It has long been common practice to worry about ��campaign finance.�� But even since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision further unleashed dark money, that kind of finance was relatively straightforward: contributions to support the costs of campaigning. But something different is happening here: campaign financialization. The election is becoming swallowed into a far more bewildering mix of speculative financial instruments. Their purpose is not simply to funnel money into campaigning but to turn campaigns and politics into a mere asset class.

This election season, we��re not just watching the speeches, ad buys, and polls. Election junkies are also paying attention to the bets on Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based betting platform that counts Trump donor Peter Thiel as a major investor. They are following the temperamental swings of Trump Media & Technology Group stock��the holding company for the former president��s Truth Social platform. They may even be following the prices of Trump-branded sneakers, bibles, and NFTs. Trump��s family now has its own ��decentralized finance�� platform in the works, World Liberty Financial, turning them from mere market participants to market-makers.

Something is also changing with the practice of polling and organizing. Partisan polls are aiming less to produce truthful assessments of the electorate than headlines that will seed future declines in institutional trust. Trump-aligned mobilization efforts seem less focused on getting out the vote than producing expectations about what should happen that could set the stage for delegitimizing a loss. Those predictions have the power to remake reality.

We already know how financialization turns human lives into data points and game pieces. This is how Wall Street��s inventiveness meant millions of people losing their homes in the 2008 financial crisis. This is how pandemic-era shortages made the richest billionaires richer.

Watching the lead-up to the election has left me with a case of deja vu. For the past decade, I have been studying the development of governance practices in the realm of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. There, the reigning political ideology goes by the name of ��cryptoeconomics��: the belief that a combination of digital cryptography and economic incentives can produce more trustworthy institutions than relying on human judgment or political ideology. Through ever more intricate financial techniques, carried out across unregulated digital networks, self-interested speculators are supposed to produce worthwhile public goods. As a common slogan in this subculture goes, ��The casino bootstraps the infra[structure].��

This is not such a new idea, really. Back in the 1990s, a pair of Brits diagnosed the strange ��Californian ideology�� coming out of Silicon Valley, which sought to discard the messiness of partisan politics with the alleged efficiency of technology and markets. But even while many Big Tech companies have finally invested heavily in Washington politicking, blockchains have given the Californian ideology a new lease on life.

Using cryptoeconomics, people have designed a mirror world of institutions based on cryptoeconomics in place of professionalism, democracy, or mutual trust. Blockchain-based organizations use tradeable tokens to vote on decisions large and small��relying on economics, not legal enforcement, to orchestrate decision making. Blockchain-based courts attempt to resolve disputes with juries who act not out of public duty or virtue but out of economic self-interest. The same logic of a prediction market like Polymarket is used throughout these systems. Betting on future outcomes, and shaping those outcomes through betting, is the replacement for good citizenship.

I have been fascinated by these experiments, and I came to be convinces that they have some virtues. Cryptoeconomics has produced innovative new methods for voting and forming Internet-native organizations. Some of these techniques could contribute to making future institutions more accountable, responsive, and trustworthy. Prediction markets, properly designed, could help produce better policy by focusing decisions more on evidence than ideology. But soon I began warning the crypto community that relying too much on cryptoeconomics presented a profound danger to good governance, limiting the scope of people��s motivation and enabling a race to the bottom. One of the leading acolytes of cryptoeconomics, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, came around and agreed.

This is because, over the years, the perils of financialization have played out in practice in crypto-world. The ecosystem is full of startups peddling complex financial tricks, but very little gets invested in solving real problems for people outside of finance. I have known a lot of well-meaning people in the blockchain community who genuinely want and work toward the common good. But they get drowned out by the speculators. Many retail participants who were sold on the idea of decentralization and economic freedom got burned by scams and grift.

The past decade of financialization in crypto has lessons for the prospect of campaign financialization in politics. When you put speculation in charge, it consumes all other interests. There is no invisible hand that makes it work toward the common good��at least not without strong regulation to set rules and goals. The more you let financialization run amok, the more you end up with a nihilistic culture that values nothing more than the next chance for a bit of upside.

Among all the risks that this election poses to democracy, the slide into financialization seems to be creeping in undetected. In some respects it is ancient; speculation on the future has long been part of political life, going back to ancient Chinese divination with bones and the oracle of Delphi in Greece. But digital networks and financial techniques run the risk of supercharging this old temptation, to the point of washing away what is left of democracy.

In an article such as this, it would be customary at this point to suggest reforms to correct for the situation I have identified. But given the unwillingness of the political class to equip itself for even the last war of campaign finance, I have little confidence that such suggestions would do much good.

From what I can tell, however, only one side in this election has massively invested in campaign financialization. The other seems to be clinging to the notion that politics is still about campaigning, persuasion, and identifying a shared sense of the common good. When political discourse is just an asset class, it becomes easier for wealthy, charismatic figures to accumulate it for themselves. A vote for Donald Trump, among other things, is a vote for the speculative casino as the engine of our political future.

The underlying idea for me is that I like to keep a clear desk. In my office, for instance, I keep the desk where I meet with students empty, except for a few intentional symbolic objects on the side. I do this to express to students that they have my complete attention��and to help me give that attention. During the meeting, we might put things on the desk as we discuss them. But at the end, I make sure those things are gone so the desk is clear for the next student.

The clear desk is also how I approach screens. I try to set up digital spaces in ways that encourage focus. I am still somewhat distractable, but within a range I am willing to tolerate. The more I hear from others about their digital lives, or see from glancing over shoulders at their screens, the odder these practices seem.

Keep the desktop empty. Just like their physical counterparts, computer desktops are useful places to put things. But they are not for storage, they are for active work. I use my desktop a lot to keep files, but only during a given work session. At the end of the session, all those files need to be deleted or put somewhere else. To help me do this, I use beautiful desktop backgrounds from NASA��s Astronomy Picture of the Day; the pleasure of seeing unobstructed images of the cosmos is more than enough motivation for me to clear out pesky icons. On my phone, I keep only my most often-used apps on the home screen.

One screen, one task per workspace. I do use an external monitor for work (laptop screens are hard on posture), but I try to get the smallest one on the market. No multiple-monitor setups. But I do have multiple virtual workspaces that are easy to switch between. On each workspace, only one task is allowed. This might mean multiple windows��say, a paper draft and an outline��but they are neatly organized using a tiling window manager. No windows piled on top of each other. Each window opens in full screen, or close to it, by default. If I want to change tasks, I have to change workspaces.

Big text. Compared to what I see on most other people��s screens, I use pretty big text��several points larger than the default on everything. Big text is easier when you have only one thing on a given screen. It also reduces the amount of potentially distracting stuff that can fit on the screen. And bigger text means you don��t have to lean into the screen as much, which is good for posture. I have lots of opinions about fonts and choose them carefully. But that��s another post, and my choices change every few years. Size stays consistent.

Minimal notifications. When watching other scholars�� slideshows, it is pretty shocking to see how many notifications it has become normal to let in. I always turn off all notifications on desktop, especially super distracting ones like email. On mobile I allow text message notifications but that��s about it. Especially for communication channels and social media, I want to have to consciously decide to see them, not have them pushed at me. For random apps that might have important messages, I have them send notifications to email and find them there.

Remove the dock. I��ve never understood docks (like the one found on MacOS). A dock takes up a bunch of screen space with distracting corporate icons, reminding you of all the other apps you could be using, and everything it does can be done another way. Learn your keyboard shortcuts.

Tab zero. Modern browsers have become at keeping vast collections of tabs open. But that doesn��t mean you have to fall for it. I might open as many as a dozen tabs in a session, sometimes in two side-by-side windows. I also use Firefox Containers to isolate tab cookies for different platforms. But at the end of a session, I shut down all the windows and all the tabs. I don��t restore unless there was a crash. If something is important, you can find it again from the history by typing keywords from the title in the search bar. I also use a plugin to clear the history that is more than six months old, because who cares.

Inbox zero. I too have read all the things about how you shouldn��t pressure yourself to be Inbox Zero. But I can��t imagine the stress of an inbox with thousands of messages, or whatever everyone does these days. This isn��t to say zero always means zero; I usually end an email session with between zero and ten messages in my inbox. I quickly delete or archive what isn��t important before looking at it, and I take the time to unsubscribe, because it is worth it. For any important email, I try to either reply quickly or shift it to my to-do list��a simple text file ranked in order of urgency��or my calendar. I should be better at this, but I try to close my email client (Thunderbird) when I am doing anything other than email.

Shut everything down after a session. When I am done with my computer, I close down the programs, or only keep open some bare basics like my to-do list. That way, when I start up again, I can open only what I need for that task.

Use open-source, noncommercial tools wherever possible. I don��t like my desk cluttered with corporate logos. That is a personal preference. But open and noncommercial tools also tend to be less distracting, since they��re less likely trying to sell you something. I also enjoy seeking out community-centered alternatives. My favorite operating system lately is Pop!_OS, made by my local computer manufacturer System76. On mobile I use e/OS, which runs Android apps but doesn��t spy on you.

Don��t bring a phone to bed. Like most people, I am super susceptible to distraction by phone. I used to lose a lot of sleep from noticing a triggering email or text while trying to doze off. So at night, now, I keep my phone in a separate room, charging for the next day. By my bed I keep an old tablet, which has apps only for reading and note-taking, plus a browser not linked to the other devices. No email, no social media, no calendars. The BlitzMail app is an easy way to send a quick note-to-self for tomorrow.

I don��t know if any of this is of use, but these habits have been really helpful for me. I hope they provide at least a bit of amusement, or perhaps some horror.

Minus the drones and shady foreigners, that was what happened on December 30 in Boulder County, where I live. I drove my family the long way home around the smoke, rushing from an aborted vacation to gather some things in case the hurricane-force winds turned the fires northward. We meanwhile checked with friends in the evacuation zones, and some would lose everything. From the air or the ground, the scene looked like what we habitually see from abroad: a burning warzone, a dense cityscape dotted with infernos.

The morning after, when the governor and other officials spoke, they danced around the causes. Maybe it was a power line downed by the wind, but they won��t rule anything out. They noted the so-far snowless winter. Wind, dryness, tragedy. Of course, they thanked the first responders. (Seriously, thank you.) But the politicians studiously avoided what might seem like ��politicizing�� the situation. It��s too early.

What if the drone part were real, though? Would there be any hesitation in saying that we know who is responsible, and we will act, and they will pay? To not name the cause in that situation would be an insult to the innocents who suffered.

The past months have been terrifying to anyone paying attention here. No snow. This is Colorado. Snow normally starts in October. It has been sweater weather since the slow end of summer. The reservoirs have been drying up. More glaciers melted. Pleasant, really, but wrong. It is, simply and precisely, what scientists have warned for decades would happen because of human-induced climate change. That, more than any downed power line or stray spark or arson, is what caused fires to tear through a heavily populated suburb on Thursday. The important cause is clear.

My neighbors lost homes, as so many millions of climate refugees worldwide have before, because our political and economic institutions have failed to respond to a crisis they have long known was coming. Just this month, again, Congress failed to pass even an inadequate piece of climate legislation. Real conspiracies of powerful people exist to ensure inaction persists, because it is profitable. Some are even foreign, though the greatest failure of leadership is right here in the United States. Our democracy, such as it is, has failed this most basic test. That is why Boulder County, along with so many other homes in so many places, burned: the refusal to care for our common home.

Why can��t we name the cause? It is always harder when the cause is partly us. Really, it is mostly not us; most Americans would love to see strong climate action. The challenge, though, is metaphysical as well as political.

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle famously describes ��four causes����four different, often simultaneous, ways of understanding what makes things happen. The easiest kind to grasp is the ��efficient�� cause: the drone pilots, willfully dropping bombs. But no less relevant are the other kinds. The pilots’ ultimate, conspiratorial objective is the ��final�� cause; the plan the pilots followed is the ��formal�� cause; the napalm in the bombs is the ��material�� cause.

Some causes are more responsible than others. Few will blame the napalm more than the people who used it. The plan on a piece of paper can��t be blamed. The participants�� eventual objective may even seem noble, even if the tactics are repugnant.

In Colorado, what is speakable today is the material cause (the wind and kindling); perhaps, they say, there is an efficient cause (some arsonist), but likely not. Neither of these are as important as the formal and final causes: the changing climate and the economic order that our institutions have privileged above stewardship. Without those causes, a fire like this would be far, far less likely to occur. In their politic, not-finger-pointy sort of way, the authorities say this already:

Why would we so unhesitatingly point fingers at the foreign drones but not at the agents of climate change? Why is it too early to say what must be said? The most important facts in this case are already on hand. There should be no hesitation.

The fires still smoldering in my community are the result of an attack. The causes are human, regardless of how the first spark lit. They must be named and confronted, if we are ever to have a democracy capable of meeting its most basic responsibilities of protection and accountability. As January 6 approaches again, we’ll see a lot about that kind of threat to democracy. But December 30 insists that democracy as we know it has failed already and did so long before the mob.

Surely no oil executive or corrupt politician outright wanted to burn my county. I can only hope they are saddened like the rest of us. But it is not playing politics to recognize that causes are still causes even when they are not caused in that specific way. We already know the cause that matters.

When I discovered that the hardware company my grandfather ran at the end of his career was a cooperative, my uncle sent me an email with a single image: the New York Times photo of President-elect Donald Trump marching through the Carrier factory, flanked by Mike Pence, executives, and, in the distance, workers. This was the mental image he had of his father��s business milieu, co-op or not: a world whose sole protagonists were White men, acting tough and doing stuff.

My grandfather��s co-op was far from the only one that looks like this. This is what I��ve seen, by and large, in rooms populated by leaders of the major credit unions, electric co-ops, and purchasing co-ops. (The worker co-op scene today is quite different, but it also holds vastly less wealth.) Even in diverse communities, the co-ops often have all-White co-op boards. Much of the institutional heft that the cooperative commonwealth has achieved is not crossing the United States��s brutal racial wealth gap��or is outright widening it.

In 2018, YES! Magazine executive editor Zenobia Jeffries Warfield argued that, despite her publication��s history of promoting cooperative efforts, ��co-ops and community farms can��t close the racial wealth gap����even if their leadership were more inclusive. Since these institutions are based on pooling and sharing community wealth, communities that have experienced systematic deprivation will wind up with less wealth in their co-ops, and less land for their gardens, than other communities do. As Warfield puts it, ��Capital can��t concentrate in areas where capital doesn��t exist.�� For those of us in some kind of love with the co-op movement and working to support it, as I have been, this is a problem.

I keep being haunted by a passage from the writings of Fr. Albert McKnight, a Catholic priest and Pan-Africanist who helped found many Black-led cooperatives in the South: ��What we need to do is reinvent the cooperative idea,�� he wrote before his death in 2016. ��If ever the cooperative approach was needed, it is today. It��s still a disgrace to Black folks that no place in the country do Blacks control economically.��

Fr. McKnight doesn��t offer a blueprint, but his provocation poses challenges enough. Cooperators love their cooperative principles��which, by the way, have changed quite a lot over the years��and their cooperative mythologies. But as a recent report on Indigenous cooperative development points out, the usual founding mythology about a group of 19th-century factory workers near Manchester effaces the generations of cooperative traditions in other societies. The cooperative idea has survived reinvention again and again.

My first ambition here is simply to let that provocation be heard again: If it is going to be of use in confronting our deepest fissures, the cooperative movement must reinvent itself.

My other ambition is a distant second: I would like to begin exploring some avenues for reinvention, some cooperative principles that may be ready for rewriting.

The first cooperative principle is ��Voluntary and Open Membership.�� In the 1840s, this meant that you couldn��t turn away Catholics or Protestants or Quakers. But a lot of young cooperators today go beyond that. For them, openness is less important than fostering safe, brave, anti-oppressive communities. Here in Colorado, Satya Yoga Cooperative calls itself ��the first ever POC (People of Color) member-owned yoga cooperative.�� A central part of its mission is helping people heal from the collective trauma of racism. In that light, openness to all comers doesn��t compute. Membership is a matter of intention and care.

The third principle is ��Member Economic Participation,�� which expects that members capitalize the co-op with their own resources. Where does this leave those communities with less to contribute? In the past, as W. Ralph Eubanks beautifully recalls, co-ops have been a means for channeling public resources to Black Americans��but not nearly enough. Perhaps we need to give up on the attachment to bootstraps and self-sufficiency so that cooperatives might be receptacles for massive wealth transfers, which have been long since owed to survivors of slavery, genocide, and segregation.

The seventh and final co-op principle is ��Concern for Community.�� It would be hard to imagine a weaker way to phrase that sentiment. The most common expression of it is through the tax-deductible donations that a co-op makes to nearby nonprofits��which might mean subsidizing the entertainment of the local elite by underwriting the symphony or outsourcing aid to the poorest by funding a homeless shelter. But what if this principle had teeth? What if it meant accountability to the community, such as by reserving board seats for the homeless or the street musicians? Community well-being should be built into the business, not an afterthought.

I think I still love the cooperative model, and I know I still love the cooperative movement. The reinventions I suggest are not mine, really, so much as they come from years of documenting the hopes that many new cooperators are already inscribing into the cooperative idea with their practice. Their example is a prophecy and demand upon the movement that needs them to inherit it.

Wrote Fr. McKnight, ��If we risk nothing, we gain nothing. We��re lost. We need to reinvent the co-op.�� And then he turned it into a prayer: ��May we have the wisdom, the faith to reinvent the co-op.��

Sacred Heart of Jesus, I beg of You the special grace of Your divine light.

If I am making a mistake, enlighten me, and inspire in my a strong aversion, a great dislike for the idea that I would pursue and which is the aim of my work.

May I repel it with a sort of scorn, if it is Your good pleasure and make it disappear from my mind. If I should never think about it again from this moment I would be a thousand times happy.

Remove from my heart all false vanity, all impractical desire, all chimeras and foolish dreams.

If You wish that I persevere in this way, oh my God, fill my weakness with your strength; clear away the obstacles or give me the means to surmount them.

In this case as in the other give me the most perfect resignation to your holy will.

May your purpose be mine, may your desires be as commands to me.

Deign, oh Jesus, to direct, to inspire my activities toward whatsoever be the end of your eternal purposes; bring it about that I may find perfect harmony with your will in the hearts of those who follow me, but especially in the heart of my wife, the beloved companion of my life.

That she should always be my consolation and my help, whether you inspire me to the complete abandonment of these projects or to the thought of accomplishing them. Amen.

��Alphonse Desjardins, quoted in George Boyle, The Poor Man��s Prayer: The Story of Credit Union Beginnings (Harper & Brothers, 1951), pp. 203-204

Having gotten to know the city staff members involved in this effort, I’ve been very impressed with the rigor and thoughtfulness that has gone into the process. Boulder will most likely not be in a position to deliver fiber-to-the-home without a municipal energy utility, but I think starting now with a backbone buildout would create the following opportunities:

+ Faster, more affordable service. Over and over around the country, we see that the large ISPs will not provide fast, affordable service without being somehow compelled to do so. A city-operated backbone could enable new competitors to enter the market and raise the bar for all. This will help strengthen our already vibrant tech business community and benefit consumers.

+ Opportunities for serving the underserved. Troubling, often disguised inequalities plague the country’s connectivity map, and Boulder is no exception. We already have good evidence that lower-income neighborhoods receive far poorer access opportunities than others. Recognizing this, the school district has been developing programs to use civic networks to serve underserved students. Expanding the city’s backbone would allow us to extend such services and ensure that all of our neighbors have affordable connectivity. We can show other communities what it looks like to treat internet access as the essential infrastructure that it is.

+ Leverage for fairness and neutrality. Today, as I write, net neutrality has officially been repealed on the national level. This is a development that could change the meaning of internet access in fundamental ways. It’s now up to local jurisdictions to protect their citizens’s rights of speech and access. Here, again, Boulder can be a leader. A city-owned backbone network could give the city leverage to negotiate arrangements with ISPs that ensure we are a net neutrality zone. This is an issue of concern to many people in town, and while it could be a difficult fight, it would be a fight your constituents would surely support.

In a sense, it is fitting that your decision to proceed with the broadband expansion comes the day after our federal government significantly relinquishes its regulatory powers over internet service. Tomorrow, we have the opportunity to step up and fill the void. Thank you for your consideration and your attention to this important matter.