Cephalopod Dreams Alter-Economies Event

In the second week of November, as autumn yielded to the coming winter, 3E held a 3-day gathering on money and alter-economies. The weekend was planned as an intensive study session around a selection of four texts. In addition to a chapter on gift economies by David Graeber and an essay on racial capitalism by Jodi Melamed, 15 in-person and 30 online participants read and discussed texts coming out of the SenseLab’s years-long experiments with alter-economies. The aim was to restart discussions on decentralized finance, alternative notions of value, and collective decision-making related to these as 3E moves across a threshold into a new phase. The major part of the 3E land, including the residency cabin, the maple forest and maple syrup production facility, and the greenhouse will finally be legally transferred to collective ownership in the first few months of the new year, officially transforming it into a commons. The guest house (“131”) will not yet be part of this transfer because of the complication that it still carries a mortgage. In the meantime, its management will be contractually entrusted to the 3E non-profit. The discussions touched on theoretical issues about the nature of money and the ideological assumptions underpinning market economies, as well as more pragmatic questions. The latter often revolved around the notion of “creative duplicity”: how to navigate relationships with banks, foundations, non-profit status and other legal frameworks while safeguarding an autonomous zone for collective experimentation in self-organization free to evolve its own cooperative methods and non-transactional ethos. Participants came out of the event energized to continue these explorations as the project moves closer to its 3-ecological goal of “giving the land back to itself.”