ECONOMIC SPACE AGENCY – FROM DEFI TO SOCIAL DERIVATIVES
Creating potentiality space for what can be expressed economically
We are entering the era of economic media
Our communication is increasingly our economy and our economy is our communication
The digital revolution has failed us economically
Social media is already economic media. ‘Money’, ‘debt’, ‘equity’ are already social medium: they express a certain social formation.
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.
Economy is moving onto a programmable medium. 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” (e.g. BTC, ETH etc.).
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.
These two projects, the redesign of communications and the redesign of money are actually one. We know that you only get democracy with economic democracy, and that both imply radical decentralization.
Post-capitalist economic media redesigns this convergence to express different socialities.
[OPEN THE GLOSSARY AT THE RIGHT SIDE BAR TO ENTER AND NAVIGATE THE ECSA HYPERTEXT]
Synthesizing finance and communication for a post-capitalist future
We are an ECONOMIC HERESY. A MARKET & sense maker for a post-capitalist future. A volatility SPACE INNOVATION: a SOCIAL DERIVATIVE, a collective risk generating practice, leveraging on our ability to act together on an opening and to collectively enjoy the upside. We are ECONOMIC SPACE AGENTs, a group of radical economists, distributed systems architects, game designers, activists, monetary theorists & content creators deeply passionate about the ECONOMY.
Post-Capitalist economic media
An Economic Grammar for expressing economic-organizational forms
A new economic grammar for the information age.
The shared grammar is the key to the interoperability
Peering through a shared protocol, not a shared state
AUTHORING FUTURES: FROM DEFI TO SOCIAL DERIVATIVES
We are building a peer-to-peer economic networking protocol which is open and free to use and gives everyone equal capacities of ECONOMIC-ORGANIZATIONAL EXPRESSION.
We’ve realized that we are creating a LANGUAGE for new economic expression. It is an economic language that can express capitalist network protocols, but it can go beyond them. It can encompass capitalist value calculus, but express more qualified values and refuse their collapse into the monological value-expression that disqualifies non-money values as economic externalities.
It is an ECONOMIC GRAMMAR capable of making the value of for example care, knowledge, our environment, research, open source technology or a community offerable, exchangeable, stakeable, liquid, consumable, leverageable – economically expressible and relatable – without collapsing all its information into one index of price and one measuring unit of profitability.
The place where this post-capitalist economic network language is spoken and understood is the new economic space. It is a place of value creation where qualified values can both be expressed, composed and rendered interoperable. It multiplies denominations, which remain interoperable, because they share the same GRAMMAR.
Economic space agents form dis-intermediated economic alliances – by issuing, redeeming, engaging in creation of credit, equity and other financial relationships. Peering through a shared protocol (a shared grammar, not a shared state) agents form a networked economic system with a privacy preserving, scalable architecture, with no central data broker, host or owner.
We think we are discovering a new value form: a new social and relational form that characterizes the information age, and the old economic grammar does not express or understand. This new explicitly relational and social value formation is what we call the ECONOMIC SPACE. The ECSA economic protocol is designed for expressing such new social-economic forms. A.k.a. SOCIAL DERIVATIVEs on generalized volatility. They are strategies for surviving and surfing the volatility of our precarious world. You see, derivatives are much more than mere self-executing contracts that reduce counterparty risk. They have a social logic that takes us beyond mere profit taking exchange and ownership as the form of sociality. Derivative logic allows us to understand how heterogenous parts move together, how to value and sense the ways we are linked together, how value is made in motion and of change, and what it means to RISK-TOGETHER. They are the new basic economic cells of post-capitalist society. The Economic Space Protocol is the open source medium for their expression. Democratized capability to design social derivatives unchains the economy from one definition of value. It allows coordination without universal denomination of value.
What counts as collateral? What counts as liquidity? And who decides these?
The issues of liquidity and collateral go to the heart of what drives CAPITALISM as a financial system. To challenge what counts as liquidity and what counts as collateral is the basis on which to open up the agenda of building the post-capitalist economic grammar. We think that this focus, and the construction of an economic protocol for distributed liquidity and distributed collateral is the key to post-capitalist economy. It must be the centerpiece for any distributed internet economic system.