Glossary for GRAVITY and SPACE

A while back, someone suspected that ECSA was a parody, since we used ambitious language like “Genetically modified economy”. As often with these things, some other people have found the comparison to genetic modification a particularly illuminating one: new (living/economic) forms become possible, when the basic information they are bootstrapped from is reconfigured (in the case of our two technologies, Space and Gravity, the reconfiguration happens to forms and governance of value transactions).

But there is a deeper issue that goes beyond “case ECSA”. As Duke tweeted:

We do believe that the change needed is not solely a reconfiguration of technological landscape, it’s a creative one, and we are out to welcome a sea change on how people think about economy. That might mean some unfamiliar language and the metaphors might appear clumsy. The only possible proof of the pudding comes later, if some of the metaphors hit the mark and thoughts really do change.
In the meantime, there is always the possible criticism that no neologism or fancy language is necessary. For instance, see this discussion between Emin Gun Sirer and Paul Coman in the case of Bancor:

Emin Gun Sirer: “Inventing new terminology instead of using existing well-understood concepts is a marker for either not being in grasp of the area or pulling the wool over someone’s eyes.”

Paul Coman: “Inventing terminology for new things is required to define those new things (in a new way).”

As such, both points are correct. The uncomfortable truth in this matter is that there are good arguments for both positions. Our wager and experience is that creative and metaphoric language, “even” art, is useful and fruitful when approaching something new and broadening horizons, so we will stick with it. We haven’t yet seen what a token can do!

In that spirit, we have decided to start building a small glossary of terms that we hope to be helpful. Check it out here.

Here are first terms to get us going:

Economic Space
i) The collection of users, smart (private and/or public) contracts, resource pools and governance models to which said users have voluntarily committed, that together organise and maintain economic group activity.
ii) The material and immaterial system of coordinates and attractors that gives shape to how people create and interact with resources, assets, values and their different modes of expression and representation.
On Space, economic spaces are protocols of economic, financial and social interaction, of value and risk creation, of sharing and distribution of resources. They are self-governed, peer-to-peer programmable organizations that can operate together in an emergent network, formed dynamically through the relations they establish between each other. The goal is the interoperation of a plurality of micro-economies, each with its own governance model, value creation logic and capacity for tokenized self-issuance. These micro-economies will be structurally interoperable to the extent they desire, and they will be able to utilize the structures created by others as a basis of their own operations.

Self-issuance
Self-issuance signifies that any agent can issue value, proposing it to other agents — its valuation is therefore a general question for the society at large and a practical question for each individual agent, whenever they face an offer for it. In current finance, value masquerades as objective, actively suppressing the highly protean emergence of value and the variegated forms it takes. Valuation is ultimately an expression. Issuance of value and value systems is therefore a proposal to be evaluated by others, transforming into collective expression of value. Instead of imposing a uniform system of value upon us, like fiat currencies enforce, ECSA’s key goal is to create a platform for rendering the rich, heterogeneous multiverse of values socially and financially liquid through mutual e-valuations.

The possibilities introduced by self-issuance enable economic spaces to rewrite the economic playbook according to new rules and new behavioural patterns. This translates into self-governance.

Join the discussion in ECSA slack.