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Economic Orangery 2021

Let main characters speak for themselves

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Online Live Action Role Play:
built around a collective imagination of decentralized economic institutions in a revolutionary Belarusian situation.

Length:
2 months, events unfold in the chat and during one hour of weekly synchronous video sessions in discord

Participants:
cultural and social workers, rooted in the Belarusian locality or experienced of living in Belarus

The voices you will hear are the voices of aspects of algorithmic economies. Let our main characters speak for themselves. They will tell you in detail what we have been doing and what we are planning in the future.

aspects / obsessions

TRANSACTION

Let me describe from the very beginning. Everything started from this letter:

Dear …

That was an invitation to the orangery of extinct economic technologies. In those days I wasn’t obsessed with transactions so much as now I’m.

That was an invitation to the larp-like activity. To test how institutions born in the situation of the uprising could be organised in Belarus, where protests against the falsification of presidential election results have been taking place since August 2020. And what role could algorithmization play in them? Do they need algorithmization at all? What specific kind of it? The assumption was that there are many ways to automatize community. And many ways that are completely different from “investment-obsessed games” with prototyping of some sort of products. Indeed does it make any sense to prototype uprising and push it as a product?

transaction laughing

heighbourhood yards economies

In the picture you can see the actual landscape from where the question of algorithmization was unrolled. It is one of the neighbourhood yards, a place between several residential blocks. In Minsk, neighbourhood yards are open and easily walk-through for everyone.

To play with this situation we decided to act from a “future-like” perspective when all algo-economies of nowadays are fossils of the epoch that passed away a long time ago. We wanted to reconstruct relations that form technological landscape intended to be infrastructure for new type of non-hierarchical relations (somebody from that wild time named them web3)


ADDITION (interrupting)

Yes. They usually said it is a more beautiful successor of web2 on the beauty show of network topologies of those days. Now we think that was because these algo-economic enthusiasts were obsessed with addition.

addition laughing


SUSTAINABILITY

So the relations that were reenacted in orangery were real, and they drag the drama of desires around them into our made-up forum.

Our task was to look after visitors

The forum was an economic orangery and we were а group of Orangery keepers. Our task was to look after visitors, meet for evening procedures and cybernetic gymnastics, and at night we dreamt as if we are the aspects of 2021 algorithmic technologies.


POWER

Radical reveries was another forum some of us were involved in.

collective mapping of discontent

That was a process of collective mapping of discontent

black boxes

Searching for black boxes.

finding ways for building coalitions

And finding ways for building coalitions and changing the balance of power.


MULTITUDE

Our cooperative is fluid, now we are 16, but tomorrow we are 60 or maybe 6?) So multiplicity of voices and economic experiments are plenty, let’s have time to try them all. We do not try to reduce everything to one, we save the difference. Before pushing to realise a genius artist’s or engineer’s idea, we will test it in our Tests environments. Like in blockchain testnets, with their instability that are going in a perpendicular direction to the drive to formalisation of the Mainnets. Our idea is to occupy this instability as it is where the cultural effects are born. It is where we are free to play around such serious issues AS MONEY.

Ha-ha-ha!


VALUE

As Value I can add that we are not playing in a field of luxuriority and abundance. We are working in a field that IS NOT rich in resources. Resources we need are not grown on trees of the crypto-world. There is no space for them in ethereum wallets.

As we think if it’s not accessible to the oppressed and poor it’s neither radical, nor revolutionary.

If it is not accessible to those who do not have time to play these crypto-games, who only deal with survival, the everyday oppression from the lux of the world and the state.

Our program is Algorithmic Solidarity — Economics of the Oppressed, moving transversely to technologies and making alliances. And maybe some of you are already in an alliancewith us?


RISK

As Risk I propose to have a service of disappearing as care —if you need a break from a daily routine, or you had a burnout, or you are under state or corporate repressions you might need a disappearing scenario! We allow others to pause unexpectedly! Disappear with us! Disappear together!


RITUAL

We have the arteracts of the desire for alternative value systems, which we cultivate and wanna rely on.

cybernetic training exercises allow us to embody the material, sensorial and performative qualities of algorithmisized economies

Our cybernetic training exercises allow us to embody the material, sensorial and performative qualities of algorithmisized economies (someone might call them DAOs). We are experiencing their textures and physicality.


Opacity:

I am obsessed with the idea of Economies of Opacity — where the sensitive resources stay within the community and members can choose a safe level of anonymity not being autonomous but interdependent in a productive way. You know, in the Belarussian context, Transparency will unfortunately not work, as we all will put ourselves in danger. Danger! Danger! So we’re planning to test such a safety automatisation network or tribe.


EQUALITY

We also want to say hi and to support all the oppressed of the world — the people in Qazaqstan, the people in Ukraine, suffering from Russian Federation colonialism now.


AUTOMATION

I’m automation and bots are one of my passions. They are an important part of distributed care we are building. Our distributed network has some bots that allow everyone to join discussions with us and spread materials. Unfortunately OPACITY does not allow me to share it with you now.


PROXY

So join our School of Algorithmic Solidarity, the series of distributed collective experiments and situated experiences that seek to answer the question how to survive under algorithmic capitalism, how to flourish within economic solidarity models.

Please feel free to let us know if you want to join and spend some beautiful time near the digital fire.

END


Background

Decentralized technologies have ceased to be a part of everyday life long ago, but turned into the fossils of the economies of the past.

But you can visit the Orangery of decentralized neighbourhood yard economies, where based on the 2021 year archives the economic relations within one of the Belarusian yards was reconstructed. The economic relations that are reenacted are real, and they drag the drama of desires around them.

A group of Orangery keepers watch over visitors, meet for evening procedures and cybernetic gymnastics, and at night they dream as if they were the guts of 2021 algorithmic technologies.

Game features

This game is a mixture of artistic and gaming techniques, offline larps and online live action role-playing games.

The peculiarity of this game is some number of rules and mechanics, freedom of action for players and an open ending. There are no spectators here — everyone is a direct participant. It depends on the participants where the game will go.

Characters

In this online game, the player has 2 characters. They speak from 2 different spaces

2021 — the space “of the present”.

economic orangery — a view “from the future”.

2021

Inside the 2021 courtyard protest space, you will “reconstruct” the courtyard economy during the revolution and anti-coronavirus measures.

All actions in this game space take place in parallel with the real events taking place now in Belarus. You can freely draw any real details into the game if you think that this will add many-sidedness and drive to the game, and reality will intertwine with the game.

Your character is involved in the movement in one of the protest courtyards.

The place of your communication with others is the courtyard chat, where all organizational issues are resolved. Your overall goal is to maintain courtyard activity, find resources for it, while trying to make sure that everyone has time for their personal life, no one gets burned out and everyone remains safe.

You’ve all known each other for several months, although you only know someone through chat. As you play, you can speculate about previous relationships with other characters and this will become part of the story. At the pre-game workshop, we will have time to work out in detail the relations between the “orgs” of the yard.

Some of the “orgs” of the yard are your neighbor in the staircase, and someone lives in the next house. Someone may not now live in houses near the courtyard, but still participate in the movement. Perhaps you are meeting with someone from the other chat users in a store in the area. You have been playing football with someone since childhood. You are not familiar with someone at all and you can only guess by their nickname who this person could be IRL.

The alternative parallel economy of your yard is decentralized. This corresponds with the ideas of horizontal movement organization. And it also ensures safety – no processes are concentrated in one hand, and even if someone misses for a while, the yard movement lives on.

Economic orangery

You are the caretakers of the Economic Orangery, which is dedicated to the economies of Belarusian neighbourhoods in 2021. Visitors periodically come to your greenhouse to gain experience and learn about the decentralized economies of the past. This is an adaptive changing space that is rebuilt every time according to the request of the visitor.

The caretakers have known each other for a long time. Each of them has his / her own obsession, which affects her / his character and the space of the greenhouse. Here is a complete list of obsessions:

Obsessions

Addition / Сложение

Automation / Автоматизация

Equality / Равенство

Multitude / Множественность

Opacity / Затемненность

Persistence / Постоянство

Power / Власть-Сила-Множество

Proxy / Прокси

Risk / Риск

Ritual / Ритуал

Secrecy / Секрет

Sustainability / Устойчивость

Transaction / Транзакция

Transparency / Прозрачность

Trust / Доверие

Value / Ценность

DREAMS

DREAMS is the space of transition between the Economic Orangery and 2021.

As an orangery worker trying to understand what happened in 2021, you develop an obsession through which you look at the archives of backyard economies. You are so enthralled by this activity that you even have dreams where the past, the future, the present, your orangery activities and the life of the yard that you are reconstructing are overlapped.

You have decided to make a collective dream diary. It seems important to you to share your obsessions, to face the collective unconsciousness of your group. Perhaps, it will be useful for you in the design and arrangement of the Orangery, because this is not an objective archive, but adaptable, that includes your desires, emotions and affects.

Thus, through dreams, a transition between the Orangery space and 2021 happens, where complementarity, influence and co-, or even, inter-dependency is possible.

With the support of:

This game is made with the support of the DAOWO Global Initiative and the Goethe-Institut. Watch Talk about the game here