Digital Strategy Research Report

Towards a Digitally Cooperative Culture: Recommoning Land, Data and Objects

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A non-profit organization

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2005 - Initiated as a student club at Emily Carr University

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2007 - Founded as a Non-Profit

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Mission: Work with artists and designers to research and develop social, cultural and ecological infrastructure

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Vision: For all people to have the means to make and access culture

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Daniel Keller of New Models

Rosemary Heather of 221A

Daniel Keller, Artist Researcher

Patricia Reed, Artist Researcher

Ron Tran, Associate Artist

Sharona Franklin, Associate Artist

Christian Vistan, Associate Artist

Tiziana La Melia, Associate Artist

Joshua Citarella, Associate Artist

Matthias Einhoff, Associate Artist

Christy Nyiri, Lead Designer

Ellen Lee, Book Designer

Daniella Sanader, Proofreader

Ross Gentleman, 221A Board, Advisor

Victoria Lemieux, UBC, Advisor

Scott Nelson, HDCF, Advisor

Geoffrey Routledge, Liquuid, Advisor

Maral Sotoudehnia, Principal Researcher

Erika Wong, Principal Researcher

Rosemary Heather, Editorial Director

Maksym Rokmaniko, Associate Researcher

Francesco Sebregondi, Associate Researcher

Francis Tseng, Associate Researcher

Stephanie Wakefield, Associate Researcher

Christine Lariviere, Associate Researcher

Christina Hirukawa, Consultant

Blockchain@UBC, Partner

Emily Carr University, Partner

the beecoin project, Partner

ChinookX, Partner

DOMA, Partner

New Models, Partner

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Participants

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Image: Glenn Lewis, Classical Toy Boat (1987) University of British Columbia’s Peter Wall Institute �Text: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!

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The Death Instinct: separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path to death—do your own thing, dynamic change.

The Life Instinct: unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species, survival systems and operations, equilibrium

Adaptive cycle from Lance H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling, Panarchy: Understanding transformations in systems of humans and nature (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002), adapted by Caroline Castro for Anthropocene Back Loop: Experiments in Unsafe Operating Space by Stephanie Wakefield (London: Open Humanities Press, 2020).

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...capitalism,

colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce

one another.

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Jenny Odell. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2019)

Kim Stanley Robinson. The Ministry for the Future. (London: Orbit! Books, 2020)

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With the ability to detect and manipulate indeterminacy, discrepancy, temperament and latency, is there a way to productively engage problems that have evaded cultural understanding or that are unresponsive to familiar approaches?

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Maybe the documents of medium design are unusual mixtures of popular stories and technical specifications or explicit architectural instructions — like a cross between a novel, a building, a platform, an actuarial table, a film and a blockchain. Maybe heterogeneous mixtures of new and familiar technologies can form impure mixtures that, by being information rich, reduce violence and develop cultural capacities beyond the small fraction of potentials now in play.

Keller Easterling, Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World, (Verso, London, 2021)

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The Strategy Screen is

a tool for determining

the criteria for adopting

any new strategy. This

values-based criteria

is used to guide future

strategic decisions before

the critical moment of

decision arrives.

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Ron Tran, Beneath the Pleasant Grass, 2019

Our Strategy Must

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• Reject Surveillance and advance self-sovereign digital identities as way to build a better internet.
• Interrogate Utopian Visions and solutionism, while being mindful of heroic claims.
• Counter Neoliberal Expansionist Paradigms, without falling into the trap of disruption as innovation.
• Develop Systems That Steward socially and ecologically ergonomic design that reinforces anti-ableist, anti-racist and Indigenous positions.

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Our Strategy Must

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• Strive For Simplicity on behalf of the usership (humans, bots/AI and other organic lifeforms).
• Distribute Political and Economic Power through an infrastructural mutualist framework.
• Decenter Western Ideology by applying non-Western historical and ontological knowledge.
• Unify and Heal social and cultural divisions through new mass-narratives.

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Research Papers

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1. Rosemary Heather
2. Julian Yi-Zhong Hou
3. Patricia Reed
4. Maral Sotoudehnia

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Ron Tran, Beneath the Pleasant Grass, 2019

Partners

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• Blockchain@UBC
• New Models
• DOMA
• ChinookX
• the beecoin project

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• Funding - equitable mix: public, private, self- generated revenue

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• Self-generated revenues applied to advancement of the

strategy and org’s pursuits at large.

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• Education & onboarding prioritizes access and diversity of engagement

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• Keep simplicity of outcomes in sight for users.

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• 3-5 Peer Learning institutions who co-develop with non-white, non- tech and non- university groups

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• 7-10 Narrative partnerships for multi-sector buy-in

Key Performance Targets 2025

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• Engagement and learning across continental-scale digital stacks

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• Engage users and audiences within user-directed and algorithm-directed social spaces

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• Human & ecological equity in digital realm

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• Decenter western ideology; diversity of design, dev community, users

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• Equity advanced through platform coop dev community; wide scope benefit

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• Strategy responds to to value as valuation changes across cultures; bioregionalism, reparation

Key Performance Targets 2030

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• Distribute political & economic power

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• Networks grow with mass-collaboration

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• Governance empowered to respond to coordinated inauthentic behaviour

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• Onboard users excluded by trad financial barriers & other criteria for political action and citizenship

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• Promote mutualist & cooperative goals

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• DOMA Fellowship

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• Investigating housing market in lower mainland

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• Identifying exclusion zones for income brackets and generations since 2006�
• Developing Platform Narrative for Lower Mainland

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Development Phase 2021-23

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• LARP a DAO

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• Sprillow design firm; distributed applications

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• Black Swan DAO hackathons�
• Staking Pool, revenue arm�
• FWB Membership, collabs

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• Governance Pool simulator; quadratic voting idea- validation

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• Forging ongoing DAO to DAO relationships �
• Explore operating nodes for 221A and aligned partners

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Live Stream

Event Series

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10 AM PDT

1 PM EDT

7 PM CEST

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Friday June 4

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The Valuation of Necessity

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Patricia Reed, Rosemary Heather, Maral Sotoudehnia, Wassim Alsindi

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Friday June 18

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Housing & Platform Cooperatives

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DOMA, Maral

Sotoudehnia, Andy Yan, Ian Spangler

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Friday June 25

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Round Table: Social Tokens & DAOs

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New Models, @albiverse, SayDAO, Folia, Black Swan, NeÏl Beloufa & Bad Manners, Circles

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Thank you.

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Main—https://221a.ca�Insta—@221Aweee

Twitter—@221Aweeee

Email—hello@221a.ca

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