A while ago I was sitting in café Latei across Klaas Speller who is one of the people running an initiative called Appsterdam. The name Appsterdam had been popping up for a while so I wanted to know what sort of organisation this was. Basically, Klaas told me, it’s a network run by app-orientated programmers trying to build around their professional practice an ecosystem that is not only mutually supportive but also able to raise awareness around all sorts of issues around the social conditions under which they work. Networked politics made by nerds, I thought, sounds interesting. And a bit unbelievable (although there is of course the Pirate Party but this sounded much more hands-on and yes, somehow cool). I needed to learn more…
Turns out they started about a year ago with the objective of making Amsterdam the place to be for app makers. They launched a series of initiatives around network and knowledge exchange, such as weekly lectures, regular hang-outs (in my local pub of all places!) and family weekends in order to start building a bottom-up social ecosystem around the practice of app making. This seemed to have worked as today, the Appsterdam community has about 1000 members. And its not just nerds; there are designers, lawyers, artists, business people, academics, you name it. Tho I have to immediately add that those programmers I have met so far do not at all correspond to the dorky caricature one tends to have in mind.
This might also have to do with the fact that at Appsterdam there is a lot of emphasis on education and training. For instance, they offer speaker training which, if I understand it correctly, is meant to help the rather technically inclined app-makers to switch from programming language to English (or Dutch). They also do so-called Guru sessions, i.e., one day app-making crash-course for designers and other app-making related professionals (for next to no money!!!). The idea here is to make Amsterdam not just the place to be for app makers but also to be the best place in the world to become an app maker as well.
The ecosystem idea thus seemed to be more than just rhetoric. At this point I was game. So last Wednesday, I went to one of their casual “meeten and drinken” get-togethers. Over a plate of stamppot en zuurkool I talk to Mike Lee a.k.a. the world’s toughest programmer and mayor of Appsterdam. As Mike put it, its about “building a ‘place’ in which we really want to live and work.” Which reminded me of the likes of coworking communities: the stuff about “building a ‘place’ in which we really want to live and work,” this notion of sovereignty sounded rather familiar. Of course there is more of a professional focus here and the physical dimension is rather secondary (as of yet, they are working on that with the Rietveld brothers) but nonetheless; it’s all about building a smarter and more timely kind of capitalism.
So he went on a search for the ideal place and he believes to have found it in Amsterdam, a place that he characterised as “a mix of Disney Land and Burning Man.” Would not be my description but well, the man is from the States 
And he’s also got a point somewhere.
He told me right away that he is not ‘running’ Appsterdam. “My goal with this organisation,” he said, “is immortality.” Great, you might think, a proper nerd, but not so fast. What he was talking about was bringing to life his idea of the perfect app maker’s ecosystem by letting go of the idea in order for it to turn into a real social network based on the practice of sharing. “So if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, this thing would continue to exist.” Alright, not a nerd but an open source hippy then!? Not exactly. This guy is a real pro, having worked for Apple and on apps such as Delicious Library, and Tap Tap Revenge. He talked about the practical ethos of sharing whatever helps one’s peers to improve their craft while only protecting that which is really necessary to make a difference in the market.
The situation right now is one of total and thus inefficient and sometimes outright silly copyright protection. They gave me the example of a corporation having been able to acquire a patent for the “shopping-function” of apps which allows them to basically enslave anyone using such a function for their app. Clearly that doesn’t make sense at all. Here capitalism is falling over its own feet (or rather its hyperindustrial prostheses it is high time to get rid of).
Activist academics like Laurence Lessig or Yochai Benkler have for a long time pointed to these problems. For them, there exists the possibility of hybrid economies which they understand in terms of the coexistence of market and sharing systems. The fascinating thing about Appsterdam is that they seem to be building a practice pushing beyond hybridity. Their vision – which is one built on practical professional experience – is of a smarter capitalism based on a topological understanding of markets. What they seem to have in mind is not the hybrid, i.e., coexistence of two pure spaces: one of sharing and of owning/competing. For them, the market itself needs to evolves into something that merges sharing and owning, involving degrees of sharing and owning, perhaps entailing a practice of only temporary ownership, etc. Hence the market becomes a totally impure space, one that emerges out of the professional practice more than being a clearly predefined container threw which goods travel back and forth regulated by price. In a word, it becomes a topology – a self-varying transformation, not unlike the coffee mug turning into a doughnut turning into a coffee mug. If you are willing to see IP in the mug and sharing in the doughnut. Or vice versa…
How is this future (un)market space exactly going to look like? Not sure yet. Of course not. However, Appsterdammers are working on an app that will map such a topology…
