The Activist Hedge Fund
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...