January 3, 2021
A New Economic Grammar: Designing Social Derivatives with Economic Space Agency
A podcast with Akseli Virtanen (@econaut6), one of the founders of the Economic Space Agency (@ecospaceagency), an organization for exploring protocols for post-capitalist economic expression. Akseli previously founded the decentralized hedge fund Robin Hood Cooperative and has been referred as The Andy Warhol of Finance. During the interview we talk about how ECSA is exploring the creation of post-capitalist economic media through the creation of a new “economic grammar”, how we can co-opt financial jargon to imagine a post-capitalist future (like social derivatives), and the irony of using the work of Friedrich Hayek on economic calculation to show that capitalism sucks. If you’re interested in the social and political possibilities of the blockchain space, it’s absolutely imperative that you keep up with the work of ECSA.
November 25, 2020
A Radical Strategy to Finance a Revolution
ECSA media architect, Prof. Jon Beller (Media Studies, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn NY) discussing his forthcoming book “The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism”, his recent piece “How We Short Capitalism – And Finance the Revolution” in CoinDesk and the ECSA strategy of “post-capitalist economic media” as a way to create alternatives to the one-dimensional expression of value in capitalism (financial value expressed in price) so that we can take power in the next inevitable recessions.
September 19, 2020
Economic Media
From social media to economic media? Social media horizontalized our communication, but left the information & protocol layer called the economy untouched. Could we reimagine finance in order to create different socialities?
A discussion with Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures) and Jonathan Beller (Economic Space Agency, Pratt Institute) and Akseli Virtanen (Economic Space Agency).
MoneyLab #9 Playgrounds for Post-Capitalism, Helsinki September 19-20, 2020. moneylab9.m-cult.org/
October 14,2020
More:
economic media, expression, Jon, JonathanBeller, post-capitalism
Economic Media: Crypto as a New Medium of Economic Expression
Just like social networking applications gave us social media, economic networking applications will give us ECONOMIC MEDIA. How we relate to each other economically will be remediated by applications (formats, templates, protocols) in the same sense that our social relations already are. Crowdfunding, P2P lending, cryptocurrencies, DAOs and DeFi, liquidity and community farming, are just the first baby steps of this transformation.
Social media horizontalized our communication, but left the information and protocol layer called the economy untouched. We can’t control the economic protocols that underpin the value capture of our communication. The next generation media will redesign the default convergence of communication, finance and computation, and fuse messaging and economy in ways that are programmable from below.
We want to create a more expressive language to describe our economic networks, their participants, the nature of their relations and how they change, what they value, how it is measured and exchanged. An ECONOMIC GRAMMAR which open and free to use, gives everyone equal capacities of economic expression and does not collapse into single universal value definition of a fiat money or a “master token”.