LAURA LOTTI

About me:

Researcher, analyst and writer based in Lisbon, Portugal
Investigating networked organizations and the cultural economy of web3
Co-founder of Other Internet Research Institute, a non-profit applied research organization studying the social, political and economic effects of digitalization.
- Currently exploring the institutional affordances of crypto protocols
- Recently led a research program studying labor relations in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)
- Previously worked with community-led protocols to improve their governance processes; and conducted ethnographic analysis on the social architecture of crypto communities, among other things
2020-2023: co-maintainer of Black Swan DAO, a Berlin-based project exploring horizontal approaches to art making and developing consensus-building tools for collectives
Recovering academic with a background in economics, media studies and philosophy
- 2016: PhD from UNSW Sydney - Faculty of Arts Design and Architecture, with a thesis investigating money as a technology through the philosophy of proto-cybernetician Gilbert Simondon
Methodological toolkit: token economics, governance design, ecosystem strategy, philosophy of technology, ethnographic methods
Incipient interests: regenerative technocultures, mutualistic org structures, food sovereignty
- If you'd like to talk about any of these, feel free to reach out!

For an almost-updated list of my writings (academic and non), public engagements, and projects + professional bios, see this page