1.11.2022-
Economic Space TV Season 1
ECSA crew discussing the chapters, key themes and interesting topics within and around the ECSA economic paper “Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression”, coming out this spring as a book from Minor Compositions/Autonomedia.
Episode 1: Ch1 Introduction
Episode 2: Ch2 From Capitalist to Post-Capitalist Economy: Transcending Hayek and his Digital Disciples
Episode 3: A New Definition of Surplus / the 12 Magic Gifts of the ECSA Economy
Episode 4 Ch3: Market as a space exchange and a space of communication
Episode 5 Ch4: Performance
Episode 6 Ch5: Stake as the Key to Value
Episode 7: Ch6: Synthetic Commons
1pmPT/4pmET/10pmCET/11pmFIN/Wed6amSYD
ECSA Zoom2 https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83493028036
April 26, 2022
Post-Capitalist Economic Expression
Akseli Virtanen explaining why it has been so exciting for him to be part of the Economic Space Agency project, relentlessly exploring what happens to money, market, price, unit of account, store of value, collateral, issuance, credit, investing, clearing, liquidity, the dealer function… when we start to understand them just as shared messaging and networking protocols. What becomes possible then? What becomes possible if we can actually turn these interaction agreements into a design space? If the economy and its key conventions move onto a programmable medium? If we can think of economy as a language or a medium of expression that allows its participants to set the terms of their finance, of economic interaction and valuations?
April 26, 2022
More:
economic media, Jorge Lopez
Economy as a re-programmable communication medium
Jorge Lopez on economy as a communication medium. This is an invitation to understand our economy as a re-designable communication medium and organization system, where our exchanges are not only material, but also informational. An invitation to enter a practical conversation on the reconfiguration of the system we share and rely upon to collectively coordinate, govern and empower each other to transform and rearrange our world. This is about more than a fussy abstraction that serves as little more than metaphor to explain the big picture. It is about the importance of identifying and recognizing the formal dimensions of our economy as a multilayer communications network. A network whose protocols we can elucidate, but most importantly, open, reflect upon and redesign. To serve our intent, we must formalize its functional building blocks. To sketch its forms, the interplay of such forms, and the totality of what they create. We must reveal our economy as a collective conversation that has a language: A set of conventions dictating how to “speak”, and what we can “say”. This economic language contains familiar terms like asset, liability, exchange, netting, clearing, and exchange rate. These terms exist in a mutual reference network of definitions that form an “economic dictionary”. It also follows a grammar: a set of rules that determines the way these terms may be put together. An economic protocol, as we shall discover.
April 26, 2022
A Preamble to the Decolonization of Money
Jon Beller on decolonization of money. In a present built out of the capture of nearly all revolutionary expression by a computational media system, this capture and consequent foreclosure of revolutionary becoming is a central feature of computational racial capitalism. Aspiration and indeed the struggle for survival becomes a means of production. Thus it becomes necessary to intervene in the mediations of capital in order to progressively intervene in the relations of production. These mediations, coordinated and algorithmically concatenated, are monetary and semiotic as well as practical.
April 26, 2022
More:
economic media, Jonathan Beller
Economic Media: An Introduction
Jon edited a special issue of La Furia Humana. This is his intro to the issue.
“Economic media,” then, implies the extension of “communication” and “value” on the same substrate. As noted, economic media already exist and currently function in accord with the protocols of racial capitalism. Meaning and value flow together, but users at best control their utterances and not their economics. Communication and value are in quotation marks above because the idea of economic media begins to blur the distinction between meaning(s) and value(s). Indeed we start to see that expression is itself value transmission/creation and exchange value is itself communication/messaging, and that the common denominator here is information. Indeed, information could (correctly) be grasped as a development of the money-form, as it allows and indeed emerges from the requirements of capitalized managerial infrastructure and its inexorable demand for returns.
March 23, 2021
More:
cryptomedia, economic media, Jonathan Beller, NFT
NFT does not stand for Non-Fascist Token but it Should
Prof. Jon Beller in Coindesk. What are NFTs doing to our financial imagination? Are they making us use the cryptomedia to do the same old things, with the same old hierarchies? Do they threaten to make all art the art of making money? Are they just redeploying the cult values of the art world and enhancing the aura of the unique work of art? Are we missing a historic opportunity to use cryptomedia to express our economic-organizational composition differently both aesthetically and materially?
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”.