Our traditional, seemingly natural ways of thinking about property are in crisis. Dark Matter Labs wants us to experiment, widely and wildly
A cross-post from the endlessly inventive Dark Matter Labs, launching their “Property and Beyond” Lab.
Crisis and/of Property
The concept of property is deeply embedded in our modern socio-economic systems.
So much so that it is often viewed as sacrosanct, a near-natural law-like means to distribute agency, power, and freedom. A means of breaking away from the dominance of the few, as well as old empires.
Yet, property has at the same time been part of a pathway of dispossession, violence, environmental degradation and the exclusion of vast and growing numbers of people.
Where property once seemed immutable, the ground is shifting—for better or worse. Property has been an information-processing and structuring mechanism through which we have governed our world, by means of abstraction, simplification, and dominion-over.
Faced with today’s unprecedented complexity and entanglement of risks, externalities, and value creation, this “property theory of governance” is falling short.
Indeed, the very paradigms underpinning our property institutions have become difficult to think with, technically, materially and ethically:
Objectification: The existing paradigm of objectification of land, nature, labour and information has obscured our intrinsic interdependence
Extraction: The detachment of property rights from embodied responsibilities of stewardship has caused negative externalities in our systems
Centralization: The optimization of abstract, exclusive rights has led to growing concentration of means of production, and the benefits derived from them
Control: Top-down regulations have failed to manage complex conceptual systems of value creation and extraction, and their externalities and impacts
Interestingly, the structural failure of existing property systems to respond adequately to many of our critical contemporary challenges — be it the housing crisis, COVID-19, or Generative AI — is opening up windows of opportunity for large-scale transformation.
What is emerging is a new theory of change. Increasing and cascading crises of various forms will have profound and tragic effects. But these crises will also create conditions to open up new imaginative and political space for alternative approaches.
Preparing for these moments, and developing proactive strategies, is critical.
Launching Property & Beyond Lab
That’s why at Dark Matter Labs we are launching Property & Beyond Lab: a new part of our ecosystem focused on developing the building blocks for futures of property and ownership.
Property & Beyond Lab aims to build a diverse and proactive portfolio of alternative forms of property, from collective ownership of land to self-owning houses, land, and cameras.
Some of the questions we’re exploring:
How might new conceptions of property reflect and embed a more entangled notion of the human?
How might we move beyond control-oriented mechanisms towards ennobling systems? How do we leverage distributed protocols that recognize complexity, and respond to contextual needs and nuance?
How might we move from commoning externalities [we’d appreciate someone’s clarification on this concept, Ed] towards outcome-based governance and long-term guardianship?
How might we move beyond centralization towards distributed and peer-to-peer permissioning, verification and accountability systems?
How might we braid alternative paradigms such as Indigenous governance and rights-of-nature with property institutions?
How might we create the enabling infrastructures that allow for alternative property mechanisms to be financed and adopted at scale?
Our portfolio
To help us prepare for deepening and emerging crises, we need to delve deeper into the multifaceted challenges of property and build shared understanding and urgency.
We are therefore launching a digital tool (see grab above) that maps critical global risks and their interplay with property and ownership.
It serves as a sensemaking mechanism to anticipate and respond to crises at a system level. It can identify potential solutions, lead environments, and coalitions, demonstrating different futures of property.
To demonstrate alternative property futures are in fact possible, we are also developing real-world applications of new institutional capabilities with Proofs of Possibility. These Proofs of Possibility simultaneously serve to strategically develop, test, and implement new critical capabilities and to present a compelling vision of what is possible.
FreeLand: We are working towards realizing self-owning land with the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, recognizing land as having agency and braiding Indigenous governance and self-determination with Canadian common law in an urban context.
FreeHouse: We are exploring a future where homes are not just assets to own but are self-managing entities that contribute to the community and environment. This approach challenges traditional views of ownership by promoting stewardship, shared benefits, and a shift away from centralized control.
FreeSense: We are imagining a new model of public sensing infrastructure and data governance, exploring the generative potential of data for public use, and how data as a civic asset can be governed without centralized control, and sustained without commercial exploitation.
The invitation
Property & Beyond Lab is an invitation to reshape one of the most critical of our societies’ deep codes. As property’s conceptual underpinnings of objectification, separation, and extraction are becoming untenable, pathways are opening up for different versions of property,
The chance is to seed new ideas about relationality, reciprocity and responsibility. This can pave the way for property to become a critical “infrastructure for the remediation and rectification of a wounded species and its wounded habitat” (Benjamin Bratton in Revenge of the Real).
Will you join us in envisioning and co-designing futures of property, ownership and beyond?
Property & Beyond Lab is currently supported by Omidyar Network and Rockefeller Foundation, and in collaboration with RadicalxChange Foundation and a Stanford University research team.
Property & Beyond Lab is a collaboration of Radicle Civics, Partners for a New Economy, and of 7GenCities and the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre.
If you are interested in getting involved, or want to learn more, get in touch via property@darkmatterlabs.org