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.