Manifesto

If I Only had a Heart: a DisCO Manifesto

Value Sovereignty, Care Work, Commons and Distributed Cooperative Organizations

The DisCO Manifesto is a deep dive into the world of Distributed Cooperative Organizations. Over its 80 colorful pages, you will read about how DisCOs are a P2P/Commons, cooperative and Feminist Economic alternative to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (or DAOs). The DisCO Manifesto also includes some background on topics like blockchain, AI, the commons, feminism, cooperatives, cyberpunk, and more.

Download it here:

DisCO in MONO

(Black and White version with no art, for easy home printing etc) Download here.

Other format versions coming soon (EPub, html, etc).

Want to learn more before delving in? Below is a short summary of the DisCO Manifesto’s seven chapters.

CHAPTER 1: Rage Against the Machine and Science Friction

How disruptive (or not?) are technologies in social change? The DisCO Manifesto provides a critical overview of blockchain technologies, DAOs and Artificial Intelligence.

CHAPTER 2: You say Potato, I say Decentralized: Semantics Matter

What are DisCOs, compared to DAOs? Why do we advocate for “distributed” over “decentralized”, and “cooperative” over “autonomous” systems? We explore worrying trends and interests in the blockchain space, techno-determinism and AI (artificial intelligence).

CHAPTER 3: Last Night A Distributed Cooperative Organization Saved My Life

How have cooperatives and the commons provided important historical precedents for decentralised models? How does DisCO upgrade the seven cooperative principles for the 21st-century? 

CHAPTER 4: Punk Elegance: The Story of Guerrilla Translation and the Guerrilla Media Collective

DisCO isn’t theory, it emerged from the real experiences of a commons-oriented collective called Guerrilla Translation, later Guerrilla Media Collective (GMC). How does the governance model work, and does this baby scale? Spoiler: that’s not the real question. 

CHAPTER 5: Turn the Beat Around: Community Algorithmic Trusts and Care Oriented Cooperativism

Blockchain, carework, and the human/machine trust spectrum from trustless to trustworthy: our thoughts on how to build a platform that tracks value where value isn’t always recognized. Meet the DisCO CAT.

CHAPTER 6: Open-Value Co-ops for Radical Workplace Democracy

Let’s get into some revolutionary details: what would radical workplace democracy look like in a DisCO? Inclusive, educational, balanced in culture and structure. Tech enabled, not dependent. Online or offline? On-LIFE!

CHAPTER 7: The Last Dance: The Future is Unwritten

Our concept for the future of work is restoration. We believe that the DisCO framework represents a more realistic, socially positive use of the potential of distributed ledger and blockchain technologies, by explicitly including co-ops, commons, feminism, open source communities, the precariat, etc. So, where do we go from here?

More resources

To learn more you can read:

• You Say Decentralized, I Say Potato: The DisCO Manifesto is live and ready to download (Press release)
• Last Night a Distributed Cooperative Organization Saved My Life (a short overview of the DisCO Manifesto)
• Rage Against the Machine and Science Friction (Video presentation and podcast)
• The DisCO Manifesto review (In-depth review with extracts)