DisCO DNA 4: Open Value Accounting and Radical Distributed Tech
Accounting has historically been a driver of technology, written communication and math. Put simply, the usage of technology for accounting can either reinforce the social standing and capacity to act (and oppress) for those with the most power, or it can serve to help allocate resources in fair and sustainable ways. DisCO's interest (obviously!) lies in the latter. How can we make use of secure and distributed accounting systems that reflect invisible labour and carework, as well as nature's capacity for regeneration? What data do we want to base our economic decisions on, and when are numbers simply not sufficient to account for certain things?
The fourth stand of the DisCO DNA builds on the previous three. It helps us to design and build tools and methods that ease the communication and practice of new economic paradigms for a just transition away from capitalism, colonialism and patriarchal oppression towards a kinder, more caring and, ultimately, realistically sustainable society.
Overview
Back in 2018 when we wrote the DisCO Manifesto, the DisCO DNA was composed of Commons and P2P, Open Cooperativism, Feminist Economics and Open Value Accounting. The latter was probably the most obscure of the strands with only a few projects self-identifying as such.
Simply put, OVA is a form of accounting where contributions to a common project are documented. The contributions can be measured in whichever way makes the most sense to the group, hours, wordcount, lines of code, results, etc. These are subsequently analyzed to identify distributions of labor and effort which, in turn, influences income. This base idea is essential for DisCO Governance with the caveat that, unlike any other OVA-based project, we added care and reproductive work to the mix.
In the years since we've expanded the definition to include the DisCO-coined term "Radical Distributed Tech". Radical Distributed Tech is our politicized refinement of many ideas floating around decentralized technologies. It basically describes technologies designed and developed from anticapitalist, decolonial and intersectional feminist positions and where power and connectivity are sensibly distributed. We merged Open Value Accounting and Radical Distributed Term into the revised DisCO DNA to highlight how technology, in the broadest sense of the term, has influenced accounting, economic purviews and distributions of power. Likewise, the development of accounting has been key in the development of many technologies (for better of worse!). Together this lets us envision accounting methods technologies fit for distributed, cooperative economies that take into account productive and reproductive labor and highlight the balance between extraction and restoration in our relation with the environments that ultimately sustain all economic activity.