15 November 2024
Protocols for postcapitalist finance: A reply
A reply to William Morgan’s review just out in Finance & Society (Cambridge University Press):
Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression is a book published by members of the Economic Space Agency. Its objective is to frame protocols (social agreements) on which to build the conditions for an economic system that is distributed (no centralised control) and can express network views about what constitutes, and how to measure, ‘value’ (value beyond profit). An insightful review by William Morgan (2024) probes some key dimensions of our project. This reply both reframes some of William’s insights and takes issue with others, especially those which emphasise a Hayekian interpretation.
15 November 2024
Designing postcapitalist finance in Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression
A review by William Morgan fresh out of press in the Finance & Society Journal (Cambridge University Press):
Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression, the Economic Space Agency’s latest experiment in radical economic design, explores the possibility of designing a digitally native economy that is geared towards care, the arts, and the environment, and which not only refuses to give up on the financial frontiers of contemporary capitalism, but actively seeks to marshal them towards innovative ends. The architecture of a novel economic space comes into view through a set of protocols, which integrate economic information within a social value framework. This ‘Economic Space Protocol’ involves crafting a new grammar for economic information production processes that have traditionally been tied to competitive market behavior. This essay interrogates the place of finance in the book, emphasizing price discovery’s generativity with regards to information. What is necessary in the imagination of any postcapitalist future are radical design initiatives that contend with both the necessity and the limits of the price discovery process.
May 21, 2024
Authoring futures
A recording of the discussion on postcapitalist economic-organizational expression held on Tuesday 21.5.2024 18-20, at The House of Text, Helsinki.
“To change our economy we need to change our economic language, for the nature of our economy is bound by the expressivity of the language that can conceive it.”
The recently published book Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression (Minor Compositions / Autonomedia, 2023) by Dick Bryan, Jorge Lopez and Akseli Virtanen has been said to be a major contribution in pushing political economy into the information age and opening economics to politics.
The book argues that money is a very interesting networking technology and an interoperability protocol. Furthermore, it shows how the recent developments in distributed computation and record keeping have given us now the ability to create – in a decentralized way – similar economic collaboration protocols as money has historically been. Yet to unlock the full potentiality of an informationally mediated economy and the autonomist politics it could enable, we need a new understanding of the economy: understanding economy as a network — a group of agents interacting according to certain shared understanding about the relations that make the network and its state — and opening these interaction protocols as a design and expression space for everyone.
July 7, 20023
An Expanded Ledger Grammar for Encoding and Communicating Our Economic Realities
It is becoming clearer and clearer to us that there is a transformative potential of viewing accounting practices and ledgers as an economic grammar — a formal language that encodes and communicates our economic realities. While traditional accounting principles have long served to sustain capitalist structures, we think that an evolved economic grammar, grounded in the principles of postcapitalism, could provide a platform for redefining economic practices and relationships. Drawing on semiotics, linguistics, and formal languages, we can show how accounting can transition from a tool of capitalism to a language of postcapitalism.
July 8, 2023
Reciprocal Stakeholding: A New Economic Networking Primitive
Here is the thinking related to our ETH Barcelona presentation — why we think the inevitable future of blockchain space is an inter-blockchain economic grammar as “Layer 1”.
To create a diverse, mutually reinforcing economic network, we need a new economic networking primitive: reciprocal stake holding. This becomes the financial link connecting blockchains, and economic agents. Reciprocal staking relationships involve simultaneous (1) equity exchange, (2) bilateral credit, and (3) co-performance agreements. It is a new kind of economic transaction. Economic agents are taking a risk together on a shared economic goal to increase their value, aligning their performances, while simultaneously creating endogenous network liquidity to sustain their economic activities. We have described this logic in detail in the ECSA economic paper Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression (Minor Compositions, 2023). This model reduces the need for external liquidity, and with that, the power of a capitalist economic logic, allowing the blockchain space to explore new value forms and measurements. Importantly, it creates and amplifies trust to collaborate in a fully distributed way. Even though we need our infrastructure to be trustworthy, the desire for true decentralization and the need for safety must be grounded on acknowledging, understanding and nurturing trust.
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.