The Risky Business of Belonging
Internal countercultures and strategizing with Gabriel Tumlos
When the going gets tough, what are the multiple strategies for collective action? From Gabriel, we learned how creating an internal company counterculture can lead to organizing, improving accountability, and making friends along the way.
Yindi Pei
Alright, to start off with, could you tell us a little about yourself?
Gabe Tumlos
My name is Gabriel Tumlos, usually located in the lovely state of California, in Los Angeles. I like to write. I spend most of my time working on this fun project called Mochi, a crypto social club that lives at the intersection of crypto, community building, culture, and art. It's a fun community that I started about two years ago, in 2019. We build tech, we organize trips, we make art together, and we're coming out with another NFT zine at the end of the year. So that's what I spend most of my time on. And I throw parties.
Coming into Logic School, I was already pretty aware of how technology and capital will get merged in this interesting way and kind of pervert the outcomes for the people that use them. You can't work in crypto and not have that understanding. At least, it was a set of concerns that brought me to crypto in the first place. So I came in as somebody who was already very convinced of the mission of Logic School, which I understood as a ground for us to think about and consider how we might reformat the logic of power in the systems that we participate in.
Yindi
What was your project and how did it begin?
Gabe
My project is an extension of work that began in 2015 or so, when I first started in this ecosystem. I worked for what was then a little known company but has since become one of the most well known companies in the space. While I was there, I worked on a variety of projects that some might term as systemically important. I did that for as long as I could and watched this tiny company turn into a not so tiny company. It grew at a blistering pace and I experienced all the things that come along with that type of growth — confusion, self doubt, job insecurity.
I have this thing, where I inadvertently start clubs everywhere I go — I think that's a function of being part of a big family. I’m the oldest of seven kids. I ended up accidentally starting a club at that company about halfway through my time there and that small club became a strange little counterculture. The club was highly critical of some of the things that we were doing as an organization — for example, some of the projects that different parts of the company were starting to engage in with United States defense industries and that kind of stuff.
So a lot of people ended up gathering around this club that I had made in the company. We ended up sticking together for a while even after we all left. I was at the company early enough to become a shareholder, and I stayed long enough to vest many of those shares. Because of that, I have particular insights into how the company has grown and shifted since I was there. And well, let's say that they haven't been the best about owning up to their promises to, one, the people who helped start that company and two, the ecosystem.
A group of us also discovered not long ago that they were doing some creative accounting on the backend that benefits certain individuals far more than the people who helped build that company. For me, that's no good. I used to be an accountant and what's happened at the company is stuff that they teach you to fight against in accounting school.
That's kind of become the evolution of my education and the counterculture that I started. It's now taken an additional kind of political dimension, that's a bit more serious than just writing critical essays and stuff. In starting the club, I still have good rapport with a lot of people, so anybody who feels like they've been wronged or upset feels comfortable expressing their grievances to me. In that sense, I have a lot of trust with people and it kind of puts me in this strange position of leading the charge towards some kind of resolution that people can be happy with.
Yindi
Were there any challenges you encountered during the project?
Gabe
There have been organizational challenges, but they weren’t too difficult. Because this has a legal dimension, it is somewhat expensive. So when I first started out, I was poking around in the dark to see what kind of remedies we might have that did not require such an expensive outlay. But quickly, I realized that if we're going to do anything that has kind of a bite or is worth our time, we need a legal strategy. So, you know, I had to raise money for that. I had to contact many former colleagues of mine to get them interested in what we were doing and get them to trust what we were doing enough to raise money. I would say that was the first set of challenges.
The second most difficult thing has been navigating this idea of transparency within groups, because things get tricky when you're dealing with legal communications. As somebody who started this journey as a transparency terrorist — I was staunchly into the idea of transparency and bringing transparency into everything. Now, to come into a place where I have to understand where the limits of that are, so as to protect our group and manage risk appropriately — it's another dimension of organizing that I'm trying to work through right now.
Yindi
How does it feel like to work through these challenges?
Gabe
It feels like a natural extension of something I started before, it feels right. It feels like I'm doing something that sits true with who I am as a person. I feel like if I were to walk away from this, that I would not be living up to some ideal that I set for myself. So for me, it feels right. It's really testing me and seeing how much I actually believe in my ideals. How far am I willing to go to affirm that those ideals are real and not just something that I heard from someone or read somewhere in a book? It in some ways feels like a test and how I respond is ultimately the character that I become.
It does feel like I’m stepping into a role. And I need to remember that’s kind of all it is. I'm just trying to maintain a healthy dose of humor and skepticism about it all. You need humor to sustain yourself through it. It can't all just be aggression because aggression has a very short shelf life — you tire yourself out. So I'm trying to maintain some sense of humor and also continue to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Yindi
Where's your project now?
Gabe
So, we had been organizing and sending increasingly stern messages to the management and directors of this company and it was kind of getting us nowhere. Then they tried to do something sneaky, where they tried to issue a whole new set of shares, without resolving or giving any of us any information about what had recently happened at the company. They tried to push it through by using COVID as an excuse for why nobody could attend the shareholder meeting in person. They tried to get us to effectively sign over our voting rights so that they could just kind of shoehorn this decision in. Our group opposed it and they ended up having to cancel the meeting. I consider that a very small win, you know, that they took things pretty seriously and modified their approach. So we’re still in the preparation stage of, I don't know what you'd call it, the first confrontation. There's some stuff that still needs to be resolved. We’re still gathering all the details to establish our position. Then we're all going to come together.
Yindi
What is your wildest dream for your project?
Gabe
In my wildest dreams, the person leading the company sees that they did wrong by their minority shareholders and former employees.They own up to it and fulfill the promises that they gave to a bunch of people who really gave up a lot to make this blockchain thing happen.
Because Bitcoin’s at $50k and Ethereum’s at $4k or whatever, people forget that those were barely words, six, seven years ago. Blockchain wasn't a word. Nobody knew what that was. I was the crazy blockchain person for four years of my life. All of us at the old company were basically cheerleaders for this Web 3 thing that did not exist. Until it existed, right? This was the work that many of us put into that company: giving up cushy jobs, taking risks, and being underpaid for a very long time. And [we] were promised equity to offset those risks. Equity is what’s supposed to make it worth it.
I would hope that in the very end the person who made these promises sees himself in a position of privilege rather than entitlement, and [sees this as] a space that we made together, rather than something he made for us. It takes labor and work and risk taking from many, many people to make this thing happen. Right now, it feels like we are all indebted to this one person, rather than the other way around. And I just hope that they would flip their perspective, just for a second, and see that they might be wrong about that. That's the best way I can put it without being too specific.
Yindi
I think that in itself is pretty powerful. I feel like a lot of people, regardless of what industry, could probably relate to that. Thank you for sharing that. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Gabe
If it does get crazy, please, please, please share this chat with someone. So they understand where my perspective is. I guess that's it. Hopefully, I've articulated the way that I view things and the way that I approach problems. You know, my background is working class. I've done well in crypto but I'm never gonna forget where I came from. A lot of working class people put a lot of time and effort into things, work their asses off, just to get crumbs. Crypto is supposed to be something different. It's supposed to change that equation. It did for me, but it didn't for everyone that I know. But I want it to. For that to happen, people need to be different. Leaders need to be different. They need to think more about people like me and where we come from.
Gabriel Tumlos (he/him/them) is a DAO founder and recovering accountant.
Visit zine.mochi.club to read the Mochi club zine