sutton038

TRADERS (photo: Harri Homi) Note: This essay was commissioned in 2015 by VICE USA, who then neglected to publish it. Apologies to everyone who took the time to give me quotes Hedge fund traders are financial mercenaries. Like all mercenaries, they are hired by rich and powerful people. Unlike some mercenaries, however, their lives are never in danger. Rather, they settle in upmarket offices with wood-paneled boardrooms and sparkling water, getting extraordinarily wealthy by betting on anything from Apple shares to oil futures to distant coalmines operated out of Indonesia. This, though, is no normal hedge fund. Robin Hood Coop  is an activist hedge fund run by anarchic artists. And this is no ordinary office. It has no wood panelling and no sparkling water. In fact it barely has running water at all, being a graffiti-strewn ex-slaughterhouse in Milan squatted by a radical arts group called Macao . Below us in the hall is a naked woman painted blue wearing a gas mask, dancing to th...

Note: I published a shorter version of this in Nesta's magazine The Long+Short as You Are the Robots . This is a modified and extended version, published under Creative Commons A banker in 1716 had two main tools: a ledger book and a quill pen. A customer – perhaps a prominent carpenter – would enter a branch, request a withdrawal or make a deposit, and the banker would make a careful note of it within the ledger, editing the customer's previous entry to keep authoritative score of exactly what the bank promised to them. ACCOUNT LEDGER BOOK OF 17th CENTURY BANKER EDWARD BACKWELL Fast-forward to 2016 and we’ve entered into a world no longer dominated by tools, but by machines . The crucial difference between a tool and a machine is that the former relies on human energy, while and the latter relies on non-human energy channelled via a system that replicates - and accentuates - the action of a human using a tool. The carpenter is now a furniture corporation using computer-program...

Note: This was originally published as a response to the Aeon Conversations piece ' What is Money ' Money is not a store of value. It is a claim upon value. This might sound like pedantic semantics, but it is crucially important, especially if you’re trying to alter how it works. Imagine a Coca Cola bottle with Coke in it. That bottle is a store of value. If I open it and drink the Coke, it will kickstart energy processes in my body and help me to carry on surviving. Now imagine a piece of paper next to the bottle that says ‘whoever holds this is entitled to claim this bottle of Coke’. That’s a claim upon value. If a group of people come to believe in the validity of that claim, the note can be passed around as a means to metaphorically ‘transfer’ Coke value, or - more accurately - to transfer access to Coke value. That’s then a form of money. The fundamental difference between the note and the Coke can be tested by a simple experiment. Burning them. Imagine I drop the Coke in...