pocas (poca organización cooperativa de autoservicio) speculates on the culture and systems of a network of mutualist self-service convenience stores set in an alternative timeline in contemporary Mexico City.
These stores provide physical and digital infrastructure for people to engage in economic activities to fulfill their basic needs within a self-governed, collectively owned model. Each pocas store is meant to be unique, developing its specialties based on its locality, surrounding communities, needs, and culture. Simultaneously, all stores share certain infrastructure and services, maintaining interoperability across a network of stores. pocas appropriates characteristics from the self-service convenience store model (intensity, urban presence, virality) but swaps their neoliberal values for mutualist ones, asking the question: How can recent advancements in distributed computing make old and new mutualist economic practices viable, efficient and convenient?
While pocas itself is a speculation, its components are not speculative at all; pocas articulates existing theories and practices into a compelling postcapitalist system for self-service convenience stores. Acting as a sort of “economic science-fiction”, pocas integrates technologies and ideas from the fields of distributed ledger technologies, the commons, counter-economics, platform cooperativism, collaborative finance, cybernetics, informal economies, self-governance, anti-colonial resistance, piracy, black markets, mutual-aid networks, lunar punk aesthetics, democratic-confederalism, autonomism, feminist-economics, indigenous autonomy, agorism, mutualism, anarcho-syndicalism, complementary currencies, tianguis and other adjacent practices. pocas articulates elements of these fields into an accessible fictional narrative depicting a plausible postcapitalist store model.