After Markets Market, 2021
After Markets Market was a one-day online workshop and storefront for goods from a post-capitalist future. Participants mapped out alternatives to private ownership and market pricing—such as worker-run firms, public resource councils, and labor-time accounting—and built prototypes from those scenarios. The day ended with the launch of aftermarkets.market (now closed), where makers listed their items and discussed what their objects revealed about life beyond capitalism.
The entrance to the After Markets Market, the online shop at aftermarkets.market where each product was listed during the final review.
Communal Delivery Drone Charging Station
Selina Nie
The trigger was the single ship stuck in the Suez Canal in March 2021 and the disruption it caused to the global economy. What if shipping broke down into individual delivery systems, with goods arriving by drone? The station is the infrastructure that would make this plausible: a solar-powered charging point on rooftops, where the solar panels already are, for passing delivery drones to park and recharge. Nie presented it as a miniature model. In the review, Montgomery pointed out that capitalism depends on scarcity, and that a solar economy could turn energy into a communal resource, free to anyone because there is no scarcity left to price.
Selina Nie
The trigger was the single ship stuck in the Suez Canal in March 2021 and the disruption it caused to the global economy. What if shipping broke down into individual delivery systems, with goods arriving by drone? The station is the infrastructure that would make this plausible: a solar-powered charging point on rooftops, where the solar panels already are, for passing delivery drones to park and recharge. Nie presented it as a miniature model. In the review, Montgomery pointed out that capitalism depends on scarcity, and that a solar economy could turn energy into a communal resource, free to anyone because there is no scarcity left to price.
Home Grown Medicines
Claudio Angrigiani
A girl in Argentina needed a $2 million medicine to survive, and an influencer spent two weeks fundraising to pay for it. Angrigiani asked why people without the means are left to luck. His device lets a household make its own medicine on demand: engineered plants act as small production plants, signals from a computer drive the reactions, and the plant drips the needed drug into drinking water. Patents and profits stop being the incentive for drug development. Instead the WHO and similar bodies issue a cryptocurrency, the Health Token, to countries and labs according to their contribution to public health. In the review, the discussion turned to how medicine made at home could loosen the tie between health care and employment, and to neighbors trading medicines, or fermenting vaccines locally almost like kombucha.
Claudio Angrigiani
A girl in Argentina needed a $2 million medicine to survive, and an influencer spent two weeks fundraising to pay for it. Angrigiani asked why people without the means are left to luck. His device lets a household make its own medicine on demand: engineered plants act as small production plants, signals from a computer drive the reactions, and the plant drips the needed drug into drinking water. Patents and profits stop being the incentive for drug development. Instead the WHO and similar bodies issue a cryptocurrency, the Health Token, to countries and labs according to their contribution to public health. In the review, the discussion turned to how medicine made at home could loosen the tie between health care and employment, and to neighbors trading medicines, or fermenting vaccines locally almost like kombucha.
Work/Life Alerter
Faith Mamaradlo
With remote work, commuting and clocking out disappear, and with them the standard shift. Notifications never stop and it gets hard to know when to quit. The alerter tells its user when the workday is over with a flashing light and a sound, played through the cup-shaped speaker. A button gives a receipt, a log of the hours worked.
Faith Mamaradlo
With remote work, commuting and clocking out disappear, and with them the standard shift. Notifications never stop and it gets hard to know when to quit. The alerter tells its user when the workday is over with a flashing light and a sound, played through the cup-shaped speaker. A button gives a receipt, a log of the hours worked.
Automatic Task Dispatcher
Echo Wan
Listed in the market at $19.99 a month per employee. Working remotely, Wan argues, people lose their work-life balance because they are assigned the wrong amount of work. The dispatcher tracks how each worker has completed daily tasks in the past, projects how much they can finish without stress, and hands out that amount each day. Workers plug it into their desktop: the green button lowers the load, the joystick adds tasks, and both teach the device to do better. It allows for different preferences, from people who like a flexible remote schedule to those who do not want to be disturbed outside nine to five. In the review, Montgomery suggested that neuroscience may be a key part of any shift away from capitalism.
Echo Wan
Listed in the market at $19.99 a month per employee. Working remotely, Wan argues, people lose their work-life balance because they are assigned the wrong amount of work. The dispatcher tracks how each worker has completed daily tasks in the past, projects how much they can finish without stress, and hands out that amount each day. Workers plug it into their desktop: the green button lowers the load, the joystick adds tasks, and both teach the device to do better. It allows for different preferences, from people who like a flexible remote schedule to those who do not want to be disturbed outside nine to five. In the review, Montgomery suggested that neuroscience may be a key part of any shift away from capitalism.
Serval State
Rachel Cole
Taking NASA’s $2.9 billion lunar lander contract with SpaceX as its signal, this future pulls government work back from private contractors and makes public service a duty. At 16, each resident receives a state-issued AI dashboard that reads their decisions and movements and recommends the department they should serve in.
Rachel Cole
Taking NASA’s $2.9 billion lunar lander contract with SpaceX as its signal, this future pulls government work back from private contractors and makes public service a duty. At 16, each resident receives a state-issued AI dashboard that reads their decisions and movements and recommends the department they should serve in.
Chimp Enclosure
Jonathan Zur
In a world where implants like Neuralink can train animals to do work that normally takes a person, companies hire chimpanzees for basic jobs because they can be paid in peanuts. This enclosure houses a chimp employee for far less than an employee’s rent or relocation: a small room with a bed, a sapling and green fake fur, the bare minimum for survival, and a console where the chimp receives exercises and assessments to sharpen its working skills. Zur aimed the piece at managers who take pride in keeping spending to a minimum, rather than in paying people enough to live well. In the review, the group asked whether peanuts as wages are a step back toward barter, and whether work done by a chimp still counts as exploitation.
Jonathan Zur
In a world where implants like Neuralink can train animals to do work that normally takes a person, companies hire chimpanzees for basic jobs because they can be paid in peanuts. This enclosure houses a chimp employee for far less than an employee’s rent or relocation: a small room with a bed, a sapling and green fake fur, the bare minimum for survival, and a console where the chimp receives exercises and assessments to sharpen its working skills. Zur aimed the piece at managers who take pride in keeping spending to a minimum, rather than in paying people enough to live well. In the review, the group asked whether peanuts as wages are a step back toward barter, and whether work done by a chimp still counts as exploitation.
Treat Dispenser
Sean Barrett
With autonomous robot police dogs patrolling neighborhoods, hackers build stealthy digital treat dispensers to distract or bribe them.
Sean Barrett
With autonomous robot police dogs patrolling neighborhoods, hackers build stealthy digital treat dispensers to distract or bribe them.
