HOW TO SHORT CAPITALISM: THE CRYPTO-POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ECONOMIC SPACE AGENCY
OPEN OFFICE, BERLIN, MARCH 10-12 2019
ECSA OPEN OFFICE – 3 days of discussions and collective exploration around the next generation network infrastructure for programmable economies
Economic Space Agency (ECSA) is building the next generation network infrastructure for programmable economies. Most blockchain and distributed ledger technologies applications are oriented toward the creation of distributed markets, reinforcing rather than disrupting oligarchic concentration of wealth over time and questioning what “value” is actually traded. ECSA offers something different: a fully integrated, commons-oriented approach to cryptoeconomy.
Full updated schedule here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eQqHsO_S7XLlu91rmo74BkKBIMy-PqpNajBPCQxWaMQ/edit#heading=h.xosx54k5ua59
Schedule and Venue
** All activities are open to the public – some sessions require previous registration **
Day 1 : How to Short Capitalism: Economic Space Agency and the Big Put
14:00 – 18:00: ECSA Cryptoeconomic White Paper Review (RSVP)
19:30 – 21:30: Public Presentation of ECSA’s Big Put Strategy
Venue: Trust, Kluckstr. 25 ( https://trust.support/)
Day 2: Economic Space Design Program
13:00 – 17:00: Economic space design Protocol and the Space grammar
18:00 – 20:00: Economic Space 2150: A speculative Design Session
Venue: Haus der Statistik, 1, Karl-Marx Allee (Alexanderplatz)
Day 3: The Politics of Cryptonetworks: The Feel of the Infrastructure
11:00- 13:30: Crypto-finance and Urban commons: around Haus der Statistik
18:00 -20:00: The Politics of Cryptonetworks? A session on the key themes ECSA team has been working on.
Venue: Haus der Statistik, 1, Karl-Marx Allee (Alexanderplatz)
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About us: Economic Space Agency (www.ecsa.io) is a group of radical economists, software architects, finance theorists, game designers, critical thinkers and artists, coming together to reimagine the future of the economy. Our crew in Berlin will include, among others: Akseli Virtanen, Pekko Koskinen, Jackie Vu, James Foley, Jonathan Beller, Joel E. Mason, Lene Vollhardt, Erik Bordeleau, Fabian Bruder, Emma Stenström, Eugenio Battaglia, Emanuele Braga, Tirdad Zolghadr, Matthias Einhoff, Kim Stanley Robinson and more.
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Day 1 : How to Short Capitalism: Economic Space Agency and the Big Put
Venue: Trust, Kluckstr. 25
14:00 – 18:00: ECSA Cryptoeconomic White Paper Review
(Registration required – please contact akseli@ecsa.io)
19:30 – 21:30: Public Presentation of ECSA’s Big Put Strategy
Economic Space Agency (ECSA) is building the next generation network infrastructure for programmable economies. Most blockchain and distributed ledger technologies applications are oriented toward the creation of distributed markets, reinforcing rather than disrupting oligarchic concentration of wealth over time and questioning what “value” is actually traded. ECSA offers something different: a fully integrated, commons-oriented approach to cryptoeconomy. Activities currently deemed desirable but unprofitable and unmeasurable – for example care, art, affect, biosphere enhancement – can not only now be expressed as value-creating activity, but they can also be synchronized and cross-referenced with each other in a way that gives them liquidity.
A token system must be able to present the social in its DNA. That is the genetically modified economy ECSA is after. The key question for is: how does ECSA build this alternative social calculus? We offer a design space for not merely tokens as means of exchange for optimal trading processes, but rather as a unit of account: as a mode of measuring; as a mode of valuing. We call it the ECSA stack. It is made of: 1. A distributed computational architecture (Gravity); 2. A multi-agent network programming language and environment (Space); 3. economic interoperability protocols (Economic Space). The ECSA stack opens up a different, more expansive – more political – design space for what is actually valued, how it is valued, why is it valued, without the imperative to be reduced to a single measure called the ‘price’.
To activate the ECSA stack, we have designed a new kind of collective financial instrument, the ECSA dual token system, a wager of collective praxis that opens up agency into the new economic space. The ECSA token gives its holder agency – economic space agency – to operate and participate in the emerging web 3.0 economy. We call our offer the Big Put as it allows investors to buy the right to offload their exposure to the capitalist calculation of value and gain instead exposure to new value forms and modes of qualitative valuations.
The ECSA economy involves taking risk position on the established capitalist economy, its calculation of value, and the economic and political power structure around it. The ECSA token will trade the spread between the probabilities of capitalism declining and ECSA prospering. It is a play on the capitalist desire to short itself and the value creating potential of the new economic space.
White Paper Summary:
Genetically Modified Economy
The Crypto-Political Economy of Economic Space Agency
1. Capitalism is passé: the cultural-financial decline of the asset called capitalist value
2. Crypto-Political Economy
2.1 Background
2.2 The Hayekian Turn / The mystic of price
2.3 Why is ‘price’ the privileged index of valuation?
2.5 What is valued is social, the way it is measured is social
2.4 The gift as social value: A derivative framing of the social
3. The ECSA Economy: doing value in a digitally composable economy
3.1 Forms of sociality as a design space
3.2 Valuing care, valuing art, valuing intangibles, valuing biosphere
3.3 Synchronizing difference in derivative and digitally composable finance
3.4 Crypto-semiotics: Index that carries the potential of the digital
3.5 ECSA as a data union, not a data market
3.6 Gravity, Space and Economic Space in construction of the ‘synthetic social’
3.7 The ECSA surplus
4. ECSA Two Token System: Liquidity, Stability, Risking Together
4.1 The ECSA Token
4.2 Returns to ECSA Token holders
4.3 Individual Economic Space tokens
4.4 Relation between ECSA token and individual economic space tokens
4.5 Token governance
4.6 ECSA unit of account
4.7 The Offer: Liquidity, Stability, Risking together
5. The Fundamental Value of ECSA tokens
5.1 Background
5.2 MV=PQ: A popular take on cryptovaluation
5.3 ECSA MV=PQ
5.4 ECSA Token’s Fundamental Value crystalized
6. The Big Put
Additional preparation materials
ECSA take on crypto-economics: Economics back to cryptoeconomics
https://medium.com/econaut/economics-back-into-cryptoeconomics-20471f5ceeea
ECSA Stack Architectural Description
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HxqlId13F9Dw7SbAEi3MgC5VAMJAaMtbIfo1B5V7560/edit
Collaborator Round one pager https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BV0-B-VwWXQKWA_JCagTSmEPopgyjBGGrQZ3FSr-6JI/editEC
ECSA Core Team and Advisors
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15F-OjvR2w-_IKHVW3GuKLrs6ajz3mdPOpRL92kaAu44/edit
* *SHORT VIDEOS ON THE ECSA STACK
1. The ECSA Tech Stack in 30sec_ (video) _ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGsaU9zXKUo&feature=youtu.be)
2. Gravity in the history of computing: Small Talk, Self, Xerox Parc, ocap, Mark Miller… _(video)_ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP0EtBNvS-o)
3. On Gravity 1: Balancing privacy with the utility of aggregating data _(video)_ (https://youtu.be/eHabxMq5Hts)
4. On Gravity 2: Informational integrity of network derivatives _(video)_ (https://youtu.be/5RIFQveg-u4)
5. On Gravity 3: Decentralized exchange, stable exchange unit, bridging different value forms _(video)_ (https://youtu.be/VV3GEagvFZc)
6. On Space 1: Programming organization _(video)_ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC6Q_1q_cWI)
7. On Space 2: Token architectures in programmable economy (_video_ (https://youtu.be/ph7je_E-cGU)
8. On Space 3: Economy is a game (_video_(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVH1K7zd2UE&feature=youtu.be))
Day 2: Economic Space Design Program
Venue: Haus der Statistik, 1, Karl-Marx Allee (Alexanderplatz)
Economic Space Agency takes the day to speak into existence a program of speculative Economic Space design. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten say of poet Mikey Smith that he’s “jaywalking through the language” (Mikey the Rebelator, 2015). ECSA is jaywalking through the economic language, and the organizational language, to clear a space for new design in uncertain times. The design program will share stories of its adventures in designing new economic space, from ECSA as a “protocol organization” to the new value forms being sought by partner projects.
13:00 – 15:00:
Economic space design program: an extrapolation of our Space grammar-based techno-social choreography in becoming. The ecsa protocol organization will be released, sharing examples from partner projects and showing current concrete possibilities and problematics of economic space design.
15:30 to 17:00:
Affordances of Space grammar: a more tech-oriented presentation of the potential and capacities of the Space grammar, a multi-agent network programming language and environment. Followed by a discussion inviting those gathered into a spectrum of future collaboration and co-imagination.
18:00 – 20:00:
Economic Space 2150: An open-ended speculative design session based on ECSA collaborator Kim Stanley Robinson’s ongoing work about the creation of new economic spaces. The economy needs to be fully reset. Unleash the economic space design imaginary!
“Essentially, we as a society would be deciding to pay ourselves to do the work needed to create a good Anthropocene. An ecology-minded quantitative easing would be its own kind of geo-engineering. Some are calling this the Green New Deal.”
“We live under a global capitalist system, in which the market rules. And that system’s oversimple algorithm, which measures priceless things in terms of quarterly profit and shareholder value, is mindlessly chewing up the biosphere and the lives of everyone in it.”
(Kim Stanley Robinson)
Day 3: The Feel of the Infrastructure:
Engineering New Economic Spaces
Venue: Haus der Statistik, 1, Karl-Marx Allee (Alexanderplatz)
How can cryptographically enabled distributed economic-organizational systems – aka economic spaces – allow for the building of a radically different political economy and modes of collective individuation? The capitalist profit extracting value calculus and its implied take on “rationality” is a design environment that is geared toward a certain kind of optimal behavior. It is a protocol for the kind of people and sociality it requires to function, seeking, nudging, sifting up and training players toward the required and desired (game theoretic, axiomatized expected utility seeking) competencies – the programmatic abstraction called homo oeconomicus. Economic agencies and DAO’s of different natures are designed to think like corporations and compete in the next level of economic game coming ahead. Without techno-social devices and infrastructures that operate at the protocol level for reshaping the economic gamespace toward commons-oriented purposes, we are left without politics, incapable of addressing and intervening efficiently in the processes redefining our rapidly evolving and fragmenting future.
11:00- 13:30:
Crypto-finance and Urban commons: around Haus der Statistik
Digital ledger technologies offer a new playing field, ushering in new forms of decentralized governance, collective wealth management and fractal ownership along the way. Can crypto-scalable urban commons address issues of gentrification and instigate new long-term strategies for funding the cooperative city and sustainable models of redistribution of the risks and opportunities of living, in a world that gestures ever more strongly beyond limited profit-taking enterprises? Featuring different participants to the Haus der Statistik / Statista project and the Beecoin public art initiative.
[14:00 -17:00: ECSA Filming block]
18:00 – 20:00:
The Politics of Cryptonetworks?
A session on some of the key themes ECSA team is working on.
We think we are discovering (1) a new distributed value form: a social, organizational, relational value form that leverages the ability to act together; (2) a new value calculus, i.e., modes of measurement embracing different ethical and political starting points, including aesthetic and qualitative evaluations of what is thought ‘valuable’. It is this relationality and sociality of value – the way we sense and move with one another and leverage the ability to act together – that the old economic grammar does not understand, and for the expression of which Economic Space Agency has created its cyber-social stack (see here). If bitcoin is as a computing architecture like a calculator; Ethereum like a mainframe computer; Cosmos SDK and Polkadot Substrate like customizable server structures; the ECSA Stack belongs to the next cloud era of generalized distributed computation and what it will make possible.
But what are the politics of cryptonetworks? What are the political consequences of our economic-organizational composition becoming bounded only by our creativity (it becoming a purely software design question)? This is a session on some of the key themes and question ECSA team has been working on, concrete steps we’ve taken but also the questions, doubts and challenges we face while developing these new economic-organizational value forms or “networks with consequences”. Lead by Jonathan Beller from the ECSA team.