Living in the Spread
How to generate a postcapitalist economic network?
Akseli Virtanen
The Economic Space Agency economic white paper Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression is now out as a book, published by Minor Compositions (Colchester / New York / Port Watson, 2023) and available from your favourite book store. See here about the background.
This week, and the next, we are in New York meeting with friends, doing a technical demo, and talking about the book and its open access co-publishing architecture — which we are using to transform the book into a live network.
We are releasing the Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression as an open access experience — with audio, PDF & ePub versions available, modifiable mood-lighting & fonts, integrated footnotes and a glossary, everything also in mobile — but in a way that rethinks the economic space of open access publishing and experiments with a postcapitalist business model for it. There, the participants become co-conspirators and co-publishers of the book, fragmented into “units’’ which become publicly readable as they get co-published — and which, in themselves, possess generative capacities i.e. capacities to actually create and curate the emerging network. The play is to transform the book into a living discourse of postcapitalist expression and to open the network generation as a political-economic performance and a choreography.
To prepare the New York Sessions, here is some context.
What is the book about?
- Economic Space Agency (ECSA) is working on a formal economic grammar — a set of economic-organizational protocols — which will reshape the economic game. By approaching the economy as an information and value transfer network (economic media), the ECSA grammar is reshaping economic interactions to emphasise collaboration, shared risk-taking, and collective wealth redefinition and distribution.
- Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression — Agency, Finance and Sociality in the New Economic Space, by Dick Bryan, Jorge Lopez & Akseli Virtanen, is the original ECSA economic white paper published as a book by Minor Compositions / Autonomedia (Colchester / New York / Port Watson, 2023)
- Protocols? The book engages with the codes that structure our economic communication and coordination. These codes define our economic-organizational capacities and boundaries of action: what is economically possible. That is why it is essential to engage here. Protocols are how the possibility of action and thought (i.e. the possible) is governed.
- Postcapitalist? The book re-opens the field of economic possible. It outlines a new value calculus, encoded as a set of distributed accounting practices, to redefine what counts as value, what counts as liquidity, what counts as collateral and what counts as surplus — and who gets to decide these.
- Expression? The book develops an open economic medium to exercise and express economic agency, to form distributed economic alliances, and to dialogue about what holds value, while creating it.
- For the other key words and concepts — like Collaborative finance, Distributed accounting protocol, Economic media, Distributed stake protocol, Economic intellect, Network premium, Social derivative — in the ECSA discourse see the Glossary
What are the key capabilities of the proposed distributed economic protocol?
- Universal Issuance Rights
Every agent possesses the authority to issue assets, including money and equity, that are guided by distinct logics. Without central issuers, ledgers, or privileged financial agencies, accountability rests with the distributed network itself. - Economic-Organizational Expression
The power to issue assets becomes a catalyst for economic communication, coordination, and the organization of postcapitalist value forms and alternative modes of value calculation. We move from social media to economic media. - Mutually-Regulated Issuance
Issuance is not subject to centralized regulation. Agents within the network reciprocally regulate issuance to one another, leveraging their collective informational and computational capacities as forms of mutual aid. - A Different Economic Networking Paradigm
Reciprocal stakeholding serves as our primary networking primitive. Agents establish peer to peer economic links through reciprocal stakeholding, enabling distributed credit, and networked performance relationships. - Risking Together
Every participant shares both the downside and upside of their economic performances. Everyone is directly or transitively invested in each other, so the network as a whole is invested in every agent. - Beyond Profit As The Sole Recognized Surplus
Postcapitalist protocols allow for the recognition and accounting of forms of surplus other than profit. Agents co-create the terms by which they value their co-creations. Surplus in bespoke terms creates both network liquidity and liquidity in the “real world.” - Anything Can Be Encoded As An Economic Performance
Performance supersedes “production”, allowing an economic framing to any activity. So-called “externalities”, such as clean air, biosphere health, knowledge creation, and education, maybe recognized, organized and valued within new economic networks.
Who are the authors?
The book is a product of research undertaken by the Economic Space Agency. The authors are all members of ECSA.
Dick Bryan, PhD, is the Chief Economist at ECSA and an Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney.
Jorge Lopez, is a distributed systems architect and the Lead Network Architect at ECSA
Akseli Virtanen, D.Sc.(Econ.), is the Co-founder of ECSA, and a Docent (Associate Professor) at Aalto University.
What is Economic Space Agency?
We are a group of post-structuralist economists, economic kubists, software architects, game designers, distributed systems engineers, network choreographers, monetary theorists and intangible asset creators deeply passionate about the economy.
We are researching and developing economic media, a new medium for economic-organizational expression: a set of peer-to-peer economic networking protocols that give everyone the ability to natively speak the information economy: value intangibles, biosphere, care, social innovation and structure relationships around them.
We are organized through ECSA Inc. in San Francisco, California, ECSA Foundation in Zug, Switzerland, ECSA Labs Ltd. in Helsinki, Finland and the ECSA DAO in the cyberspace. We use reciprocal stakeholding as our network generating primitive.
Economic Space Agency was founded in 2016 in Palo Alto, California, and headquartered its first three years in Oakland, CA. We work as a distributed team, meeting also physically at least quarterly, members for example in Helsinki, Berlin, Bremen, New York, Bangor, Bangkok, Guatemala City, Guadalajara and Sydney.
Some definition (from the ECSA Glossary) is always good:
- Economic Space Agency (ECSA) An economic heresy. A market maker and a sense maker, a navigator for a postcapitalist future. A volatility space innovation: a collective risk generating and arbitraging practice which leverages on our ability to act together on an opening and collectively enjoy the upside.
- economic space agency The capability to operate and navigate in the new economic space-time. The capability to use the postcapitalist economic media to express new economic-organizational compositions. The capability the economic space protocol creates for its users. We all need it. And we want everybody to have it. The ECSA project is about open sourcing economic space agency.
What is postcapitalism?
Postcapitalism is the economic network that comes after capitalism. The ECSA project is designed to open this spread between the capitalist and postcapitalist futures.
In postcapitalism, all agents can issue assets to be used as collateral if recognized as valuable by the network. Implicit here is the idea that a postcapitalism, framed through finance, can be depicted as an economy of continuous creation and expression of new value-forms.
Our first wager is that postcapitalist value-creation will emerge from finance as the frontier of capitalist economic innovation and change. We use capitalism’s historically consolidated capacities, including computing and the power of financial instruments, to wager on postcapitalist outcomes.
Explaining this strange connection between postcapitalist economy and finance as a network generation technology forms the substance of the Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression book. We start in Chapter 1 by describing the difference between capitalism and postcapitalism as a financial ‘spread’ — a difference — which emerges by the answers these questions get in the capitalist and the postcapitalist economic networks:
- What counts as liquidity?
- What counts as collateral?
- What counts as ‘surplus’ and
- Who decides these?
ECSA is working on a grammar for postcapitalist economic-organizational expression, i.e. a medium that allows us to formulate the new answers to these questions.
The place where this postcapitalist economic network language is spoken and understood is the postcapitalist 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. In other words, the postcapitalist economic grammar is a more expressive medium to describe our economic networks, their participants, the nature of their relations and how they change, what they value, how it is counted and exchanged. Furthermore, it is a media that can make the value of any intangible, relational, informational (expression, care, the biosphere, community) offerable, exchangeable, investable, liquidity creating, leverageable — economically expressible and relatable — without collapsing all its information into “price” and “profitability”.
Our second wager is that a clear spread will open between what the capitalist and the postcapitalist economic space (economic network) make possible — there is a clear difference in their expressive capacity, accessibility, stability, adaptability, scalability, privacy, functional equality and programmability.
Now, besides politically and technically, we frame this as a spread also financially. This is the role of the ECSA token. Investing in the creation of new economic grammar is trading the spread. It is taking a long position of an alternative to capitalist modes of valuing. But we also depict it as a short position: those who recognize pointers to capitalism’s loss of legitimacy — understanding it as a cultural-financial asset in decline — may want to place a bet against it. Bitcoin may be a short position on capitalist money. But the ECSA token offers a short position on the capitalist economy and culture. The ECSA token holders retain the option to support the build-out of postcapitalism or cash out. We call this “living in the spread.” Can you afford to risk not building a different economy? Full financialization has made precarity and risk part of life. The ECSA token allows us to meaningfully risk together on a different future because it helps us build it.
For more, see: Capitalism; Postcapitalism; Postcapitalist economic media; The Big Put; ECSA token; Living in the spread
What is Co-Publishing (Co-Pub)?
Co-publishing is a new format for economic media that lets stakeholders take part in the book’s publishing and in the postcapitalist discourse generation process. This book is divided into collectible paragraphs which stakeholders can individually choose to co-publish through a symbolic financial contribution.
By acquiring a unit of the text, a participant joins a discursive community reflecting upon agency, finance and sociality in the new economic space. The postcapitalist economic space is also about creating new economic logics for open access publication. As more shareholders contribute to the publication of the book, its text will gradually be made public, one unit at a time: You will participate both in turning the book into an open access publication and in the development of its publishing format — making both permanently accessible online for everyone. As a sign of a contribution, a participant will obtain a Unit of Discourse that is uniquely her/his/theirs and grants a set of network generative capabilities.
What is a Unit of Discourse?
- A Unit of Discourse is a fragment of human and machine readable text fully on chain. Together with related on-chain text fragments the Units compose the ECSA economic white paper Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression. Technically, a Unit of Discourse is an ERC-721 NFT. You can view the whole collection e.g. on OpenSea.
- By acquiring a Unit of Discourse you become a co-publisher of the ECSA economic paper Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression and a participant in the development of postcapitalist discourse. You participate in the process of transforming the book into an open access publication and a living discourse — i.e. a living network — of postcapitalist expression. The aim is to catalyze a historically nascent community, engaging in discourse creation, and with that the rethinking and remaking of our relationships with knowledge, expressivity and value.
- The Unit gives its holder a set of discourse generating rights and capabilities.
How much does it cost to acquire a Unit of Discourse?
- Each Unit of Discourse is available from the book website site at two different price tiers. We ask participants to choose the price tier that makes sense for their financial circumstances. Our hope is to make these units accessible to those in precarious situations or living in the global south.
- By co-publishing a Unit, you support both turning the book into an open access publication and in the development of its CoPub co-publishing format — making both permanently accessible online for everyone. It is a play both for the commons and for the development of a postcapitalist economic model around it.
- Furthermore, you will receive the book as a custom PDF and a serious set of discourse generating capabilities in exchange for your support.
- We trust that if you have benefited from systemic inequalities or the structures of capitalism and/or if you reside and work in a country within the Imperial Core and possess the means, you’ll consider adjusting the slider upwards.
- “More periphery” is meant for people with lower access to wealth in the global context (as a general rule of thumb: most people in the Global South and people who’ve been systematically disadvantaged or are poor/precarious class in the Global North)
- “More imperial core” is meant for people with medium to high access to wealth in the global context (as a general rule of thumb: middle class and upper/owning class people in the Global North, anyone with investments or retirement savings, anyone who expects an inheritance)
- For our take on Decolonized Finance see here.
- Within each price tier, there is a Virtual Book Only Bundle and a Special Edition Print Book Bundle available. These bundles contain the same rights, regardless of whether one chooses the higher or lower price tier.
How many Units of Discourse are there?
The Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression collection consists of 601 Units of Discourse. Other collections of Units of Discourse might be released in the future.
How do I acquire a Unit of Discourse?
First you need to receive an invite code. If you don’t have one yet, this is how you can get an invite-code. Then you need to follow these steps:
- Step 1 — Navigate to the invite code address in your browser.
- Step 2 — Turn on Economic Media mode by clicking [the Orb symbol] at the bottom of the window.
- Step 3 — Find an available unit you want to publish, and click the ‘publish unit’ button below it.
- Step 4 — Choose your price tier and click the ‘co-publish’ button.
- Step 5 — Connect your wallet on the Polygon / Matic network. (If you’re having trouble connecting to the Polygon network, follow these instructions).
- Step 6 — Co-publish. Make sure you have enough MATIC in your wallet.
- Step 7 — Copy invitations and send them to your friends!
- Step 8 — Download your custom PDF; Come check what is going on at Postcapitalist Discord server.
It is early access
Checking this out now, you are among the first users beyond the core ECSA team to interact with the co-publishing platform, so please bear with us 🙂. The co-publishing platform is early in development and we’re actively working to improve it. The current version (v0.1) is functional, but you might encounter some glitches. At the moment, for the best experience, we recommend using Chrome or other Chromium-based browsers (we recommend not using Firefox at this phase, sorry).
Need help?
We’ve gathered answers to some questions on the project FAQ page (like how to get MATIC, how to add Polygon network to your wallet etc.). If you have further questions or difficulties, for the fastest response, please join our new Postcapitalist Discourse Development Discord server and open a support ticket in the #help channel so that a team member can assist you.
Credits
Physical Book
Authors | Dick Bryan, Jorge López, Akseli Virtanen
Foreword | Jonathan Beller
Cover & diagrams design | Pablo Somonte Ruano
Interior design | Casandra Johns
Printing & publishing | Minor Compositions
Book Platform
Design, coding & graphics | Pablo Somonte Ruano
Web3 integration & NFT deployment | Aleksa Stojanović
On-chain NFT design | Catherine Schmidt
Metadata | Mikael Brygger
Audiobook | Mat Slater
epub & html parser | Daniel Shinbaum
Texts & documentation | Daniel Shinbaum & Akseli Virtanen
Glossary | Rüzgar Imski, Daniel Shinbaum & Akseli Virtanen
Discourse Discord| Mikkel Kjär, Catherine Schmidt, Joel Mason
Support & Feedback | Pekko Koskinen, Rüzgar Imski, Mikael Brygger, Jorge López, Michele Iovino, Alvar Virtanen, Jonathan Beller & Joel Mason
