THE ROBIN HOOD INVESTMENT FUND | 2011

The idea and operation of the Robin Hood is based on quite intense analysis of functioning of the financial economy, biopolitical economy, semiocapital and its relationship with the problem of organization (its inoperability, let’s say). We don’t think that changed nature of the organizational problematic has been understood really yet at all.
So what is it that people, the precariat, the cognitariat, the third estate, more and more people in the future at the mercy of semiocapital really need?
 
Robin Hood Fund is developed as a strategic means to challenge the existing ways of doing things, both the elite asset management and the existing options the precariat has for financing its living (debt, work and destructive competition of it, wishful thinking, marginal communities, taking over government, hoping that somebody else like the state will take care of you...). Robin is a radical organizational (and technological) innovation, a possibility of political operation of building financial out-onomy (as the italian philosopher Bifo would say) in cooperation.
 
We have run massive tests 2003-2009 and now the operation is running. And it works (in a sense just like Google was able to predict the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest). And our operating costs are ridiculously minimal compared to their traditional asset management with high end locations and leather sofas.
 But now, we would like to build a channel to socialize or out-onomize this information, to use it, to play with it, to study it...  but also build on its basis an updated version of the micro banking phenomena in India and Latin America: a possibility of micro investing for basic income, for radical project funding, of cheap loans for financing one's studies or life, in a form of an investment cooperative. Why would we not cooperate to take also charge of the work our money can make together? Minor asset management.
 We would like to now start the phase beta of the organization: the idea is that in the first experiment round, to make a point so to say, we take on 100 participants/groups each investing 1000 Euros for one year. After the year, we guarantee back to the participants the development of the S&P500 (+certain percentage e.g. 2-3 % of the profit). The spending of the rest of the possible surplus will then be decided together: we buy more shares or arrange a huge potlatch for example!
Would you be interested? To invest, and even more, to take part to the thinking of what we could develop this into?
 





workshop by :
Akseli Virtanen & Jan Ritsema