organisation, and bitter infighting soon got the better of them. As we have found out with Faircoop’s first steps into creating a work coordination platform and distributing credits, this is neither the first or last time this has happened. The gig economy is rife with similar work platform growing pains even when working with best intentions. But can we prevent it?
It would be nurturing and regenerative for so many people to not end up abandoned and old after dedicating their lives to a cause. As Emma Goldman once said:
“I often think that we revolutionaries are like the capitalist system. We draw out of men and women the best they have and then we are so at ease watching their days end in abandonment and loneliness”
(This quote is translated from spanish language in the book “El magonismo: historia de una pasión libertaria, 1900-1922”)
After they leave behind their failures they sometimes go back into the very world they were trying to create alternatives to or escape.
Like many other groups, like those detailed in Alicia Trepat and Ana Manzanedo in their recent work for the IFTF, “Designing Positive Platforms” at Faircoop we are attempting to build a way of working that is, well, fair.
Last summer, August 2017, Faircoop members met for the first summer camp where we would agree on the Open Coop Work proposal: an agreement between around 30-40 people to take on the now increased tasks of this cooperative crypto-currency’s working group. Where before around ten of us had laboured mostly voluntarily for a small shared budget, now we would create agreements for fair distribution of that work between all those people. Since then, as happens in many soap operas and cooperatives alike, things degenerated and people are now tired and stressed by the life lived in chat groups and online apps.
Arguments, mediations and heated assemblies with accusations and insults flying each way, key people taking time off or distancing themselves due to the perceived workload or just the stress of the environment. Without the evenings we had together at the summer camp, to speak outside of just work, and find out who we all were, there was little to show we have things in common except the actual tasks we propose to do together.
I believe that in deciding how something should work, we all have inside us a drive to protect the old and staid ways things have worked, and a drive to create the new, which is sometimes at odds with the old ways, which is never perfect. This is evident in our meetings and assemblies, where some voices defend our work against what we fear: people being disrespectful, especially where money is concerned, and abusing the system, and others wish to be open and welcoming to new or different ideas. Once again, the right wing and left wing in the world of direct democracy don’t manifest as political parties but as fears and impulses in each of our heads or hearts at different moments. And each of us might be expressing hope or fear in any given moment, it is not a case of it always being the same people.
I’m being accused of being a functionary another recent accusation was of being a bureaucrat: how dare I charge for time I spent working on Faircoop work, if others can do it for free. This whole issue has made me think about these parallels with the functionaries and bureaucrats around us. A recent article in “La Vanguardia” for example struck me as showing both sides of this coin: (Unfortunately the article is now behind a paywall. It’s title is “Hacienda pone la lupa sobre la actividad de los trabajadores freelance” or “The tax office puts freelancer activity under scrutiny“). In the article, after warning against possible abuses of employers towards their precarious teleworking gig economy staff earning crypto-currency, it defends the role of tax office and government functionaries, who now have the added work of finding these perceived injustices in the freelance system, with an increasingly reduced pay and workforce.
At a Psytrance festival on the cow filled hills behind Dezentrale in the Swiss Alps, some summer camp participants attempted to give out flyers. One festival-goer passed by, read the words “fair coop” – and handed it back. “It’s not fair just because you say fair” he said in disgust. This has never been a more profound truth. We have managed to make explicit all the things that we thought wrong with the capitalist or unjust systems around us and sought to make our own, but we have found out that all the unsaid things, all the unspoken truths and all the hidden areas are now simply a mirror world. It’s impossible for Faircoop to be 100% fair just as it was for google to be 100% not evil. No group is completely good or completely bad. It’s just that we criticise google for not taking this in and thinking itself omniperfect but we don’t criticise our own initiatives however free, open, revolutionary or confederative that we have applied a label that makes it impossible for you to criticise it. So what are you if you don’t like how Faircoop works? Unfair?
Now I see how in FairCoop various different powers and roles are emerging. On one side, nomads with high mobility and little or no outside responsibility. In the middle, activists or volunteers who help when they can, and at the other end, the ‘doers’ who are engaged in a lot of the necessary tasks which make the system work, but who become tied to this system to be able to cover their needs in the “old” economy. I don’t think it’s a hierarchy: we shift between roles and different types of power as we participate in FairCoop more or less, or travel here and there, our available time and ability to organise ourselves is limited by the need to bring in income to satisfy needs regardless of the currency used, and whether we can meet our needs within FairCoop or not.
Each part of the pyramid of time, mobility and work has it’s own power and strength, but at this point it feels unbalanced, and those at the bottom are increasingly felt to be exploited by the others, and unable to switch to the other parts of the pyramid. The best thing we can do I think, is find ways to spin this pyramid, so that we all get to see different parts of this and experience life as a do-er, nomad or activist indifferently. This is why I feel it’s important to make evident what is beginning to show after nearly 6 months of this increased work across Faircoop, so that we can tackle this problem as soon as we can.
If we are only paid for the time spent clicking doing what was defined, it leaves out all the hours we spend at meetings, coordinating, communicating and organising. The task rather than the person is in charge, because we aren’t working on our mutual aid between members, at changing things from the ground up. The result is the triumph of work above life where your status depends only on your most obvious or well remembered tasks and their quality, and your needs are mentioned less and less. This might have been the key point that led people like Murray Bookchin to criticise Anarchism, with it’s 19th century focus on the workers, tasks and production.
It was maybe 8 years ago now that in the Catalan Integral Cooperative(CIC), also founded by Faircoop founder Enric Duran, we went through a similar albeit regional process. The CIC’s first assignment system for alternative currency(https://ecoxarxes.cat/) in return for work, the “asignación básica” or basic assignation agreed in the CIC’s permanent assembly, was paid in based on a basis of total or partial dedication to a project. The idea was that you would be working at all hours to make that thing happen and it was a priority for you. In the beginning this assignation was very much like basic income plans, but restricted to core participants, those who did the most for any one project, who would then agree in assembly on key tasks. Later on the need to limit abuse, manage times and monitor task completion led the CIC to the adoption of a Redmine server for collective project management. The difference between Faircoop and the early CIC structures so far is the lack of day to day human contact, as you are part of a new global economy where hardly anyone understands how it even works let alone has well established means of communications to do it. In the CIC, we worked on Integral Revolution in a more grassroots way, challenging our lives with a focus on collective methods and agreements, rather than personal ones.
In the CIC, the group around where we lived, worked or produced became the place where our work, leisure, confidence and reputations grew. Instead of being in a physical project or space shared by many different people and projects, in a global, virtual context we are slaves to our laptops and the information in a hundred groups, lists and online tools. Before the FairCoop summer camp I was burnt out by this, but determined to go to make sure there would be a representation of human welfare, of the rights of the worker and person who works in these lower rungs. Will we be able to finally take care of each other?
Anything you do in return for something whether it’s an ideal or some alternative currency, is ultimately an exchange, but the difference then is that we devote our lives and time to this promising ideal, and take steps to actually live as much as possible within it, by working for it as many hours are available. This demands a lot of support from people around you if you still have connections to the “capitalist world” such as your local area or neighbourhood, parents or children.
From the point of view of the writers at “La Vanguardia”, I have been one of this precariat, living with no rights such as sick pay or working hours. Living with only Ecos and FairCoin made me rich in many senses, not least for the organic locally grown food and cooperatively made products, and it was a choice I’d made, but I hardly expected the other viewpoint.
The other way of looking at a month and the hours in it, is that tasks need to be done because we are working for an important ideal. In order to be efficient we need to push forwards with this ideal without fail. We have to keep pushing for this efficiency, so that all payment is only for a completed task, mostly a mechanical task: a piece of labour that can be measured and quantified. All participation beyond that: “why”, not “how” you clicked that button or set up that account, must be voluntary as all democratic decisions are fairer if there is no money involved: almost Athenian in it’s level of democracy. This means helping someone, contacting someone, figuring out a way forward, planning something – all of this isn’t payable, but only the mechanics of making the tools of this new economy are. The problem is, Athenian democracy looks great on paper but wasn’t so fair in practice if you were not a free, well off male grown up. Today, instead the parallel is free time and tech access becomes a social and cultural gap: those that have it believe their time should be given freely, and those that don’t also want to join in but can’t. An equivalent would be a bar that pays the waiter only for each coffee they served, and didn’t include anything for when that person grew old or sick.
Has Faircoop inadvertently created a meritocracy? It’s scary thought also if a new project is to build a blockchain based reputation system that is purely electronic. It’s only been a few months and it’s best in my view to have these problems now than years from now, when it might be too late. Maybe if Faircoop becomes a monster where finally humans are subjugated to the task, or even the blockchain, then maybe we can fork it, and go and make “GoodCoop”. GoodCoop will be the coop where only good things and good people are allowed, and tasks and humanity finally reach a balance. This will be easy to achieve as no-one will be allowed to join: all of us have a little bit of good and bad in various flavours and perspectives. In this perfect, empty cooperative, not only will we marvel at the efficiency of tasks we do, but we will have a humane and respectful way of helping each other improve, showing gratitude for the work that was done long ago and in the present, but also for that human being’s right to flourish and be supported.
Until then we will have to mess around and argue in these imperfect muddy online chat groups and task tracking systems, between functionaries, and fairserfs, building an economy that allows for human and algorithmic error and imperfection, and for varying types of unfairness to continue existing.
Until then I’ll continue clicking widgets in the dark and doing mechanical tasks for a digital employer run by efficiency maximisers who mistrust me and suspect I will be lazy. Somehow, not much has changed from that world we thought we were now living in the ashes of.