GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Rok: Hello everyone. Very exciting to see a full crowd here tonight. We're about to play a game that I've been developing for a few years now, and which Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana has been supporting for the last two years – shout out to Janez who is in the audience. For this special edition we partnered up with Platform Cooperatives Germany and SUPERMARKT Berlin, who were kind enough to provide a small stipend for the players. Robert Sakrowski of panke.gallery has provided us with this cozy setup, for which we are most grateful. Last but not least, we have Weird Economies supporting us from a distance, helping us with compensating the players, the rental for this space, but also with the realization of an e-zine that will be created based on the proceedings here today.

The main idea behind the game is that we all participate in and craft this thing together. So today, you are not passive audience members, you are “peerticipants”, who will be able to influence the game in a number of ways; more on how in a bit. Throughout the game, two teams – Capitalism and Commonism – will, with their narrative strategies and powers of persuasion, attempt to co-opt or otherwise win onto their side an array of buzzwords associated with alternative economies and/or governance. What we have for this edition are sharing, wellbeing, participatory, regenerative, solidarity, and cooperative. We've decided on these, among many other possibilities, together with the players, and came up with two active playing fields for each. Let’s say these are representative alternative economy practices, models or concepts. Around these, in a few moments there will take place a discursive battle for your hearts and minds. While the Capitalists will be invoking different kinds of challenges in order to co-opt these contested alternative economic spaces or “ideological battlegrounds”, the Commonists will be manifesting different kinds of interventions for radical transformative change.

Let’s begin with the first way of how we can create this game together. The players will now come on stage one by one and introduce themselves. What I'd invite you all to do is to place them on one or the other team – meaning they will temporarily have to embody and represent them. You should have a card in your hands, with one side being red and the other blue. Flash the blue side if you want them to play on team Capitalism, and the red side if you want to see them play as a Commonist. So without further ado, I’d invite the first player to come up here and replace me on the stage, and give our peerticipants their short personal introduction.

PLAYER INTRODUCTIONS

Max Haiven

ReImagining Value Action Lab &

Society for the Promotion of Radical Analogue Games

Good evening. My name is Max Haven. I'm an author and a teacher, and I'm an aspiring troublemaker. I've worked on themes of the commons for many years and also as a critic of capitalism. I would be very happy to be on either team. I think I'll be funnier playing a capitalist, but you know, it's up to you. Otherwise, what am I supposed to say? I don't like long walks on the beach. I've never drunk a Piña Colada. What else is there to say?

Placement: Team Capitalism

Ela Kagel

SUPERMARKT Berlin &

Platform Cooperatives Germany

Thank you all so much for coming. I'm Ela from SUPERMARKT Berlin and Platform Cooperatives Germany. I consider myself more of a person from the commons side, but who knows what tonight brings, I'm really curious.

Placement: 50:50 split (up to player)

Philip Horst

Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik

I was born in the 1970s in West Germany, and my mother came up with this story to explain communism and capitalism to me. She said: “Imagine a farmer in a late summer setting. A big thunderstorm is coming up, the harvest is already on the field, and it will be thunderous, rainy, and cold. The capitalist farmer will go and pick up the harvest because without the harvest, he will be poor, and the communist farmer will just relax and hang loose.” Since that time, I've been trying to prove that harvesting in the rain and bringing in the fruits together is something nice to do collectively.

Placement: Team Commonism

Laura Lotti

Other Internet &

Black Swan DAO

Hello, my name is Laura. I'm a researcher primarily working in the field of blockchain and decentralized technologies, trying to explore the affordances of these technologies for the creation of alternative economies. I guess these years I've been working very much in the crypto space, and I've learned that playing on the side of the capitalist is sometimes a lot easier. So, yeah, just decide, either side will be nice to try.

Placement: 50:50 split (up to player)

Beth McCarthy

Funding the Commons &

Department of Decentralization

Hi, I'm Beth. I work at an organization called Funding the Commons, which is a spin-off from Protocol Labs, a Web 3.0 and decentralization technology company. We are devoted to bringing together people working in Web 3.0, building infrastructure, tools, scientists, entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders interested in organizational designs and in building the public goods infrastructure stack. We're also involved in research and producing experiences with local organizations interested in these topics. I came from Silicon Valley, so I'm very well-versed in some capitalist aspects but also in talking about the benefits of the other side every day in my job. So, I don't know which side would be more interesting to play for.

Placement: Team Capitalism

Yael Sherill

Curatorial Collective for Public Art

Hi, everyone. I'm Yeal, a curator. Talking about capitalism, I'm part of the art world, so you know which team to put me on, okay?

Placement: 50:50 split (up to player)

INTRODUCTION TO THE PLAYING FIELDS

Rok: I would invite Max and Ela – the first players of the two respective teams – to have a look at all the available cards and pick the three that they find compelling, but also, these should be cards that they think are somehow related to the buzzwords and playing fields we’ve chosen for this edition [Max, as a Capitalist, should pick three Challenge cards, and Ela, as a Commonist, should pick three Intervention cards]. Then, I’d invite them to pass their decks over to the next player in their team. Meanwhile, as they do this, I would ask the other players to help me contextualize some of these buzzwords and playing fields for our peerticipants who may not be so familiar with them or possibly need a refresher.

Solidarity

Rok: Let's start off with the buzzword “SOLIDARITY”. The first playing field in this space is Universal Basic Something, and the second is Community Currency. I’d ask our peerticipants to raise their hands if there needs to be some contextualization for these. If not, we'll move on to the next pair. Okay, it seems like we're all pretty familiar with these. Let’s move on.

Regenerative

Rok: The next one is “REGENERATIVE”. On one side, we have Ecovillage, and on the other, we have Doughnut Economics. If anyone's unclear about either of these, please do raise your hand.

Peerticipant: Yeah, what is Donut Economics?

Beth [the Capitalist]: My understanding is that it's a framework that makes value flow through a lot of individual stakeholders who are focused on individual enrichment and achievement while that plugs into the commons that they're part of, but also accommodating for individual needs as it serves the whole, with the Earth being considered one of those individuals. But, yeah, anyone, please challenge that. That's just my understanding.

Participatory

Rok: So, under “PARTICIPATORY” we have Participatory Budgeting, and we have Something DAO. Everyone familiar with these? I see one hand raised. Is the question what is a DAO?

Peerticipant: I’m assuming it has nothing to do with daoism?

Rok: Yeah, no, so it stands for decentralized autonomous organization. Ela, would you take this one?

Ela [the Commonist]: I’ll take this opportunity to explain it from a commonist’s perspective. A DAO is a digital organization that is formed by a global audience. Basically anyone that has internet access and a wallet can engage in collective decision-making on projects, and they pool their money, which very often – or almost always – takes the form of cryptocurrency.

Wellbeing

Rok: So for the next set, in the “WELLBEING” space, we have Happiness and Self-Care.

Peerticipant: What is happiness?

Rok: Good one. Well, let’s see it play out.

Max [the Capitalist]: Money, money is happiness.

Sharing

Rok: "Next up, we have “SHARING”, where we have Time Bank and Skill-Sharing Platform.

Audience member: What is a time bank?

Philip [the Commonist]: So everyone has 24 hours in a day. The time you use is dependent on what you do with it. For example, I give you some time, and you give me some in return. The exchange moment is stored in a bank. So if I give you 10 minutes, you either give them back directly, or you can do it later. The in-between time is stored in a bank. Or, let’s say I help you clean the windows for 10 minutes, and you help me with cleaning my bike for 10 minutes, then we're equal. But maybe you don't want to clean my bike, it’s another person that does it, so we have a bank in between who is kind of trading the time, like money, but in time.

Cooperative

Rok: The last ideological battleground we have is “COOPERATIVE”, with the notion of Co-ownership and the notion of a Balanced Job Complex. I'm fairly sure most people won’t be familiar with the latter, it's a specific concept coming from the Parecon framework. It's essentially a proposal for how to equitably distribute different kinds of labor within a community. Let's say some labor is more on the self-fulfilling part of the spectrum, like, you know, you're doing art, etc., while other kinds are meant to reproduce society, like a chef, a person cleaning the streets, etc. So how do we create a system where we each person sort of has a fair share of both, is the basic idea there. And for Co-ownership, if anyone needs any contextualization, raise your hands. Otherwise, we can move on.

THE RULES OF PEERTICIPATION

Rok: I’ll explain briefly how this works, and we’ll learn some of it as we go. So in the back, there is a table with some blank Challenge and Intervention cards. The players will be using these two types of cards to create their stories, and the cards already in the deck were created for or during previous events. The deck also includes some new cards which some of you submitted specifically for this event using the online form. Team Capitalism will be using the Challenge cards, and team Commonism will be using Intervention cards. With these, they will attempt to claim the playing fields by creating a compelling short storyline, argument or narrative that – at the very least in a loose way – sticks to the prompt written on the card. So I would invite you, the peerticipants, to maybe first listen to some examples of what kinds of challenges and interventions are in play. Some of you may have already seen some displayed on the projection screen before we got things started. But then I would invite you to propose your own and we will plug them into the game, meaning the players will potentially have to roll with your ideas to create their stories, and the game will have gained one more “game commons” – a game element shared as a commons that can be used at this, as well as future game events.

So, let us start things off. Team Capitalism always starts by default. That's just how the world we live in these days works, I can't help it. For this first move, Team Capitalism will pitch a short story, argument or narrative to claim any one of the twelve playing fields on the board, and they'll have about a minute or two to do so. We have a sand timer here that sort of works, and when the team is done, I'll ask you, the peerticipants, how convinced you are by them. You can give them a score of anything between a zero (not convinced in the slightest) and a six (totally convinced) . If you're not convinced at all by the story, feel free to give a zero by raising one of your hands and holding a fist. Conversely, if you are super convinced by the storyline, it really, you know, touched on some things that resonate strongly in one way or another, feel free to give it a full six [one hand open, and the other holding a thumbs up]. This also goes for any online peerticipants out there joining us. Whenever we will put up a story to a vote, feel free to use the chat and present us with a number between zero and six.

We'll give it about a minute each time to see what both the in-person and online peerticipants think. And then, by looking around, I'll come up with what seems to be the average score for that “move”, which we will proceed to map onto a dice roll. You'll see how that works in practice in a short while. We have some big fluffy dice here, and we'll actually invite you, the peerticipants, to roll for the players. After Team Capitalism has had a chance, Team Commonism will have their turn.

Lastly, a note on a question some of you may have, regarding audience bias. I’m guessing that since you've come to this event about alternative economies, you probably have some aspirations towards, and sympathies for, team Commonism. But, at the same time, I think you’ll want them to represent you well, right? On the other hand, team Capitalism, well, they can essentially just reference everyday dystopian reality, and try to touch upon things that resonate in that way, for example, they use certain words or narrative strategies used in the real world by, let’s say, defenders of the status quo, or they come up with compelling arguments why the Commonists have no chance to succeed. So this is just a little bit of framing to help you think about how you vote, but really, vote with your hearts, or your minds, or however. And it’s up to you, the players, to figure out those hearts and minds, by experimenting with different narrative strategies, and seeing what works. Okay, enough talk, let’s play!

PROCEEDINGS

Move 1: Team Capitalism

Max [the Capitalist]: I just want to say, this is a beautiful audience, and I just want to say you are the smart people, and I know you're going to come onto our side because as much as you might have come here to talk about the commons, blah, blah, blah, bullshit, the reality is, we all know what's going on here. And what we know is going on is that when you boil it down, and any of you who've ever tried to be part of a commons-based venture know this, really what it boils down to is that we are self-maximizing individuals who are out for number one, and we're all number one, and we can all be number one in one system, and we call that system …

Team Capitalism: Capitalism!

Max [the Capitalist]: Exactly, or ‘Genau’, as we say in Berlin. You know, we're here to talk about happiness, and we want your support recognizing that if you want to be miserable, you are welcome to side with the opposition and put yourself in some horrible commune where you're just going to make each other very, very miserable. But if you actually want what you want out of life, then honestly, you need to recognize that human nature is fundamentally competitive, and that if we're all competitive and we all embrace that, we're all going to be happier. I mean, not all of us, probably not them [Team Commonism], but there's only three of them and there's ever however many of you paid admission. Anything to add?

Yael [the Capitalist]: If you look also at visual history, where do you see happiness? I mean, do you see it in visual history in communist contexts? I mean, have you seen propaganda posters from communist Russia or any of the ex-Soviet bloc? No happiness there, my dears, none. Movies, Hollywood, have you seen Hollywood movies produced in any of the … None? So, yeah, I think our point is proven. Happiness actually was not even existing, didn't even like, was not even invented until capitalism arrived in the world.

[VOTING STARTS]

Max [the Capitalist]: These are the smart people.

Beth [the Capitalist]: If anyone is still wondering if money can buy happiness, have you ever tried to access health care without money? It's like you can't even continue existing without, um, you know, without the money to at least give it a try. So, it's a critical one.

Move 1: Team Commonism

Ela [the Commonist]: Friends, I would ask you to close your eyes for a second and take a deep breath. Let's be in this space together, right? Okay, talking about happiness. What is happiness if our planet is being destroyed? How can we be happy if the source of our lives, the very basics, the fundamentals of our being, is being destroyed on a daily basis? What are we talking about here? Happiness is self-indulgence. What we have to discuss here tonight, and we really hope for your support, we need to counter these neoliberal arguments around happiness that are doing nothing else but isolating you guys. Instead, we need to come up with a story that puts us all together as a whole, because happiness can only be real if it is shared, right?

Philip [the Commonist]: I was just looking up who is the happiest society in the world, and you know who it is? The Finns. And they live with needle trees, saunas, fresh air, and a lot of darkness. And what makes them happy? It is the sadness of being – you know, Kaurismäki movies – and the solidarity among them.

Laura [the Commonist]: I mean, what else can I add? It seems pretty obvious to anybody who's, you know, minimally aware of what's happening in the world that money doesn't buy happiness. Or it depends on what kind of happiness you want to buy. Is that happiness in the first place, or is it just a golden prison? So, I think it seems pretty clear that happiness only works when it's shared, and without a planet that is also happy, I don't think any of us can be very happy in the long term.

Ela [the Commonist]: Please, friends, give your neighbor a hug. Thanks.

Move 1: Lightning round

Max [the Capitalist]: All right, I heard two things that I want to respond to. The first is about the Finns. I don't think the Finns are very happy, and also, this is a capitalist country. I mean, okay, whatever. And second, I heard a discussion about a golden prison. I mean, yes, sure, we're all in a prison, blah, blah, blah, blah, but like, do you want to be in a golden prison where you get to decide the rules, or do you want to be in a prison made out of dirty laundry?

Ela [the Commonist]: Stop, stop, stop. Overtime, guys. Don't buy into this neoliberal story. Happiness is only real when shared, believe it.

Beth [the Capitalist]: But first, you have to access stability for yourself, and then you can help others. And, you know, in the amount of time that, economics is rapidly changing, like, everything's going to shit, you really have to focus on yourself first to achieve happiness, and then you can share it with others. It's called pouring from an empty cup.

Philip [the Commonist]: Just imagine the whole world is a desert, and you are the only one on Earth. Do you think you can be happy, and how?

Laura [the Commonist]: How can you help others if you burn out from working too much just to be able to pay your bills and your healthcare to make you happy and whatnot? So I think that ultimately the standards that the capitalists want to set for happiness are not really something sustainable or achievable in the long term.

Yael [the Capitalist]: I just want to say, at least we have a standard for happiness. Like, let's talk about this for a moment. You are nice initiatives, you know, trying to organize, save the Earth, and, you know, it's all about, actually, discomfort. It's all, you know, for what? For what? How much time do we have left? Okay, so let's just enjoy it, no?

Move 2: Team Capitalism

Beth [the Capitalist]: “The steep learning curve associated with new technologies embodies colonialism and the current class structure.” So it's like, you know, you try to have a skill-sharing platform, and yet who even has access to that platform? How do you measure success on that platform to determine who is going to be selected for certain jobs? Like, you know, all of this kind of, um, like trying to break down specific ways of classifying intellectual output and success smacks of colonialism. So, for example, in societies where learning to code is really valued, that's a much easier one to measure. So, yeah, it would make a lot more sense in terms of actually developing people's skills for them to be embedded in companies and organizations where that could be really tracked and compensated over time and be within kind of a closed environment. Because otherwise, like, how do you have people from, you know, less tech-savvy areas even being familiar with it? Maybe they're getting paid in cryptocurrency, people don't even know how to access that. So, yeah, I would say that the safest way to avoid a colonialist mindset for skill-sharing would be to keep it in a closed container.

Move 2: Team Commonism

Philip [the Commonist]: So, I have a card here: “Establish a tradition of town hall-style meetings for envisioning futures and deliberative democracy.” So, I think developing your skills and being able to live out your skills is really dependent on the freedom you have for money and how to spend your time. So if you are born without money and your parents always keep you short, you don't get the education you deserve for developing your skills. You're not able to develop them and present them on a skill-sharing platform. So, I think one of the things is putting some high-tech on inherent money to give everyone the chance to develop their skills and establish a town hall meeting that everyone is kind of like your neighbor, see your skills, and vote for you and support you in developing your skills.

Ela [the Commonist]: I also want to say, it's a false assumption that we can put a price tag on every skill. The skills you are talking about may account for only 5% of people's skills. But the real skills, emotional skills, creative skills, there are so many skills we cannot estimate in terms of numbers. I'm really sorry, like the whole human progress philosophy, the way we are here together in this room, this is very much based on something that cannot be measured. I'm really sorry. So, what's your point in coming up with a skill-sharing platform if 95% of human skills cannot be tied to a price? I don't buy into that, I'm sorry, dears.

Move 2: Lightning round

Yael [the Capitalist]: I just want to respond to this idea that you cannot put a price on skills. We have been, and the world has been developing. I mean, people are working everywhere and doing stuff, and when you use money to value work and skills, then somebody with, let's say, skills of peeling potatoes, can exchange their money for some work, for instance somebody knows how to program. Money enables that, thank you.

Ela [the Commonist]: I hate to tell you this, but the skills we're talking about here, you have tried to co-opt, but you cannot, right. There is no way of co-opting our skills. Our skills are free, they are free for our use, and skills are magic, because very often you don't even see a skill when it emerges. It's only in retrospect that you see it was a skill, and then you want to sell it, you want to have it for your evil plans, but we don't share our skills with you. I'm very sorry.

[VOTING STARTS]

Yael [the Capitalist]: I think we should set up a committee that investigates corruption here, you leftists.

Move 3: Team Capitalism

Yael [the Capitalist]: So to organize, you know, there are popping up all of these initiatives of self-organization, self-governance, cooperatives, DAOs, different kinds of currencies, a million different kinds of currencies that nobody can exchange with anybody, and it's a problem. It's a serious problem. And this, at some point, will really undermine your everyday existence. You will have one currency, you will not be able to exchange it for another; you won't be able to buy what you need. People, this is a serious problem. If we want to create a coherent society, we need something that keeps us together. And these systems, like monetary systems, keep us functioning together as a community, as a society. And so actually, this card is a very real threat when we're talking about co-ownership. All of these nice buzzwords, you know, co-ownership would usually mean that there are some people that own something together, and then there are other people who have no access to that, and there's also no way of entering it. And what about these people, right? So, nice ideas, community and everything, but co-ownership of what and who. Who can, like, you know, buy a building together, only if you have access to some resources. So, I say let's keep it with the system that we have, that, you know, there is one person or like a company that owns and can regulate and offer it to a big community.

Beth [the Capitalist]: Plus, say that you start off having co-ownership of, say, you know, a building or a property of land, and then something happens like oil is discovered on that land. There's no regulatory framework for determining who would end up actually benefiting from that. So, you know, it would actually end up backfiring because, you know, how would that be shared? It's in a totally different legal frame. Like, it gets way too complicated and actually exploits people who have been participating, but they don't understand how to access the legal framework, and, you know, you can't put in the work when you need to bring in experts anyway.

Max [the Capitalist]: Very briefly, we've been doing co-ownership for 500 years, it's called a transnational corporation, and it works like magic.

[VOTING STARTS]

Yael [the Capitalist]: I just want to say you should feel empowered, as individuals, to vote for what you really believe in. So don't be affected by all of these people around you with their twos and their ones. Like, express yourselves.

Max [the Capitalist]: Yeah, no more leftist groupthink.

Move 3: Team Commonism

Laura [the Commonist]: We’re also going for co-ownership, and actually, we have some interesting ideas that could also be interesting for our friends here, the capitalists, because we are not as exclusionary as you guys. So, there are these things called tokens, and they're like these beautiful shiny objects, sometimes they have a JPEG attached to them with some nice animations. It's, you know, like, you decide the price according to your market that you like so much, and then we can create a system where, you know, you can be exposed to whatever value occurs there. But the ownership and co-ownership of this network remains in the hands of the actual members and active participants of organizations. So, you know, like this card says, “It might be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but crypto tokens make it just a little bit easier to tap into the end of capitalism for those funds that we will need to build new worlds.” So, you know, we can provide you with the investment sheets and everything you need, but ultimately the idea of co-ownership is going to be realized by the people who are actually actively participating in this network and not just, you know, capital allocators. We're not a plutocracy when we talk about co-ownership.

Ela [the Commonist]: Money and credit creation should be in the hands of the people and not in the hands of capitalists.

Move 4: Team Capitalism

Max [the Capitalist]: We're the smart money; we take the time we need to make the right investment, as I know the audience does, or I hope you do. Listen, we're talking now about Universal Basic Something, and what we have to admit is that we are in a moment where, even though our colleagues on the left-hand side of the table want to convince you that they're in this for the good of humanity with all of their flowery words about this, we all know that everyone is, in fact, quite the opportunist. There are many different NGOs that are competing in the space to provide Universal Basic this, Universal Basic that, and let's face it, they're quite cynical actors. I mean, there's a great deal of profit to be made, whether that profit is material and monetary or symbolic, from being able to claim you can solve everyone else's problems. But, of course, the thing is, when you claim to solve everyone else's problems, you realize that, in fact, these are the problems that you conceive of. The only institution that's capable of solving everybody's problems without resorting to violence is – you guessed it – the market. And we have ample historical evidence to suggest that any other regime, if you put even our soft-hearted colleagues in charge, is going to reduce itself to authoritarian government the moment anyone like us, job creators like you, the smart money, want to actually make something of this world. So I think you can hear their impressive rhetoric about Universal Basic Services. You can hear their impressive rhetoric about Universal Basic Income. But you have to be a little bit skeptical, and I noticed from your voting patterns that maybe you're not being as skeptical as you should be. That is your right. You can exercise your marginal utility as you want. But let's realize that they might win in this room, but we run outside, and you should be with us.

Move 4: Team Commonism

Ela [the Commonist]: Okay, let's talk practicalities here. Just one little word about Universal Basic Something. It is the power to say no, no to bullshit jobs, no to people co-opting your time. But let's really give a very practical case. Put yourself in the shoes of a person that is in a, let's say, network of an Ecovillages, whatever, and you have a community currency there that allows you to buy whatever you need and exchange it with whatever seems to be appropriate. And that really sets you free from the pressure of the market economy. It is possible. We have proven this in multiple Ecovillages in multiple hubs worldwide, closing economic loops with like-minded people, making sure everyone has what they need, what the basics are of their life, and sharing everything in this group is a possibility. We are really talking about something that is achievable and practical. So I really have to ask myself, and I want to ask you, why on Earth would you not want that as a possibility in your life? It seems to be very obvious.

Comment from a Peerticipant

Peerticipant: I have to say that in this particular round, I heard a team mentioning potato peeling, and knowing that potatoes came from my end of the world, it doesn't seem to matter how many hours I spend peeling potatoes, it's people like you that keep eating all the french fries. So, I do come from places where we already have our credit, you say that you're going to offer me something, but it's been 500 years of offering, offering, and offering, and nothing actually comes to us. It's people in my village or in my town that are the only ones we can depend on, so that's why that story seems more true.

Move 5: Team Capitalism

Beth [the Capitalist]: Alright, I'm going to read this card out because it's very beautifully written by our occasional collaborator, Jaya Klara Brekke: “Philosophers, lawyers, and economists in the West have engaged in a kind of intellectual willing into existence of an outside of capital that might exist elsewhere. This cosmology of the commons has always felt constructed and abstract, never full.” And one can see that most effectively in Doughnut Economics. There are two areas that just completely fall flat when you try to actually make policies that help people in monetary flows that are trackable, replicable, and scalable. So, for example, if you're trying to include everyone's needs but you refuse to measure them, which you all have made clear is not yet part of your construction, then it doesn't become a donut, it just becomes, like, the void inside the donut. And the worst of all, when you are considering the Earth as a stakeholder, like where do you end? If you are taking the most nihilistic view, the Earth as a stakeholder would prefer to have none of us there. Therefore, we should, you know, just extract as quickly as possible so the Earth can go back to the state that it prefers to be in, without any humans at all. So, yeah, it just starts to get into some mental masturbation loops that are very useless for policy and in fact, are, contradictory, pretty much.

[VOTING STARTS]

Beth [the Capitalist]: We're getting full Epicurean here … I don't know how they do it, you have to wear a Patagonia vest to do that.

Move 5: Team Commonism

Philip [the Commonist]: We chose the card “Citizen science project mapping social and ecological initiatives, their ambitions and challenges.” So, if you are arguing that Doughnut Economics is having no measurable impact on our living environment, I must say that this is not true, because we have to live, by our own nature, in this environment. And to prove that and to provide us with data, a very good source is a citizen science project, which brings knowledge and resource tracking into the whole society. Everyone can contribute with sensors and other forms of measurable data to prove that there is a limit of your expansion, that we have to live with the resources which are available for us, and we can't go over the top because it will destroy our lives and all your economy; we will be dead.

Ela [the Commonist]: Also I think citizen science is a great instrument to reveal people's actual needs, and not the needs that are suggested or anticipated by the market economy, that is, what are people's needs in relation to nature, in relation to their natural habitat. I think this is really something that's super important to explore, and it very often doesn't show up in statistics. So the data we have is super biased by virtue of capitalist influence, and I would welcome any citizens' initiative to free us from that and to open up a space where the needs – not only of people but also of nature at large – become visible, and we have to deal with it.

Move 6: Team Capitalism

Yael [the Capitalist]: So, I'm just going to read it out: “General displeasure with governance, stemming partly from economic inequality, leads to cascades of protest votes, creating a wave of dysfunctional nations.” Okay, I want to say something about participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting means that people who don't necessarily have any particular skill or training are involved in decision-making at such levels of complexity that are sometimes way above their understanding, maybe sometimes above their education level. And they might very easily lead to budgeting completely wrong priorities, and that may very easily lead to massive demonstrations, and absolute inequality between those who receive the resources, whom the people chose for whatever reasons. I have to say, participatory budgeting is definitely a nice idea, I'm not saying it isn't. But we need to educate the society and the community who does participate in budgeting in order to be skilled enough to do it. We're not there yet. Maybe in the future, we will be, but I think we really need to watch out for this.

Move 6: Team Commonism

Laura [the Commonist]: We're also going for participatory budgeting, but like, just to respond a little bit to the fact that, well, if sometimes participatory budgeting may not work, it is when it's designed from the top down by people like you [the Capitalists] that don't have any connection with the local realities of these communities and places and initiatives that are already, you know, trying to organize for themselves. But we see huge evidence for communities that already spontaneously develop local cooperation and share goods and services and favors with one another without the necessity for any financial schemes on top of that. So there are ways in which participatory budgeting, community coordination at the local level, can work really well, when the people that take on the ownership to develop this initiative are the ones that are also very much embedded in these realities. So, you know, there's still a lot that things like participatory budgeting can do at the local level when it is actually the people that are first of all impacted by these initiatives that take a big role in this.

Ela [the Commonist]: We really would like to invite you [the Capitalists] to participate in our budgeting and give your money, because it's all about redistribution. What if you would join us in our big cause and give us a little bit of your money? That would be amazing. That would be real participatory budgeting. You would be welcome.

*BREAK*

Wheel of speculative fortune (I)

Effect: Commonists trigger a trojan horse dynamic, meaning they get to pick one playing field where both teams have been successful in planting their narratives and claim it for their own.

Move 7: Team Capitalism

Max [the Capitalist]: So, I mean, we agree. We actually think self-care is extremely important. And the reality is that, try as we might as a species, we've backed ourselves into a bit of a corner, and even us capitalists don't really know what to do about the environmental situation. It's not all our fault. I mean, we were just each of us pursuing our corporate agendas and self-interest, and we now have a big problem. But the reality is, these problems are not going to be solved by sort of airy-fairy thinking about abstract ideas. They're actually going to be solved by the people in this world who are making decisions. We have access to them. And the reality is, if you look at all of the people on our team, we're funding numerous initiatives, including some of the initiatives that have sponsored this event here tonight, to actually try and come up with solutions. And the reality is that if we're going to be speaking about solutions, we need to actually be thinking about things that are going to work. We don't have a lot of time. We don't have a lot of patience at this moment for a bunch of basically abstract ideas that might work for 10 or even 100 people but are not going to work for 8 billion people. The important thing for all of us to remember is that we need to be taking care of ourselves. And I don't mean that in a selfish, self-interested way. I mean that in the sense that if we're actually going to be capable of coming together and changing this world together, then we actually need to think about how we're going to bring our best selves to the table. Now, you might not like the system of capitalism, but that's the system that we have right now. Maybe we're going to change it. We're all Democrats here. If you vote us out, if you vote capitalism out, be our guests and elect the right parties and go through the proper channels. This doesn't have to be violent. Let that be as it may. But the job that we have to do right now is to think about ourselves, to prepare ourselves, and to be the kind of citizens we want to be in order to make that change. And that involves hard thinking, not just idealistic thinking.

[VOTING STARTS]

Max [the Capitalist]: Congratulations on staying in fantasyland …

Move 7: Team Commonism

Ela [the Commonist]: Okay, people, let’s not let the capitalists dictate to you what self-care actually is because you all know best, right? And I want to suggest that we engage in a spontaneous hackathon as a format which is all about you and your needs, and what self-care means for you. This is about you, right? And I want to invite you for 30 seconds to close your eyes, take a deep breath, take a look at yourself. These 30 seconds are just for you. Opt out of this game, opt out of this space, opt out of the logic that keeps you here in this room, and just ask yourself the question: Who are you? What are your needs? Why are you here? This is about you. This is about self-care. And you know best what it means for you.

Wheel of speculative fortune (II)

Effect: Capitalists get to ‘co-opt’ one playing field where both teams have been successful in planting their narratives and claim it for their own.

Move 8: Team Capitalism

Beth [the Capitalist]: So with regards to time banking, I think a fear that all of us have, popularized by the phrase “this meeting could have been an email,” is that people want to be able to define their own time, the value of that time for them – which tasks they actually consider to be equivalent, how they value their own time, and definitely don't want that to be put into one of these meeting formats where, for example, design elites with stakes vested in the status quo of continuing to think of time as exchangeable units, or even that all types of time might be valuable in the same way. Like if one person is a lot faster at creating design requests or pushing code, why should that be subject to discussion among a large group of people instead of just individually determined? So I think it's good to take back time banking and other types of resource sharing from having to be put forward into these endless discussions and into something that people can value with a metric that makes sense to all of us, which is money, how quickly the output is made, not having this quorum about how much time it takes and what that means.

Move 8: Team Commonism

Philip [the Commonist]: I have this card where “You write a viral song about bringing down the patriarchy that is played at the president's inauguration”, and what comes to my mind directly is [the song] The Time is Now. Du du dururu, duu-du, du du dururu, duu-ru, du ru dururu, duu-ru, time is now! Time is now! So, I think it's really about seeing the time now, and how you can react to certain situations. It's not always about imagining, but being able to react in time.

Beth [the Capitalist]: Can I make a response?

Philip [the Commonist]: I’m going to allow this. Because we like dialogue.

Beth [the Capitalist]: I thought you were going to reference the song that's like, “the boss makes a dollar, I make a dime.” And I just wanted to point out that, you know, you lost your opportunity.

Philip [the Commonist]: Wow. I need some help from my colleagues. Do you have some support, or maybe I can call upon a member of the audience to support me. Maybe it’s time for someone who can support our idea.

[The Commonists activate their “Call a Peerticipant” card – however, no one volunteers]

[VOTING STARTS]

[VOTING ENDS]

[DIE IS ROLLED]

Max [the Capitalist]: The market has spoken.

Wheel of speculative fortune (III)

Effect: Commonists draw an extra intervention card which any of them can play at any time, next to the cards they have in their hand. Once this card is used, it cannot be used again.

Move 9: Team Capitalism

Yael [the Capitalist]: Okay, so I'm going to read this. It's about the balanced job complex, which I'm just going to remind you refers to these utopian societies where everybody shares all the tasks and responsibilities. So, you have this magical balance between your passion activities or things that you're feeling strongly about or enjoying doing, and your commitments to the society in order to keep things going, right? So, you might need to give two hours a week to clean the streets, but you can then use the rest of your time to do whatever else. And the challenge that I have is “Having a bullshit job and working for hours on end leaves little time to seek out, connect, and engage.” So basically, let's just think about the amount of work that an individual will need to do in these utopian societies that will leave so much time for their pleasure activities. There will need to be farming going on, which we know is such a not time-demanding work, right? There's going to be low demand. There's going to be a need for education, health care, child care, cleaning – all of these activities. And except for doing and participating in all of that, you will also have, of course, so much time to pursue your passion or your joy tasks and activities. This is a fake reality, this is a story that is being told, and the reality is that, at least in the system that we have, you can work in a job, you put in the hours, and you know how much time afterwards you are free to do whatever you want. You don't have to go clean the street, somebody else cleans the street, that's their day job. So, yeah.

[VOTING STARTS]

Max [the Capitalist]: Everyone is welcome to stay after and help clean up tonight, if you want to put it into practice.

Move 9: Team Commonism

Laura [the Commonist]: First of all, I just wanted to say that bullshit jobs are the ones that you create, so, you know. But apart from that, the idea of a balanced job complex may sound pretty abstract, may sound utopian, but actually utopias only live in the realm of the abstract until someone makes them real or starts to bring them into people's minds. And actually, what we've been doing is collaborating with our close friend Kim Stanley Robinson, as this card says, to develop the best post-capitalist fiction novel ever. And guess what? It's based precisely on this idea of a balanced job complex and it tries to bring it more into the real world, into a storyline that actually makes sense and that we hope that you'll all enjoy. Also, the publication is going to be Open Access, because we care about that.

[VOTING STARTS]

[VOTING ENDS]

Yael [the Capitalist]: There's clearly a lot of imagination here in the room, fantasy even …

Wheel of speculative fortune (IV)

Context: A whole other set of cards. Player picks blindly one of three Wildcards presented by the game master.

Max [the Capitalist]: Oh, look at this new age nonsense! You want to put these guys in charge? All right, all right, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Yeah, do your thing, do your thing. Run your community by tarot card.

Card chosen: Not Mark Zuckerberg (the extraterrestrial)

Effect: Team Capitalism gets to take one card from each opponent player.

Max [the Capitalist]: So we don't get to reclaim territories? Right, because astrobiology tells us that there's a universal law to the universe of competition that guides the evolution of all life forms, whether terrestrial or extraterrestrial. We all know that … I for one welcome our new alien masters. They're actually a lot like us.

Move 10: Team Capitalism

Max [the Capitalist]: You know what, all three of us have actually spent a lot of time in Ecovillages, and when we're there, we're actually really A+ members. Like, I think all of us learned a lot actually from our time there. We talk about it in our management retreats, and I think we all, you know, we're into it, and we actually think you also should have Ecovillages as well. The reality though is that – yeah, so we can sponsor, definitely, yeah, yeah – but, you know, the thing is, like, an archipelago of isolated Ecovillages is not going to change this world. It's a beautiful thing that people can do, and we actually feel and we submit to you humbly that, actually, within capitalism, it gives you the perfect opportunity to do that. If you and a bunch of friends want to go and own land collectively and share it and have democracy and make a sustainable community, please do so. Set an example for the rest of the world. But the reality is, and you need to admit this as much as anyone else, you're not going to be able to network that and scale up on a level that is actually going to be able to save this planet in the time that it needs to be saved. And we all see the hourglass – which has been taken off the table – running out. The reality is also that, if you admit it, these are Ecovillages for the wealthy and the privileged and the educated. You're not at all concerned about the plight of the two-thirds of humanity who are not going to get to move to Ecovillages but are desperate for the resources that can, at this moment, only be provided by capitalism.

Beth [the Capitalist]: And with the locals providing the labor for the Ecovillages who might not get to get involved in the yoga retreat. But, you know, it's like on one hand, it's creating jobs, but on the other hand, is it creating systemic change?

Max [the Capitalist]: Yeah, this is a fantasy.

Move 10: Team Commonism

Ela [the Commonist]: So we have the “Collaboration camps fostering synergies between grassroots initiatives and municipal government,” and this is something that we would like to bring to the table, because what we very often miss in Ecovillages – and we completely agree with your [the Capitalist’s] point – is that it's a very elitist movement and it’s people with money and resources, so we pretty much share your arguments, thanks for laying them out, but there is a component that we would like to propose for Ecovillages, and that is the level of municipal governance and people working with locals, not just with farming or whatever. This is really about activating people at a local level and at the same time regulating what's going on there from a perspective of the law, of legal frameworks and forms of collective decision-making that are grounded in the spot with the people, and therefore we think it's essential to have this component in Ecovillages as well. We didn't discuss that and I think you did it on purpose, because you like to derail the discussion to a point where it's again just about individual decisions. What we would like to see here is a truly collective movement which is also strengthened by local policy-makers. That would be my point. Anything to add?

Philip [the Commonist]: I think it's also a good moment to share the quietness and difference you're looking for when going to a place like an Ecovillage, and also helping the surroundings feed you with their experiences.

[VOTING STARTS]

[VOTING ENDS]

[DIE LANDS]

Yael [the Capitalist]: So lucky that there's an art world where this reality can happen, isn't it nice …