Lemma. If it is possible for tokens to be used to expand cryptocurrencies beyond the conventional, individual, market-fundamentalist, transaction-based functions of money, this is something that is yet to be invented and will require a great deal of craftiness.

SCHOLIUM B. Alternative token strategies also tend to operationalize a form of value that has not been mentioned up to now, but is fundamental to capitalism: use-value. The praise of use-value is often sung in alter-economy communities as a way out of capitalism. This is dangerously naïve. Use-value, it is true, is qualitative: “it is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from it” (Marx 1976, 126). However, use-value only functions economically to the extent that it “metabolizes” as (is processually converted into) exchange-value (Marx 1976, 196–97). The threefold definition of money, and the correlation between quantity of labor-time and quantity of value, are complicit with use-value to the extent that it metabolizes as an economic factor. Measures may be taken to prevent use-value from fully metabolizing with exchange-value (as in skill-sharing networks and other sharing economies; T25). But nothing can prevent it from being haunted by money, the market, and the essentially extortionist correlation between labor-time and value. These slip back in in informal assessments of how “equal” or “fair” a sharing exchange had been, even if such assessment is discouraged. In addition, use-value is essentially normative. It is bound up with already-formed functions having conventional values in one or another systemic context (related to technical systems, productive industries, service industries, or cultural industries, with the definition of “use” varying by domain). By virtue of this systems-participation, a formed function carries a certain regulatory force, even outside its dedicated functional context, and in spite of the best efforts to break that link to power. How could the judgment of usefulness not carry such a force? All of this is part and parcel of the work paradigm so integral to capitalism (even where it is not in force in a full-fledged way as a work ethic). Tokens could theoretically be used in entirely different ways, potentially skirting around use-value, by adopting gaming models. However, gaming typically privileges a stimulus–response structure (as opposed to a creative call-and-response process) that re-performs the dominant economy’s individual transaction-exchange paradigm, even as it repurposes it for the production of a certain surplus-value of life: fun. Fun is a kind of surplus-value of life that is well-known to neoliberal capitalism and well-articulated with it, even to the point of fulfilling a regulatory function in the life of human capital (spawning whole industries: the entertainment sector).

T92

The postblockchain cryptocurrency digital-platform route offers many avenues of response to the capitalist market, but the models now existing or under development so far are stuck in a game of whack-a-mole with it. With every blow against it in one place, the familiar myopic face of one of its constitutive principles pops up somewhere else.

T93

Although all manner of commons-centered, collective, collaborative models should be exploratorily pursued and concertedly experimented with, there is a need for projects attempting to go beyond the pale, to cross over today’s anarcho-libertarian horizon to new anarcho-communist vistas more intensely prefiguring the postcapitalist future.

SCHOLIUM. Only a project that operates, in its own processual arena, according to radically anarcho-communist, as opposed to anarcho-capitalist, principles has a chance of beginning to move beyond capitalist economization—and its attendant power formations—in a way that is maximally resistant to recapture. Intentional communities and autonomous enclaves are a traditional route for experimentation of this kind. Their limitation is that they are obliged for their survival either to opt out of the economy in a way that is rarely sustainable long term, or find ways to link back in through participation in the local economy or the creation of microbusinesses. They also tend to devalue processual excess, which expresses itself most intensely in surplus-value of flow, in favor of a regained rootedness in a regulatory ideal of “real life.” Their affective intensities often pool around figures of purist return: to “nature,” to “authenticity,” to true “community,” and to true activity (craft)—normative notions, all. Experimentation with alter-economic models employing digital currencies can potentially pioneer more sustainable and flexible ecological models, proudly impure and without return. Intentional communities and autonomous enclaves are a welcome element in an alter-economic ecology, as long as they are able to reconcile their dedication to local structure with open system. But they do not provide a general model for alter-economy.

T94

The invention of an anarcho-communist alter-economy would not only have to eschew the market as an organizing principle but conscientiously build in mechanisms to actively ward away the return of its constitutive tendencies.

FABULATION. Warding-away is a practice of conditioning (very different from causing, structuring, or systematizing; T77 Schol. a). The list of necessary wardings-away is forbidding—or inspiring—depending on how you look at it. They are inspiring if they go hand-in-hand with a constructive set of speculative strategies for building an alter-economy. The strategies would bear on how conditions might be set in place that not only foster a creatively self-driving collective process but also imbue that process with immanently lived criteria, so that a participatory evaluation of the two aspects of the ethico- and the -aesthetic is performed flush with the self-running. The lived criteria, once again, are transindividual intensity and the processual quality of the process’s tendential direction. The conditioning strategies weave together into a speculative fabulation (T70) of what a collectivist postcapitalist economy might involve. They are fabulatory techniques of relation: a speculative-pragmatic “pseudo-narrative” (Guattari 2014, 37–38). In exceedingly cursory sketch form:

Speculative strategy a. Use-value. The concept of function needs to be replaced with the more plastic concept of operation, making clear that the operativity is processual. That means that the system remains constitutively open to emergent potential, in-formed by the differential play of tendencies. This involves operationalizing the immanent outside.

Speculative strategy b. Fun and games. The differential play of tendencies should be just that: play. Gaming models might enter into the larger field of play, especially if they privilege collective action rather than revolving around individual inputs. But they would not define the relational space overall. Play is a more encompassing concept than gaming. Play can take up into itself a heterogeneity of affective intensities. These are really produced through the artifice of “make-believe.” However, they are produced in an arena where the normative contexts in which they are conventionally found are under suspension (Massumi 2014c), so that the affective intensities are staged independently of their capture by function (playing pirates, for example, does not involve being at sea or making someone actually walk the gangplank—but the players have to feel that this is being done). This skirting around use-value allows the unfolding of the intensities to undergo emergent modulation. Play is an operative tendency connoting a processual openness. Events “play out” as their constitutive tendencies unfold. Systems have “play” as they test their limits. Techniques of play-relation are a serious domain for the exploration of alter-unfoldings. These may be staged in such as way as to carry an exemplary force for export to extra-play contexts, introducing a margin of play into them that allows them to test their tendential limits. Don’t make political platforms. Make play political. Make-believe, but not in the ideological sense of imposing adherence to a program.

Speculative strategy c. Work. The assumption that participation is work would be displaced by building in interactions that have an improvisational edge to them. Having an improvisational edge is what defines play. Play should not be confined to any already-recognized arena conventionally designated as a play space within the existing norms of society. Play deploys to intensest effect in temporary autonomous zones. In addition to the multiplicity of affective intensities produced as it unfolds, participation in an improvisational interaction creates a global surplus-value of life that is lived qualitatively as a value, and comprises such sub-surplus-values as zest, beauty, wonder, and adventure. These are expressions of Spinozist joy. They accompany the becoming-more-intensely-affirmative of life-formative forces. For Whitehead, the intensity of becoming—“adventure toward novelty”—is the highest “civilizational” value (taking the word “civilization” with a large grain of twenty-first-century salt; Whitehead 1967, viii). To the extent that the collective production of improvised surplus-values of life self-drives an alter-economy, those surplus-values might be called, tongue firmly in cheek, adventure capital. Adventure capital, having to do as it does with the affirmation of a life-quality, is a directly aesthetic form of value.

Speculative strategy d. Labor-time. No correlation would be built in, or be allowed to develop, between input of time and production of value. In the postcapitalist future, time is not money. It is life. The best way of warding away the time = money equation is to keep the sense of value focused on emergent effects that add up to more than the sum of their parts and that are valued, in the currency of direct experience, for their incommensurability with their causal input or conditioning factors. This leveraging of emergent effects is precisely what is meant by improvisation. Improvisation is another word for free action: life-activity unsubsumed by the use-value of existing systematic functionings and the work model that goes along with them. The techniques of relation fostering free action combine for a pragmatics of the useless. The useless is pragmatic in that it may prefigure the invention of new operations, from which new functions might emerge that were unthinkable within the terms of existing systems.

Speculative strategy e. Individualism. Internal to the project, there would be no division into individual shares. This means that on the inside there would be no unitization of value, in terms of currency or other forms of tokens. This is done to safeguard improvisation, which is never a question of individual creativity. It is always a playing out of a differential field. The field includes suprapersonal factors—habitus, collective memory, cultural allusions, genres, genders, plus any number of nonhuman factors that prime the field and can serve as cues or contingent triggers—as well as infrapersonal factors (the dividual). The latter pertain to the co-motion of bare-active tendencies vying to take hold of the body as a vehicle of their own expression, and to increase their power to self-perform by composing with other tendencies, differentially affecting more than one body in concert through an emergent collective attunement to the stirring tendential potential. Improvisation, looked at in this way, is a transindividual machinic subjectivity, or subjectivity-without-a-subject. It operates by synergy and the fusion of a multiplicity of moves into the continuity of a transition. It expresses itself in and as an emergent collectivity marshaling the power of a continuum whose fusional taking-form cannot be reduced to the sum of its participating individuals.

Speculative strategy f. Product. No product separate from the process would guide the process teleologically. Emergent collectivity would be valued as the product. By emergent is meant that its taking-form is an event-form. This would be an occurrent value. The events might answer to any number of already-existing arenas, with which they link transversally, resonate at a distance with, or which they parasitize. Art, education, and activism are the key examples. Products might well be produced—artworks, films, books, participatory learning platforms, aesthetico-political activist interventions—but they would not be treated as the product. The product would be the continuing of the creative process. Any products other than the self-driving of the creative process engine would be experienced as happy incidentals. A directly collective product of the highest importance would be the spinning-off, from the self-formative movement of the process itself, of exemplary techniques of relation. These would be ways of conditioning, triggering, and sustaining emergent collectivity. Techniques of relation would be stored as process seeds that could be replanted to move the process through another iteration. They could also be gifted to other collective processes. Their collection would be the only store of value that would animate the process. It would amount to a store of potential. The techniques would be at the same time action traces of past events and forerunners (preaccelerators) of future creative variations on them. They would be a qualitative index of the power of the process to turn itself over into its own continuance. In other words, they would index the power of its continuum. The actual items stored might take the form of suggestive action recipes, improvisational event scripts, or supports that could be used for repriming process. This could include preservation or documentation of the conditioning factors that went into past events (materials, images, sounds, words, concepts, code, media). Their collection would constitute an archive, the more multimedia in nature the better. The processual potential they indexed, as it turned over to reanimate the process in new variations, would constitute an anarchive (Murphie and SenseLab 2016): an excess-over the archive fueling the continued self-production of the process as an autonomous subjectivity-without-a-subject. The anarchive is a surplus-value of storage. Through its anarchiving, the emergent collectivity would grow and prolong itself into a singular varietal culture.

Speculative strategy g. Accumulation. There would be no drive to accumulate anything other than techniques of relation and the archival elements fueling the anarchive. The digital platform involved would be open source, freely available for uptake and adaptation. The process seeds would not be proprietary. They would be meant to disseminate. This would make the project an open, dissipative system. Although it would tend toward its own continuance, it would not be afraid to die, either by its own potential-crunching volatility going off-kilter or by extreme success (exhausting the pool of potential it was effectively conditioned to mobilize). Even in death, it would live on in the process seeds it disseminated. Self-preservation would not be its aim. This willingness to risk itself would safeguard its quality of adventure, and prevent it from becoming an institution: an apparatus of capture driven by a will to systematically reproduce itself, rather than processually spin off qualitatively different versionings of itself, free to go wild. It would dedicate itself to rewilding, not reproduction. This is an aspect of the process’s anarchic disposition.

Speculative strategy h. Incentivization. There would be no incentivization by promises of quantifiable individual gain. The adventure of the ongoing collective self-improvisation would be its own incentive. The process itself would serve as a qualitative attractor for emergent-collectivity production. Attractors orient activity, immanent to a process’s self-running, rather than subordinate it to goals or preprogrammed results imposed from without. They operate by purely affective means. They do not goad, discipline, channel, obligate, or obviate. They lure. They do not premold or premodel results. They stir up self-driving tendencies predisposed to move in the direction they indicate, their attractive power inflecting them en route into producing variations on themselves. They are leaveners of event-based taking-form. Attractors are lures for the autonomous self-expression of creative process. They are echoes of futurity in the present, drawing tendencies out of the past into new adventures. They are an ever-present future-dimension of event-conditioning. They prompt tendencies to outdo themselves (exceed their own slavish repetition).

Speculative strategy i. The digital. The digital merits inclusion on the list of dangers to ward off to the extent that it lends itself to forming social or cultural bubbles fearful of the outside, or embodies a transactionalist exchange model (Strategy j). A digital platform is necessary, of course, to implement a cryptocurrency (T95). But if the digital platform is considered the process, rather than a platform of relation through which the process phase-shifts, a closed culture, and the accompanying entropy, can quickly set in. The digital platform would be conceived as a pivot for the process, spinning off creative energies into offline collaborative events. The archival action-traces of the events would be returned to the online archive. They would then be dynamized by procedures, both automated and manual, designed to render them anarchival: apt to reactivate as forerunner conditioning factors for events to come. The offline events would be where the surplus-value of life would be most intensely lived. The self-affirming value produced by the process would revolve around the production of embodied surplus-value of event. The digital platform would be the technical engine of the creative process, but not its experiential heart. The relation between the digital platform and the offline events spinning off from it would be transductive. By transductive is meant the continuing of a process across phase-shifts moving the process from one qualitatively different differential field of emergence to another, each hosting their own qualitative differentials and manners of taking-form.

Speculative strategy j. Transactional exchange. Smart contracts would be used internally for easing into collaboration and communicating the relational ethos of the varietal culture to newcomers. They would not be contracts in the traditional sense, but more like process movers. For example, they could be used as gateways that organize a participant’s getting to know the process and being welcomed into it. This would avoid the heavy-handed disciplinary gesture of requiring acquiescence to a formal set of rules as a condition of entry (the widely used strategy that is the digital equivalent of the outmoded “social contract” so much a part of liberal democracy). They could also be used to crystallize activity and attention around emergent propositions, and to nudge them over the threshold into an eventful taking-form. In this capacity, they would replace the formal “governance” structures built into blockchain and postblockchain projects, even the most alter-economic in inspiration. There would be no membership, no formal vetting of newcomers, and no structured-in unequal distribution of power (for example, between newcomers and old-timers, even founders). The danger of trolls and willful destroyers would be assumed as a risk of adventure. Again, if the project died for lack of adequate immune response to these threats, its disseminative nature would mean it could always reseed itself elsewhere. It would be designed to be self-grafting, rather than self-preserving and self-reproducing. The fusional process driving it would carry fissile potential.

Speculative strategy k. Decision. There would be no formal decision-making, whether consensus-based or voting-based. This would be at the heart of the anarchistic aspect. Consensus-based decision-making has been experimented with for many decades among alternative political and social movements and has been resurgent in recent years in the assembly-based movements coming out of the Arab Spring and Occupy. Conceived as a form of direct democracy, often under the anarchist banner, in practice it easily leads to paralysis: the despotism of the most cantankerous or the least adventurous. Since an individual (or in “consensus-seeking high majority rule” models, a small minority) can block any action, it can lead not to anarchic adventure and effervescence, but to least-common-denominator ennui. This is not so different from the net effect of traditional majority-rule voting, which weeds out exactly the kind of outlier tendencies that an anarchic process needs to fold into its varietal culture and nurture, encouraging them to unfold and carry themselves to their highest power, in self-acting relational autonomy. Voting destroys collective process (except those whose systematic reason for being is the exercise of normative regulatory power). It stages a simulacrum of collectivity, requiring that individuals act utterly alone at the same time. What that yields is not an emergent relational spin-off effect, but a statistical aggregation-effect. This is a use of quanitification procedures that is pronouncedly de-creative. In an anarcho-communist process, decision-making would be truly self-organizing. The positive orienting power of attractors would be used. Decisions would be lured into self-organizing. Anyone would be empowered to throw down a lure, in the form of a proposition for a gathering of the collective energies. Any decision resulting would be affective and improvisational rather than deliberative and procedural. If the lure fell on fertile ground and succeeded in gathering creative momentum, the proposition would move over the threshold toward actualization. This would require that propositions be offered in the spirit of a gift, without the obligation of payback: the gift freed from the dialectic of the countergift. This willingness to offer without a guarantee of return would be the core quality of the processual ethos. It would qualify the process as, fundamentally, a participation-based gift economy. The generosity expected would not be styled as a personal character trait, but as a quality of the collective process moving the individual, and moving through the individual: a surplus-value of care. No assumptions would be made about “human nature” and whether it is fundamentally “good” or “evil” by normative standards. Such debates are beside the processual point. The ethical quality of the process would pertain not to the individuals per se, but to the nature of the subjectivity-without-a-subject embodied in the always-emergent collectivity. The process would leverage the power of the impersonal (native to the immanent outside). The possibilities for distributed agency offered by interactive digital platforms are key to mobilizing the self-organizing, anarchic potential of surplus-value of care. The mechanism for the self-organizing of decision would hinge on a collective attunement on the part of the participants to the moments when the process is felt to be reaching a threshold where a proposition is ripe to tip over into its actualization in an event. An algorithmic means would have to be found to register the fluctuations in the affective intensity composed by the tendencies in play, in order to make the approach to these tipping points palpable. In other words, a digital affect-o-meter registering intensity would have to be invented.

Speculative strategy l. Humanism. The operationalization of the subjectivity-without-a-subject expressing itself in the iterative taking-form of emergent collectivity would be a processual rebuttal of humanism. Humanism’s focus is on the individual (bourgeois) person as the beginning and the end of all that is considered to matter in life. Anarcho-communist process would be transindividual: linking infrapersonal tendencies to superpersonal factors. It would be more-than-human. Here also, the digital platform can assist. Processual operators (basically, glorified bots) could be used to introduce strategic doses of contingency and whimsy into the interactions. These would be relational, both in the sense that they would be responding to qualitative differentials tendentially churning in the interactions, and in the sense that they would operate as cues or triggers that might modulate the interaction consequent to their intervention in ways that were not anticipatable, thus bringing less accessible potentials into relief. These fabulatory creatures would act as punctual potential-churns, introducing a nonhuman element of play. Their ability to play to creative effect would depend on their being tied to algorithmic analysis running in the background that would be capable of detecting and indexing creative differentials constituting qualitative tendencies. This requires effectively turning the tables on quantity, committing quantitatively based (digital) analysis to the mining not of numbers or statistics per se, but of qualitative potentials: a not derivative-unlike convergence between quality and quantity (T46), shorn of the drive to accumulation. The success of the affect-o-meter involved in decision-tipping would depend on this as well. What would be needed is what Nora Bateson has called “warm data,” in her call for the development of techniques for harvesting “transcontextual information about the interrelationships that integrate a complex system” (Bateson 2017). The invention and operationalization of warm data is absolutely fundamental to the entire economization project. The process could only create an economy that did not end up resubsuming surplus-value of life under the drive for economic surplus-value if ways are found of indexing qualitative potential by quantitative means without annulling it. The economization would have to run on affective intensities affirmed for their own value. When this is achieved, the very nature of measurement will change. Now snaking through the coils of the process, integrated into its most intimate operations, measurement has been converted into a qualitative conditioning factor, so dynamically entangled with the creative process as to contribute to changing the nature of what it measures: it becomes a dimension of the qualitative becoming running through the creative process engine. This would carry to the limit the convergence financial derivatives tend toward in the name of accumulation, falling short as a result. Existing qualitative analysis tools might be conscripted to the task, to which machine learning might also be adaptable. The economization tools would also have to pivot on suprapersonal and infrapersonal movements, and the differentials between them, rather than centering on inputs, opinions, or tendencies attributable to individual humans. All analysis would have to be carried out in keeping with the transversal modus operandi of the process and the transindividual ethos in-forming it. A critical concern would be to register the way in which subtendencies have insisted on themselves, even if they were not brought to full expression. A surplus of anarchival potential is found in the differential between these un-self-accomplished subtendential insistencies and the global emergence-effect they contributed to, if only in the way they ended up being skirted around or thwarted (the way in which they were “negatively prehended,” Whitehead would say, recalling that negative prehension “expresses a bond”; 1978, 41). These also-rans constitute a horde of leftover forerunner potentials that can be reactivated to make an eventful difference. They lurk in the process, and can be brought back to bear. Hording, not hoarding.

Speculative strategy m. Privatization. For there to be no accumulation, there would have to be no private ownership within the project. No appropriation. There would be no distribution of individual shares of any kind. Any economic value spun off would be returned to the collective process. This is the communistic aspect.

Speculative strategy n. Purity. The order of the day would be creative duplicity. Purity, and the sense of personal moral superiority that goes along with it, would not be a factor. Since all of this would be happening in a pore of the dominant society, it would be necessary for the project to find ways of processually coupling with the existing economy in order to sustain itself. Even more importantly, it would couple with other alter-economy projects operating along different lines, as well as alternative political movements of all kinds, including the burgeoning activist peer-to-peer world (https://p2pfoundation.net). The project would be a collaborative partner in an ecology of powers. Its creative process engine would function as a driver of primary resistance disseminating tendentially postcapitalist process seeds into its surrounding fields, with which it strives to enter into mutually beneficial symbiosis, all the while feeding off the dominant capitalist economy where needed, rather than feeding it, awaiting a tipping point to be reached where the alter-economic web would be capable of taking over from capitalism.

T95

The crucial question is: How can a creative process engine that stays true to its mission of producing surplus-value of life for its own sake at the same time style itself an economization process capable of interfacing with the dominant economy in self-sustaining ways? That kind of complicity will be necessary transitionally, as the postcapitalist pores of the current society take the time they need to dilate and merge into an alter-world of their own. The only way this might be possible, if the present analysis holds, would be by exploiting the two-sidedness of intensive magnitude: the way in which the qualitative and the quantitative embrace each other without touching, while taking flight together in the caduceus of intensive magnitude.

FABULATION. Say that algorithmic techniques were found to index potential. What they would register would be qualitative differentials preaccelerating emergent tendencies. This would require a mode of mathematization beyond counting and statistics. The count of tendencies is largely irrelevant for processual purposes, for the simple reason that the potential in-forming them is supernumerary. To get at this supernumeracy of potential, the quantitative analysis involved would have to bear on differentials as such: spreads, contrasts, ratios, frequencies, distributions, vectors converging and diverging, varying distances. The qualitative characters of the items in the online archive (images, sounds, words, etc.) would be analyzed to extract these differentials in ways designed to be indicative of fluctuating relation. This would put the machinic finger on the pulse of the power of the continuum (T78 Schol. b) as it is in-forming a taking-form destined to separate itself out from the flow as an evental drop of processual experience. The aim would be to register the anarchival movement of surplus-value of life at the emergent level. One possibility (doubtless there are many) might be that the differentials would be rendered in the form of a topological figure that would fold into new shapes each time the pulse was taken. From the torsions of the figure, vector values could be extracted that would register the fluctuations of the affective intensities coursing through the online interactions over time. This would amount to a derivative measure of process, indexing the flow of creative activity, treated as an intensive magnitude. To ensure that the measurement captures the creative advance, certain passages across thresholds of taking-form could be given special weight: tipping points where a proposition gels, where a proposition passes into offline actualization, and where the action-traces of actualized events are returned to the online platform to further the anarchive. This is where, pragmatically, the two-sidedness of intensive magnitude comes in. Internal to the online platform, the creative process engine would continue as usual, using its suite of relationally oriented smart contracts, processual operators, and other tools, oblivious to the mathematical harvest going on in parallel. The mathematical indexing would parallel the magmatic flow of the creative advance. It would render, into a quantifiable expression, the power of its continuum as it peaks and irrupts in discrete relational events of collective experimentation, to continue its turnover across them. From the outside perspective, refracting the quantitative expression that has been extracted from the process back onto it, this “magma” of event-potential could be looked upon differently: it could be thought of as an un-unitized money mass. Say there is a cryptocurrency associated with the project. The quantifications of the fluctuations of creative potentials taking-form could be used to “mine” units of the currency. A certain number of units of currency would be minted at regular intervals, indexed to the magmatic flow and its irruption into eventful takings-form. Call the cryptocurrency “Occurrency” (in keeping with the evental nature of the project). Occurrency would not be used internal to the creative process engine. There would be a digital membrane separating the creative collaborative process from its minting of conventional economic values and, through them, its participation in the larger economic environment. Occurrency would lurk on the outside of the membrane, paralleling the qualitative value-producing process as its quantitative flipside. On this side, the aspect of intensive magnitude that lends itself to quantification would be operative. Internally to the process, it would be the other side of intensive magnitude—where it dips into the playing-out of potential composed by qualitative differentials—that would be operative. The membrane would exist only to manage the two-sidedness of intensive magnitude, operating as an economizing filter. The continuum of magmatic potential would filter through the membrane, appearing for that purpose as a money mass undergoing unitization. The unitization would convert the inside flow of the process into an outside (oc)currency. Outside the membrane, Occurrency would fulfill the threefold function of money. This economization membrane would be the only way in which the creative process engine would be enclosed. In other respects, the process would be radically open—to new participants, to the external world of offline events, and to the immanent outside of creative potential. Occurrency would be liminal in relation to the creative process engine, and interstitial in relation to other alter-economic spaces. The creative process engine would exist in an environment of other alternative “economic spaces,” each with their own dedicated cryptocurrencies operating along whatever lines their collective, commons-oriented projects required. Each currency would be convertible into a surrounding currency that would be interoperable with all of them. Call it “Space.” The economic spaces would buttress each other: each would contribute a portion of the value they minted to the spaces around it, encouraging cooperation. The environment would be designed for symbiosis rather than competition. To complete the complex open system design of the environment of alter-economic spaces, there might be an underlying cryptocurrency that Space would link with. Call it “Gravity.” Gravity would participate in the burgeoning cryptocurrency market, providing an outlet through which the economic spaces cohabiting the alter-economic environment could interface with Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, or national currencies, using Space as a transitional medium. This would create the possibility for the Occurrency minted by the creative process engine to be converted to cash value, on an as-needed basis. In this way, the project could provision itself with the goods and services it had no choice but to source from the dominant economy, but which it needed to fuel its self-driving on its own processual terms (travel, food, and accommodation for participants in the offline events, materials, etc.). The resulting economy would be an economy of abundance, because its “underlying” would be activity, and the activity, though fluctuating, would be ongoing. It would be the force of its continuing that would be harnessed. The economization would bear on the power of the continuum: a self-renewing plenum of subjective becoming, rather than an objective scarcity of resources. It is important to note that the rendering of warm data registering the movements of magmatic potential toward a determinate taking-form (an emergent decision) could be given a double expression. Inside the alter-economic space, on the platform, it could be visualized (or audiovisualized or otherwise figured) to form an affect-o-meter (T94 Strat. k) following the qualitative-relational flow in real time, or in periodic refreshings of the figure. This registering of fluctuations in the affective intensity indexing the playing out of tendencies would be an aesthetic accompaniment to the process, in the process: an immanent accentuation-differentiation of it. In a word, it would be an affective resonator. It would co-condition emergent takings-form by making the ebb and flow of the process immediately palpable. This could potentially activate the collective sensing of formative thresholds, and push them over the edge into becoming tipping points (immanent decisions). By this device, the quantification apparatus moving the process outward would converge with the creative advance of the collective qualitative becoming on the inside. The monetization occurring through the passage through the membrane would appear on the outside as the economized tip of the creative iceberg. The process would effectively bifurcate. Crucially, the bifurcation point would be twofold. It would be double-actioned: the unitizing quantification would filter the process out into its monetarization outside the membrane, while at the same time, as a function of the same registering of qualitative differentials, the affect-o-meter as immanent decision-making aid would be folding the process integrally back into itself. The process would be simultaneously refracted outward and fed it back into to its own immanent inflections, in synchronous oscillation. This would produce a single, two-way movement, on the one side toward a countable expression of magnitude, and on the other back into intensity. The complementary relation between the monetary refraction without and the self-advance of the process taking another creative turn within would be the source of confidence in Occurrency. It would “commensurate” the qualitative production of surplus-value of life that is the continuing life of the process with the monetary surplus-value spun off from it, so that the outside exchange-value of Occurrency both within the ecology of alter-economic spaces and (through Gravity) on the general cryptocurrency market would be perceived as an effective “pricing” of the “underlying asset”—which is, paradoxically, the very project of producing the incommensurable. The overall strategy would be to make the process an effective paradox (playing creative duplicity to the hilt).

Fact. The SenseLab (www.senselab.ca) has been working on just such a project since early 2016, in collaboration with the developer of Space and Gravity, the Economic Space Agency (ECSA). The creative-process engine is called the Three Ecologies Process Seed Bank (named after the book by Félix Guattari; 2014). The offline events will power an alter-university project called the Three Ecologies Institute. Like the SenseLab, the 3E Institute will operate at the intersection of art, philosophy, and activism. Its aim is to evolve collaborative techniques of relation for the collective valorization of forces of primary resistance. Its only product is the process of emergent collectivity. The ideas contained in this manifesto were developed through this project, in dialogue with a network of alter-economic thinkers in and around the Economic Space Agency. The orientation of the concepts, and in many cases their content, has been strongly in-formed by the collective making-thinking process of the SenseLab and would not have been possible without it. This particular articulation is just one among many churning in the creative cauldron of the ongoing 3E project. It does not represent a consensus (just one proposed suite of attractors) and will undoubtedly change significantly through the evolution of the collective process. Much will depend on whether the speculative adventure of inventing digital techniques for numerically expressing the play of qualitative differentials in the way just described pans out, and on the creation of a functioning affect-o-meter associated with those techniques. Much will also depend on how successful initiatives like ECSA and Holochain (with which the SenseLab is also collaborating exploratorily) prove to be in their speculative adventure of reinventing the blockchain and smart contracts without slipping past creative duplicity toward financial capital into creative process–destroying compromise. The SenseLab is maintaining a certain processual autonomy in relation to specific platforms by prototyping offline analogue versions of all of the qualitative-relational operators that would compose its proposed digital platform. In fact, the digital operators are modeled to begin with on analogue strategies experimented with throughout the SenseLab’s fifteen-year history (Manning and Massumi 2014, 83–151). This builds in a margin of play in the form of platform-independence, and militates against code-fundamentalism (“code is law”) or techno-utopianism. Crypto-failure could still topologically morph into Three Ecologies success. This is not a technological project; it is a life project.

T96

Although there is no room for purism, given the reality of complicity and the need for creative duplicity, it is crucial, in order to maintain course toward the postcapitalist future, to make room for an extremist or maximalist tendency—a limit-case attractor set that is not afraid to engage with the processual mutation that is financial capital and grapple with its new technological crypto-avatars, while implementing, in as intense and comprehensive a way as possible, strategies for warding off the unwanted return of market functions, prefiguring to the greatest extent presently possible a postcapitalist future.

SCHOLIUM. The account presented here is intentionally extremist in its insistence on keeping the traditional definition of money and the individualist presuppositions of liberalism and libertarianism out of the heart of the alter-economization process by exploiting the two-sidedness of intensive magnitude. The membrane segregates the unitization/monetization necessary for interfacing with the dominant economy from the mode of operation of the creative-process engine in its own right. This is designed to shelter the purely qualitative economy growing in the tendentially postcapitalist pore of the field of life constituted by the project from creeping capitalist recolonization, while enabling it to indulge in life-sustaining practices of creative duplicity. The maximalist orientation of the present account is not meant to serve as a model. This would return to normative regulation. Rather, it is meant as a lure encouraging alter-economic experimentations to stretch their tending over the capitalist horizon toward vistas that are not yet in view, and can barely as yet be thought possible. Its function is to serve as a tensor to the postcapitalist beyond: a kind of probe-head to the future-impossible. The whole notion of running an actual economy on affective intensities affirmed purely for their qualitative surplus-value of life may well prove impossible. There is a palpable edge of madness to it. But if the oft-repeated phrase that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism captures our contemporary condition, then a touch of madness and concerted lure to the impossible is exactly what is needed if the end of the world is to be avoided—and the way we are going, it is looking likely that the end of the world will coincide with the end of capitalism, through capitalism’s own madness: its predicating its process on endless growth (which is how it figures the future-impossible that it destructively takes as its lure). The creative process engine envisioned here would not judge or oppose alter-economic spaces negotiating their creative duplicity differently, even in ways that reintroduce certain market features (such as tokens). It would enter into an ecology of practices with them. Cohabiting a symbiotic environment with them, it would act, by its very presence in their midst, as an ongoing anarcho-communist propaganda of the deed. Neither would it demand purism of the individuals participating in the project. No one would have to be “all in.” Straddling economic domains would be the rule. Ecologically speaking, a complex field of intertwined alter-economies of different kinds (sharing economies, gift economies, local currencies, collectivist intentional communities, etc.) would be the most robust. While the various pores grew and combined to form a complex, expanding, prefiguratively postcapitalist field, angles of continued participation in the dominant capitalist economy would likely be a necessity of survival for most participants. The alter-economic approach itself would enter into an ecology of practices with anticapitalist political movements choosing other grounds of action. Movements privileging the micropolitical (Massumi 2015b, 47–82) would be most symbiosis-friendly. Strategic forays into macropolitical interventions—approaches that are demands-oriented rather than prefigurative-process-oriented, and prescriptive/programmatic rather than affective/intensive—would not be shied away from on principle. Most of all, direct-action tactics of refusal, blockage, and breakage would remain an essential ingredient, bolstering and defending movements of primary resistance. There would be no hard-and-fast principles, no top-down directive strategies. Pragmatism, with a view to the concertation of potentially confluent but irreducibly singular self-affirming movements, would be the order of the day—on the condition that it remained overall a speculative pragmatism tensoring toward the invention of a postcapitalist future. Different species of activism and intervention would cohabit an ecology of alter-powers, supported by a growing culture, fertilized by a relational ethos. The ideal: not purity, but creative duplicity, most ecological. Duplicity creatively practiced, not as an end in itself but as an impetus toward its own obsolescence, in approach to a global tipping point: a process-wide “turnaround” point performing the etymological meaning of revolution.

T97

The madness of basing an actual economy on affective intensities is not entirely without precedent (and may not be so mad as that).

SCHOLIUM. As discussed earlier, the financial markets, which have taken over the pilot function of the capitalist economy, run more on affect and intensification than on underlying economic “fundamentals” (T11 Schol. a; T46 Schol. b). In a sense, the alter-economic strategies advocated here are taking the most advanced sectors of the neoliberal capitalist economy not at their word (which is ambiguated by lip-service to outmoded classical-liberal economic rhetoric) but at what they do at their furthest processual reach: their own propaganda of the deed. If the financial markets can levitate themselves using affective intensities as the engine of their process, why couldn’t another kind of economy similarly bootstrap itself? One that does not just run on affective intensities but affirms them purely for the surplus-value of life they yield. One that refrains from brutally subsuming them under the profit-hungry quantification mechanisms driving capitalist accumulation. One that economizes alter-wise.

T98

If the revaluation of values expresses itself in an aesthetics of value-embodying creative adventure, it has to embrace beauty—while divesting it of its connotations of harmony.

SCHOLIUM. In the aesthetics of value, beauty would be a pure-quality word for an actualized quantum of value. As value-word, it would displace the profit-word. It would be the abstract figure of surplus-value of life. Adventure is the way beauty outdoes itself, in self-driving processual turnover. Thought of in tandem with the dynamic of adventure, beauty does not privilege the steady-state notion of harmony. Based on a play of qualitative differentials—irreducible contrasts whose tensions activate incommensurable tendencies—this kind of beauty would involve an unabstractable element of discord (Whitehead 1967, 257, 259–60, 266, 282–83). Traces of zest, adventure, and wonder troubling its pure quality would keep beauty processually honest. In the processual vitality they make felt, discord would be palpable. Dissensus—the unerasability of qualitative differentials and the incommensurability of co-motional tendencies—would be affirmed. A certain off-balancedness would accompany the process. It, also, would be affirmed. This would prevent a systemic self-satisfaction (reproduction) or structural entropy (stasis; anaesthesia) from setting in. Politically, the trick would be to prevent this constitutive imbalance from running the process aground. The process would have to be so conditioned as to metabolize dissensus, fusing its co-motion of tendencies into an iterative rhythm of creative advance, integrally expressing itself, in drop after drop of surplus-valued experience. The trick would be to make incommensurables compossible. This is precisely what an ecology does.

T99

Speaking processually, as well as ethico-aesthetically, the transition to a postcapitalist future is best achieved nonviolently.

SCHOLIUM A. Becoming-reactive is the epitome of ugliness—and violence breeds reaction. Violence is dissensual in a curtailing and destructive way, rather than creatively and metabolically. Discord as a processual virtue associated with beauty is mutually intensifying, not eliminative or limitative. If violence is used, it must first be converted into an affirmative force (Deleuze 1983, 70). The only thing to be eliminated is the becoming-reactive of forces.

SCHOLIUM B. Given the perhaps insurmountable difficulty of employing violence affirmatively, the revaluation of values would remain as tendentially nonviolent as possible. That means that nonviolence is practiced not on principle as a personally ascribed-to moral imperative, but pragmatically as a transindividually enacted processual virtue.