ETÁ - Designers for Blockchain: Back to Primitive

Image: Ricardo Stuckert

ETÁ is a blog for designers who are interested in Blockchain.

It will publish articles, studies, papers from others and also my personal view.

New Economy Subvert Capitalism

It was 1999 and I was impressed with his first lecture. Dr. Barbrook was speaking about the “High-Tech Gift Economy”₁, an article published by him one year before that lecture. The text says, quoting the new left activists, that the gift is supposedly about to replace commodity as in the Potlatch, a gift-giving feast practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States₂. The tribal arrangement demonstrated that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market₃. For the next weeks, there were a lot of thoughts in my mind about this utopia. The tribes, the dream of a decentralised force that would empower individuals against large corporations and a possibility of a less unequal world. At last, I wrote an article for a major Brazilian newspaper with this title: New Economy Subvert Capitalism.

Anarcho-blockchain

Eighteen years later I was deluded with my twenty-something years old ideas from that lecture. I became a designer believing that the human-centered approach₄ would fulfil, at very basic, part of my almost obsession for a better world. I would have the opportunity to listen people’s desires as the decentralised Internet proved wrong and more significantly, captured a wounded individual by depriving the most essential human right: the privacy – main principle of liberty. I left Marx and I joined Smith. I do not believe in welfare controlled by state anymore. I believe in humans and Blockchain rekindled that flame extinguished by the kidnapping of my soul. I will, from now on, be dedicated to redesign the world because “no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable₅.”

Welcome to Etá, a name from Brazilian indigenous language tupi-guarani meaning “a lot” or “many”. As the first lecture of my honourable master Dr. Richard Barbrook, the name represents the Potlatch, a stage of sharing knowledge for the good of human beings. If it is not a gift, at least is mine.

1. High-tech Gift Economy by Richard Barbrook - http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/631/552
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch
3. For the historical antecedents of New Left anarcho-communism, see Richard Gombin, Les Origins du Gauchisme, pp. 99-151. For its later influence on the new social movements, see George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left, pp. 204-212. - from High-tech Gigt Economy
4. IDEO - https://www.ideo.com
5. Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations, Book I Chapter VIII, p.96, para. 36.