In the early 2000s, the democratic spaces of the web were greeted as an alternative to centralized commercial and social structures; in 2007, after the financial landslide, the sharing gospel gave hope to those struggling to make a living.

The boom of “sharing platforms” provided the private sphere with powerful market mechanics, enabling fluid commodification of what had been the private sphere. Flexible, web-scale human resourcing drew “app freelancers” into the gig economy — an unprecedented economic reactivation of latent human assets. A new labor force emerged, one obliged to hire itself out for ever-smaller jobs with no safety net, as companies profited handsomely.

While sharing platforms employ organizational tools of savage power, masses are atomized — strong-armed into unorganized negotiation.

Crowds attack taxis and block streets as services are banned in countries around the world. Unrest is staged against app-based, short-term accommodation platforms and the conversion of entire buildings into de facto hotels.

PANDA is a counter-organizational platform, providing a tactical disruption-as-a-service toolkit, empowering app workers with the means to mediate terms with the platforms and their algocrat masters.

That the service materialized out of Kinshasa is probably a fabrication. Skirting traditional venture capital cycles, it nevertheless emerged as a distributed, open source network of for-profit tactical nodes. Untraceable and decentralized, a system of vast data and self-regulating algorithmic control.

PANDA is at once an act of resistance and a business opportunity, conceived within the cultural framework and space of new digital economic realms. It is the antibody of metastasizing platform capitalism.

Within mere months, PANDA experienced dramatic expansion, crystallizing the masses in tactical just-in-time action groups: from intangible interventions to exaggerated physical transformations.

As software eats the world, as everything solid melts into air, PANDA recasts technologies of oppression into a machinery of individual empowerment. By providing tools to actively navigate the turmoils of new digital regimes, PANDA fosters a new sense of belonging and purpose.

PANDA was created in collaboration with The OMA for the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016 and is part og the In Residence exhibition on display at the Centre for Architecture and Design (DogA) in Oslo until November 27.

AMO Team Giacomo Ardesio / Laurence Bolhaar / Paul Cournet / Giulio Margheri