041: A crack in the present

Dear readers of this little dispatch,
This is Fei, writing you probably for the last time as a Village One co-op member.

But before we get into that, let me start with a small story:

Two years ago, I was tasked with organising Village One’s very first birthday party. I arranged with the venue’s manager that we would pre-pay for a certain amount of drinks in form of drink tokens.

On the day of the party, the manager gave me a jar full of red, round plastic tokens. When I started to distribute them among the villagers with the instruction to hand out two tokens to each arriving guest, Harry suggested that we could just put the jar on a table, let people know the tokens were for drinks, and trust that everyone would only take what they needed. We all nodded, none of us questioned Harry’s suggestion even for a moment, and I left the jar on a table. During the entire party, the jar sat there unattended, and by the end of that evening—despite lots of people showing up at the party—there were still some tokens left! When I “caught” some of our guests paying for their drinks at the bar themselves, I asked why they hadn’t just taken more tokens. They said that they were very grateful that we provided free food and drinks, they had already used one or two tokens, but were also happy to leave the rest to other guests and pay for their own drinks!

This anecdote stayed with me ever since, I think about it from time to time, because it’s a simple, but good reminder of how much of the vision behind Village One is rooted in optimism and trust in other people. And it also shows how many kind and mindful people we’ve been lucky enough to call our friends, family, and clients! Sure, some people maybe took a few more tokens than others that day, but we had decided to not start our party by setting up rules and mistrusting all of our guests just to prevent a few people potentially taking advantage of the situation.

I’ve recently finished reading the book “Poetry from the Future” by Srećko Horvat. In the last chapter, Horvat suggests that instead of looking at the present-day crisis and extrapolating all of it into a dystopian future which we need to save ourselves from, we should imagine a future in which we all want to live in, and derive from that the actions we have to take today.

“To act now means to create the conditions of our future, not to follow the already written script from the past: it means to produce a crack in the present, a disruption in the imposition of capitalist temporality, the rhythm of power.”

Anyone who has visited Village One’s website will know, this is what we’ve set out to do.

The past Thursday was my last day at Village One. After three years of agency grind and a full-remote work setup, I decided to go back to working on a single digital product in a hybrid setup, which I think is at this moment a better fit for my current life situation. I got very emotional during our Thursday check-out meeting—for the most part because I’m going to miss seeing and talking to Doro, Sev, Julia, Meg and Harry everyday, but also because I’m going to miss being part of this “somewhat utopian, worker-owned studio for ethical design and technology”, which at its core is so full of optimism and trust in ourselves and in other people.

I wish all the best to the current and future Village One cooperativists, keep up the excellent work, your kindness, and your optimism. I’m looking forward to catching up with you all very soon. And to everyone else: see you at the next Village One birthday party! :)

Yours truly,
Fei