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(Note: I originally wrote this article for Contributoria as Crowdfunding Critical Thought , and it is republished here under a Creative Commons license. To republish please attribute original) Greg Palast’s approach to investigative journalism can be summed up in one phrase: Stand up for the underdogs, and take on the fatcats . His hard-hitting reports on corporations like ExxonMobil, politicians like Bush, and shadowy institutions like vulture funds stem from an impulse to challenge those players with the power to bend the rules to their private advantage. That’s why functioning democracies need people like Palast. Such a role faces two unique challenges though. Firstly, powerful institutions and individuals tend to hide behind walls of secrecy that extend over vast geographical space. Investigating a corporation, or a government spy programme, requires a lot of time, a lot of travel, and a lot of prying into hard-to-access information sources. HMM, WHERE TO START? Secondly, it enta...

Over the last 5 years I’ve been working on ways to break down the oppressive wall of mystique that shrouds global finance, and to experiment with methods of 'hacking' financial systems. At first this took the form of my own ‘gonzo’ anthropological explorations of the world of derivatives trading. It has since merged into me working with campaign groups like ActionAid, MoveYourMoneyUK and the World Development Movement, and getting involved in the alternative finance community via initiatives like the Finance Innovation Lab. In 2013, whilst writing The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance , I decided to start developing an experiential workshop series to help London's diverse array of activists, artists and alternative economists grapple with the financial sector in their midst. I decided to call this London School of Financial Activism (LSFA) . Phase 1: Seed-funding In 2013 I ran a crowdfunding campaign to provide me with initial seedfunding to develop the idea. I raised £...

(Note: This is based on a talk I first gave at London Bitcoin Expo 2013 ) Imagine a scenario 10 years from now in which Bitcoin has managed to establish itself as an important global currency, supported by a myriad of Bitcoin companies, trade associations, and educational institutions. Now imagine the board meetings of those organisations. What will their demographic breakdown be? Will it resemble  this , or this , or this ? It's no secret that the directorships of large FTSE 100 or S&P 500 companies are overwhelmingly dominated by men, and white men at that. This is not just due to random chance, or men's innate brilliance. This is due to our society having a lingering, systematic male bias built upon hundreds of years in which men have had the most access to job opportunities, educational opportunities, political rights, and (perhaps most importantly) cultural  encouragement  to actually seek those positions. This has helped men build capital, skills and to normalis...

I originally wrote this article for  Transition Free Press Edition 4 . It's published under a Creative Commons licence (see side panel for details) Finance, even in its most high-tech formulations, is rooted in ecological systems. A high-frequency trading hedge fund, for example, relies on electricity created by burning fossillised organic matter. It relies on employees, surviving via agricultural systems. It trades in company shares, given value by the actions of those companies’ employees using assets (like computers and telecommunications systems) that are all dependent (at some level) on mining, forestry, and other extractive industries. The financial system has been a net drain on ecological systems though. Finance involves steering economic energy – symbolised in money – in an attempt to generate a yield over time. For example, investors may steer money via financial instruments like shares and bonds into economic activities, and attempt to extract returns in the form of divi...

AHOY, THERE BE A CLOSED SYSTEM TO OPEN This is an article about Open Source Finance. It's an idea I first sketched out at a  talk  I gave at the  Open Data Institute  in London. By 'Open Source Finance', I don't just mean open source software programmes. Rather, I'm referring to something much deeper and broader. It's a way of framing an overall change we might want to see in the financial system. To illustrate this, I set up an analogy between computer systems and economic systems, and I then explore what financial 'code' might be. I then sketch out the five pillars that could underpin an open finance movement. Computer systems as economies Computer systems are great metaphors for economic systems. That's because, in a sense, a computer is a microcosm of our economy, albeit one that is a lot more predictable and controllable. Economies, at some basic level, are based upon people using energy to extract useful stuff from the earth, using tools, proce...