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.
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
15 Oct 2019
More:
CESSUMMIT2019, cryptoeconomics, distributedexchange, Jorge, JorgeLopez, MIT, network, protocols, video
“A Distributed Exchange Protocol” MIT PROTOCOLS FOR A CRYPTOECONOMIC NETWORK
Jorge Lopez (Chief Architect, ECSA): “Instead of having an algorithm that is constantly maximising that spread, as to maximise profit, what ECSA is proposing is the introduction of another index, and maximising within another metric format. The (singular) profit maximisation takes a secondary place. While this logic ensures that you don’t go out of self-sustainability, you no longer try to play that game of maximising the spread. The information system is enough for you to assess what would happen if you were to enter this trade as a calculation of maximization for an increase or decrease of a particular index. By pursuing the increase of another index, different economic decisions, different trades, and offers are made at the effect that therefore the economic agent pursues something else.
(…) Therefore, it is an explicite, deliberate change of the goal of the game.”
3 oct. 2019
More:
article, cryptoeconomics, defi, medium, postcapitalism, protocols, valuecalculus
Towards Post-Capitalism: A Language for New Economic Expression
In the course of writing the upcoming white paper Protocols for Cryptoeconomic Networks, we have realized that we are creating a language for new economic expression. It can express capitalist network protocols, but even more, it can go beyond them. It is capable of valuing, for example, the biosphere, care, intangibles and social innovation — without reducing their information into one index of price and one measuring unit of profitability. It is a post-capitalist language (a language for post-capitalist economic expression), in a literal sense.
October 2019
Crypto-Political Economy. Transcending Hayek and his digital disciples
Is cryptoeconomy just a refinement and acceleration of a capitalist economy or can it create a new understanding of Economy? This article explains how it could be either or, indeed both, by introducing the chapter “Crypto-Political Economy” of our upcoming white paper.
“The technology permits both capitalist and social versions to be designed centrally or in a distributed way. In both cases, there are clear cost and speed advantages of cryptoeconomic platforms because of the absence of need for central clearing houses, and we see large corporations and states adopting the technology for fast, low cost and accurate record keeping.”
September 2019
Podcast: An Economic grammar for the information age
What is the ECSA vision? Why is capitalism under stress right now? Why are the central banks looking so fragile? Is it possible to get out of capitalism and its detrimental protocols, which are not so safe as it claims? Can capitalism short itself? Find out about the juxtaposition of politics and finance: the ECSA offer as a short position and a long position.