::fibreculture:: Masterclasses: Hacking Finance Capital and Digital Ethnography

[Ned Rossiter]

Digital Infrastructures and Economy Masterclasses
Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
http://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/home
3 November 2015
Venue: EB3.17 Parramatta South

10.30-12.30 – Tomás Ariztía, ‘Researching Knowledge Making Practices in 
Market Settings: From Creative Spaces to Digital Infrastructures’

Register for this masterclass at:
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/masterclass-with-tomas-ariztia-tickets-19245340331
http://tinyurl.com/o4sbtoh

2-4pm – Akseli Virtanen, ‘Finance as a Place of Creation: Hacking 
Finance Capital with Parasitical Algorithms’

Register for this masterclass at:
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/masterclass-with-akseli-virtanen-tickets-19245415556
http://tinyurl.com/qeb3qst

Summaries

Tomás Ariztía, Universidad Diego Portales

‘Researching Knowledge Making Practices in Market Settings: From 
Creative Spaces to Digital Infrastructures’

This seminar focuses on discussing some methodological issues regarding 
doing fieldwork in knowledge spaces in markets. In particular, the 
seminar will present and discuss some of the strategies and devices I 
have used in order to deal with challenges that distributed knowledge 
practices and devices posit to an ethnographic approach. The first part 
of the seminar will consider a 30-40 minutes presentation of some of the 
research I have done on knowledge practices (with emphasis on my latter 
project on data mining/transactional data practices). This will be 
followed by an open discussion in terms of how to design, think and do 
fieldwork for researching knowledge in the digital age.

Tomás Ariztía is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology at 
Diego Portales University, Chile. His research is concerned with 
Consumption Studies – particularly Social Studies of Marketing, 
Sustainable Consumption and energy – and Sociology of knowledge. He is 
particularly interested on how consumers are mobilized in marketing 
knowledge practices. He has conducted fieldwork in advertising agencies 
and marketing departments and is currently involved in a three year 
research project focused on comparing Big Data, Design Thinking and 
Market Research as different knowledge grammars through which social 
entities are enacted in markets. Recently he edited the book Produciendo 
lo social: usos de las ciencias sociales en el Chile reciente (Ediciones 
UDP, 2012), which explored the connections between social sciences and 
the production of social 
worlds.http://www.icso.cl/investigadores/tomas-ariztia-larrain/

Akseli Virtanen, Robin Hood Minor Asset Management Cooperative

‘Finance as a Place of Creation: Hacking Finance Capital with 
Parasitical Algorithms’

Robin Hood Asset Management Cooperative is an experiment in the creation 
of new social and economic forms. It is an algorithmic hedge fund 
synthetically imitating the emerging conventions of the financial 
oligarchy at the U.S. stock market, assembled as a cooperative, and 
operating programs of common equity and protection of the common. In 
this workshop we try to open up some of the background thinking, some of 
the things we have learned, the dead ends we have met, and why it has 
become necessary for Robin Hood to now take on a new and more monstrous 
form – as a financial platform of the future. Finance is a place of 
creation. What new possibilities does appropriating and reengineering 
financial technologies together with the organizational possibilities of 
blockchain technology offer for today’s workers, makers, co-creators, 
peers, crowds becoming new kind of economic operators?

Akseli Virtanen is a theorist of new political economy, born in Finland 
and currently based in Santa Cruz, California. He is a co-founder of 
Robin Hood Asset Management Cooperative, an activist hedge fund, 
currently in the process of taking on a new more monstrous form as a 
financial platform of the future. Akseli’s recent books include 
Arbitrary Power: A Contribution Towards a Critique of Biopolitical 
Economy (n-1 Edições, forthcoming 2015). http://www.robinhoodcoop.org/