Stacco Troncoso on Feminism, Solidarity Economics, and the Peer-to-Peer Commons20 min read

How can technological innovation and labor be reconfigured to center care, rest, and all of our other concrete needs? We spoke to DisCO co-founder Stacco Troncoso about embedding intersectional feminism into the cooperative digital economy.

mai ishikawa sutton (MIS): How did you first become drawn to the solidarity economy, the commons, and the way they intersect with digital network infrastructures?

Stacco Troncoso (ST): You get exposed to these kinds of things depending on where you grew up and the communities that you’re surrounded by. For me, and for many people, it was a yearning. Knowing that there’s something missing. I think that everyone can sympathize with the phenomenon of bullshit jobs or ever decreasing returns in your time investment for the glorification of capital. 

During my 20s, I was really attracted to anarchist literature, but in my own experience in many cases when I went to squats and other anarchist spaces, I found them really exclusionary. The attitudes were at odds with the stuff I was reading, from Kropotkin about animals and humans thriving through cooperation and mutual aid. For me, all of this coalesced around the time of the Occupy movement and 15-M, which is the Spanish equivalent, maybe even predecessor to Occupy. There was a real sense of power. When we think about temporary autonomous zones — well, that was an autonomous zone that persisted in time, that had a lot of media visibility. And it was also a very transatlantic phenomenon. And you know, there was this continuity, from the Arab Spring to 15-M to Occupy. 

Then I found myself and my partner, Ann Marie Utratel, working with people from the library of 15-M in Spain, connecting with the folks in the library at Zuccotti in New York. I had been at that point a professional translator for 15 years. So to me, the obvious thing was this linguistic disconnect here. It made me question and wonder how I could contribute to the movement beyond just putting my body in a tent, and holding off the cops in the square. What other things can we do with the experiences that I’ve acquired without having the need to sell my labor for the capitalist market?

So we started translating stuff. This led to a complete dissatisfaction in keeping our corporate day jobs that we had. We thought, “We have to do something that allows us to sustain ourselves while we contribute to the movement.” Because we’re getting old and we can’t put in so many hours without activist burnout. So that became Guerilla Translation. It was conceived as a way to put as many ideas from Occupy, 15-M, the literature, and the conversations that we’re hearing, into an actual collective that lets us do our activist translations of the texts that we think are important for the movement. We wanted to be able to share trans-linguistically and make a living from it. 

So out of that, we developed an economic model. This exposed us to a lot of stuff going on in the peer-to-peer (P2P), commons movement – both in terms of technology, but also in terms of relationality. So we just incorporated more and more ideas. This developed into a sort of collage of how we could make this work, not from theory, but from something that actually has a legal form. An entity that’s able to invoice and offer goods and services within the marketplace, while also being quite subversive. 

Guerilla Translation was a really good testing ground. As it says in the name, it does translation – that’s really easy to conceptualize. And sure, you can be translating for the bank or for the corporation, or you can be translating revolutionary texts that may or may have a great effect. There’s a power to it. So it was good to shift our power from contributing to capital to contributing to the causes that were in line with our ideals. 

Then we figured out that this worked really well. We wondered how we could take the learnings from Guerilla, which again, was a practical project where we were bringing lots of theory into practice, and derive some new theory that could lead to further practice away from Guerilla. 

That was DisCO, which stands for distributed co-operative organizations. It’s kind of like a greatest hits of alternative economics in a way that we think is legible in these apocalyptic, weird, hurtful, inspiring, no-one-knows-what-the-fuck-is-going-on times. So we’ve tried to make DisCO vibe with the spirit of it, then offer tools for people to create organizations which in their essence are anti-capitalist, decolonial and intersectional feminist – because I think that’s what we need more of all over the world.

MIS: You started to touch on this but I’d like you to elaborate on the ways your translation work fed into your praxis. How did you create this collective project that you could make a living off of, but also embody your values through that work? In particular, how did the act of translating meaning across languages help you think about your approach?

ST: Translation is often this invisibilized form of labor that actually yields a lot of subtle power. When you work prioritizing care, you care about whoever’s reading and you care about the authors. 

If I’m translating Donna Haraway, I think, “If Donna Haraway was fluent in Spanish, how would she express this?” But it gets into those intricacies. For the translator, it’s the greatest educational process. We’re post-credentialist. We didn’t finish college, we’re dropouts, yet we ended up working in political economy. 

I think it’s necessary for those who are not credited and entitled by the system to offer our perspectives. Translation is the best education that you can find, because you have to pour over every meaning of the word. You have to make sure that you’re conveying the animating logic in a way that is true to what’s being expressed. That inevitably leads to new ideas. So it’s studying text with a magnifying glass. The process of having to write them in another language is like active studying. It’s really involved.

For us that was like a turbo charged process of learning, because we were practicing what we were translating. Just by the act of translating, instead of passively reading, we were both really learning it and feeding into it. So yeah, it was quite a magical, unexpected process of gestation of what then became DisCO.

And it continues to this day. While Ann Marie and I are not an active part of Guerrilla Translation anymore, we’re like close cousins. This also made us happy, that it could just progress on its own while we went on to take care of DisCO.

MIS: What in your experience is something that is often idealized about cooperatives? What’s glossed over when people talk about cooperatives, that people don’t discuss as much when talking about what it means to share power, to create participatory, inclusive democratic organizations? What are the opportunities in exploring those challenges?

ST: There’s a lot of idealism in cooperatives. In my experience, and the experience of many people in co-ops that we’ve spoken to, is that you arrive there and you have no idea what to do, because no one teaches you this shit. You’re not educated to be a cooperator. You’re educated to search for a hierarchy, and either be the activator of that hierarchy or take a spot in the managerial class, or be subject to it. Like someone’s always looking for the boss. 

One of the most important things with cooperatives is education. Not just education on the craft of the co-operative but actually deschooling — unlearning the values that the dominant system teaches us, so we can determine our own. We’re neurologically wired to cooperate and to support each other mutually, in the production of whatever artifacts we’ve made, and in the reproduction of our cares, our bodies, our sustenance, etc. That’s a process that cannot be skipped over. 

Another thing with co-ops is how much inclusivity they can have when membership is based on the monetary contribution that you have to enter the coop. There’s also all sorts of invisible power in co-ops where there’s long standing members, and then there’s new membership. So it may be one person, one vote, but there’s all sorts of influences and disparities that can happen over there. 

I don’t see this so much in the official literature from the ICA. They present the numbers, showing how co-ops have made so much money, etc. Which is great. I mean, it’s important to remind ourselves that they can be successful, but I think that explicitly acknowledging the nitty gritty and the difficulty of sustaining a co-op is really important. 

The other thing that we have to face is that we don’t get tax cuts. We don’t get the billions that weapons and oil industries get. This is a political issue that I think that we have to advocate for, because we’re actually doing the good work. By doing restorative or socially minded work at the source, you’re saving the state money in repairing things that normative industries break. But we don’t get any help. We don’t get many concessions compared to those economic entities that are doing active damage. 

The last thing I would say is that sometimes cooperatives can be a bit meek and a bit old fashioned. They’re revolutionary, but also want to be polite and not break things. Even when things are breaking down all over the place. Don’t be polite. Silicon Valley prides itself in its, you know, adaptation of the Schumpeterian creative destruction, embodied by the phrase, “move fast and break things.” Well, we can also break other things, like the patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism, while also taking the time to move slowly, which sometimes it’s a luxury in the current economy.

I love co-ops, but I think that co-ops need to be more explicit about their origins. My feeling is that co-ops institutionalized the logic of the commons – of being able to produce for ourselves in conjunction with our environment and according to our own rules. The co-op is a market interface that allows you to do that. But co-ops can increasingly turn managerial, and turn away from the commons. So another stated goal of DisCO is having this rekindling. 

MIS: Why is it that we can’t change so many things, even though we know they’re broken? For example, there’s plenty of evidence that many people in powerful positions of government, and even within the fossil fuel industry itself, knew that the climate crisis was coming, that industries were causing it. And yet they didn’t do anything about it. It seems like a kind of exceptionalism that’s so pervasive, preventing us from actually addressing some fundamental problems.

What do you think is missing when it comes to convincing policymakers that there are many different ways to approach things and that it’s necessary to try them? And I say this knowing that policymakers themselves tend not to be very creative thinkers, because what they excel at is seeing what is already successful and advocating for that in policy. What do you think is needed in terms of lobbying, to convince them of the potential of cooperatives and the commons?  

ST: Whether they’re cooperatives or more informal entities without a legal structure, they thrive in times of collapse and in times of social breakdown. 

My own firsthand experience was what happened in the Mediterranean zone after the 2008 crash, especially in Greece and in Spain, where there were suddenly a lot of mutual aid and autonomous projects that we’re providing for people. And sure you could go to the news and they’re talking about the risk premium or GDP and things which most people do not understand. But when you cannot go to the hospital but there’s a local clinic, you can understand that. I think that this kind of tangible experience is what lets you see that there are alternatives. 

There’s a lot more wiggle room in local legislations, and then maybe up to a point in federal legislations. But again, it’s always about making compromises with the rich with the powerful. What I think that the best argument is, is for there to be more prefigurative spaces where you’re already outperforming in certain senses. Whether it’s capitalist enterprises or systems which are not functional, we should make economic arguments for either policy to change or funding to be directed to these new projects. 

But like you say, there’s a great apathy and just a great fearful disinterest in the level of crisis that we’re facing. I think that this is why it’s so important to visibilize the alternatives. So you can offer these new approaches in moments of shock – referring to the “shock doctrine”, a term coined by Naomi Klein to refer to moments when states leverage crises to impose more and more neoliberal reforms. We’ve seen so many of these shocks, that maybe following the next one, we can actually support the projects that actually encourage organizations and projects that can be the building blocks of a more just and resilient economy.

MIS: What do you imagine can happen when we apply both the solidarity economy and commoning approach to the web and other types of network infrastructure?

ST: The first thing that comes to mind is the notion of sufficiency and the way that the web has grown to include more and more things which are unnecessary. Services that take up more bandwidth, which necessitate more servers, which then necessitates more water, more cooling and more raw materials. 

We have to ask ourselves, what do we want to share online? Sure, entertainment. Sure, information. But do we want to go down this rabbit hole which is expansionary by nature? Not because we need those online services, but because the bottom lines have to increase? So there’s this whole propaganda apparatus that will push for digital innovation, under the illusion of decoupling from material realities. But again, the more bandwidth that we need, the more information that is extracted for capital profit, and not for actual human need. This all has a very high environmental footprint that we cannot overestimate.

The other thing that I think about is that behind these tools and behind these nodes in the network, are our bodies with needs: the need to be fed, the need to receive affection, the need to have shelter, the need to express ourselves creatively. And those are the kind of things that we want to increase and not detract from. 

Another aspect of sufficiency is how much time we want to spend relating online versus relating in life and getting our hands dirty. And again, we see these wonderful cognitive capacities that we’ve evolved over hundreds of 1000s of years, which only come into play when you’re physically present with other people or surrounded by nature. So while digital technologies that are commons-based, cooperatively-owned, and are based on free libre software, can be much better and tend to consume a lot less, we shouldn’t just imitate and make a better killer app of something that’s really not worth it. 

I think it really has to be needs-based. Also be designed in a way that is not addictive, where you don’t need a way to rack up the dopamine hits to sell advertising, but in a way that frees up time. In a way that could free up time for constructive beautiful things, leisure or simply rest, because everybody’s exhausted. So I think that high tech under our terms should lead to a bit more of a low-tech vision where we’re not so dependent on devices or on imitating the high speed that capitalism demands from us.

MIS: Technology has made work so much more efficient and we’re able to produce much more than ever given the high capacity of computation. But it still feels like we can never catch up. It always feels like we’re not doing enough. Even though technology has in theory given us the ability to slow down, it just makes everything feel like it’s sped up. 

It’s connected to the climate crisis too, and like our addiction to fossil fuels and our inability to slow down and stop the current ways that we’re consuming. And as you were saying, creating a bunch of unnecessary hardware and infrastructure that seems to require us to be more addicted and ever consuming. Can you talk a bit more about how a digital commons could help us with these addictions?

ST: I always get a bit triggered by the digital commons, as if it’s exclusively digital. When I think about the “digital” I think about bits flying in the ether. Again, there are bodies, there are people, and the whole physical substrate that is really heavy. My mentors David Bollier and Silke Helfrich used to say this, that every immaterial commons carries a material commons, and every material commons carries an immaterial commons. 

The pop definition of the commons is a resource or gift governed by a user community that operates according to the rules of the community, not the rules of the state, not the rules of the market, even though those are realities that must be contended with. So when it’s our rules, then we have the freedom in designing it. We have the active participation of communities, first of all, in determining what systems we want to use, which are digital, which are analog or purely physical? How do we want to design them to maximize free time to actually increase the productivity that matters – catering for people’s needs, whether physical or emotional. 

When you speak about efficiency, I think actually that things have not become efficient; they’ve become faster. So we can cram more things in, to yield higher and higher profits, which feed into the biggest indexes of inequality that have existed in the history of this planet. There’s also this frantic alienation. I’m 48, so I remember the pre-internet world. I remember the sweet spot before Web 2.0. But then, you know, capital reinvents itself really well, because it wields the power, whether it’s researchers, intellectuals, technologies, to be able to enclose and capture innovation. 

I mean, the internet is still built on peer-to-peer protocols. But on top of those protocols, the logic of capital is the logic of lock-in, a terminology developed by Hal Varian, the chief economist in Google, around the early 2000s. 

They needed to privatize, and they needed to increase consumption. The culture of Silicon Valley and venture funding is based on promising infinite monetary returns. So to do that, you need more servers, you need more admins. So there’s been this strategy of frantic growth in areas which are totally unnecessary, instead of having a more organic exploration and reflection about what needs to be digital. We haven’t had a chance to ask ourselves what digital systems we want to have? And how can we run them as a commons? How can we make them non-alienating and inclusive to people? How can we take inputs from a wide variety of people, so we’re actually satisfying needs? 

The commons has to be as sexy as the world of proprietary, capitalist systems that are paraded before us as if they were and are free, but actually extract a lot out of us. And the commons has to be sustainable. It can’t just be volunteer projects and maintainers burning out. This leads me back to what I was saying about some of the logic of Guerrilla Translation and DisCO – you can’t just do activism on your own free time unless you’re fabulously privileged. So we need to put activism where it belongs, which is the workplace. We need to put the construction of the commons, whether digital or material, at the center of our work, and combine this with an approach that actually lets people be rewarded for that work. And, you know, have the sustainability of labor baked in. 

These are big challenges, but nonetheless, I think that there are ways to ensure that they’re being partially met. And the more examples that we have of these challenges being partially met, the more that we can make them visible. Have more people experiment with them, and then gain traction.

MIS: What do you mean when you say DisCO takes an intersectional feminist approach in creating and building commons? Could you comment on other solidarity economies and common spaces that have not made feminism explicit?

ST: The feminist aspect was something that we felt was very much missing from this euro-centric vision of the commons, which typically tends to leave it out of our practices and sensibilities. This led to a study of feminist economics around the time that we were creating DisCO. DisCO, especially our Manifesto, was an answer to the blockchain accelerationism of 2014 to 2019. We were reacting against the ridiculous claims of the DAO world, how it was so revolutionary, and how it was going to democratize economics and allow us to get away from normative systems and such. And yet for being so cutting edge, there was no mention of feminist economics anywhere. 

The DAO world has a very private priapic, patriarchal notion: if it’s quantifiable and if we can make up smart contracts, then we will design the systems for the liberation of all but especially for the profit maximization of us; “us” mostly being white people with privileged technological backgrounds. So in the DisCO Manifesto, the feminist critique is quite prominent, but grounded on the theory is the practice. The practice of both destabilizing the normalization of patriarchal structures and making visible care work and reproductive labor. Visibilizing all this, and then just putting life at the center, putting other approaches, which are not merely numerical or easily tokenized, as the heart of our value systems. 

Really it’s care work, which is a universe with slippery definitions. The one that I like comes from Joan Tronto and her co-author, Berenice Fisher, but it’s basically that “care is a species activity to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.” Care as a species activity strikes me as something that anyone can easily understand. And that can be at the heart of our economic and value systems. Value promotes the things that we want to do more of. So in neoliberal economics, value is just actualized in exchange value, the things that you can sell in the market that can grow your GDP. 

What if value is love? What if value is getting a good night’s sleep? What if value is all these more fuzzy categories? Which if we make visible, then we can take actions towards the fulfillment of that kind of value, instead of the value that is harming us?