### Here are some of my writings, talks & interviews


**Dick Bryan, Jorge Lopez & Akseli Virtanen (2023):** *[Protocols For Postcapitalist Expression - Agency, Finance & Sociality In The New Economic Space](https://ecsa-nft.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmZZMxzKSm88446Vr5mNN9cL2YS3VFGbRp8Ru1KTda4HTN)* (Colchester, New York, Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2023.

**Jorge Lopez & Akseli Virtanen (2023):** [An Expanded Ledger Grammar For Encoding And Communicating Our Economic Realities](https://medium.com/econaut/an-expanded-ledger-grammar-for-encoding-and-communicating-our-economic-realities-b32cdb1d3abb)
It is becoming clearer and clearer to us that there is a transformative potential of viewing accounting practices and ledgers as an economic grammar — a formal language that encodes and communicates our economic realities. While traditional accounting principles have long served to sustain capitalist structures, we think that an evolved economic grammar, grounded in the principles of postcapitalism, could provide a platform for redefining economic practices and relationships. Drawing on semiotics, linguistics, and formal languages, we can show how accounting can transition from a tool of capitalism to a language of postcapitalism.

**Jorge Lopez & Akseli Virtanen (2023)**: [Reciprocal Stakeholding: A New Economic Networking Primitive](https://medium.com/econaut/reciprocal-stakeholding-a-new-economic-networking-primitive-31ff81b336f0)
Here is the thinking related to our ETH Barcelona presentation — why we think the inevitable future of blockchain space is an inter-blockchain economic grammar as “Layer 1”. To create a diverse, mutually reinforcing economic network, we need a new economic networking primitive: reciprocal stake holding. This becomes the financial link connecting blockchains, and economic agents. Reciprocal staking relationships involve simultaneous (1) equity exchange, (2) bilateral credit, and (3) co-performance agreements. It is a new kind of economic transaction. Economic agents are taking a risk together on a shared economic goal to increase their value, aligning their performances, while simultaneously creating endogenous network liquidity to sustain their economic activities. We have described this logic in detail in the ECSA economic paper Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression (Minor Compositions, 2023). This model reduces the need for external liquidity, and with that, the power of a capitalist economic logic, allowing the blockchain space to explore new value forms and measurements. Importantly, it creates and amplifies trust to collaborate in a fully distributed way. Even though we need our infrastructure to be trustworthy, the desire for true decentralization and the need for safety must be grounded on acknowledging, understanding and nurturing trust.

**Jorge Lopez (2022):** [Economy As A Re-Programmable Communication Medium](https://web.archive.org/web/20220815054657/http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/77-lfu-43/1102-jorge-lopez-our-economy-a-re-programmable-network-operating-system)
On economy as a communication medium. This is an invitation to understand our economy as a re-designable communication medium and organization system, where our exchanges are not only material, but also informational. An invitation to enter a practical conversation on the reconfiguration of the system we share and rely upon to collectively coordinate, govern and empower each other to transform and rearrange our world. This is about more than a fussy abstraction that serves as little more than metaphor to explain the big picture. It is about the importance of identifying and recognizing the formal dimensions of our economy as a multilayer communications network. A network whose protocols we can elucidate, but most importantly, open, reflect upon and redesign. To serve our intent, we must formalize its functional building blocks. To sketch its forms, the interplay of such forms, and the totality of what they create. We must reveal our economy as a collective conversation that has a language: A set of conventions dictating how to “speak”, and what we can “say”. This economic language contains familiar terms like asset, liability, exchange, netting, clearing, and exchange rate. These terms exist in a mutual reference network of definitions that form an “economic dictionary”. It also follows a grammar: a set of rules that determines the way these terms may be put together. An economic protocol, as we shall discover.

**Akseli Virtanen, Jorge Lopez, Dick Bryan, Jonathan Beller, Benjamin Lee:** **[MIT Cryptoeconomic Systems Summit ’19 – A Discussion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swxw84Af0SE&feature=youtu.be)**
*Panel discussion of the event “Protocols for a Cryptoeconomic Network – with Akseli Virtanen, Jorge Lopez, Dick Bryan, Jonathan Beller, Benjamin Lee.”*
“We see profit-making as an index. Profit making would be a goal that each agent would try to maximise. It influences the decision making process by which /offers/ are made and accepted.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 explicit, deliberate change of the goal of the game.”

**Cryptoeconomic working sessions, NYU (2018)**
*16-18 October 2018, New York University / Stern Business School*
The Economic Space Agency project is to create new (post-capitalist) economic space and tools for people to start operating and exploring this space. We think we are discovering a new distributed value form and value calculus which are different to the capitalist commodity form and calculation of value. If this is true, it means reorganization and reproduction of economic space itself. The ECSA token system can be framed as a put option on capitalist value calculation: people buying the ECSA token are purchasing access and relation to new value forms and thus a difference to capitalist calculation of value. ECSA is offering the right for agents to part with/sell out of capitalist calculus of value. We call it a put option as a statement of our long position as a difference to valuing and calculating just “profit” — the value of a put option rises as the value of the underlying asset (capitalist value, or more precisely, capitalist perspective on value, how it is created and captured) declines. In this session we explain the ‘big put’ as an exploration of how to organize the production of value and how calculate value in ways different from those that define capitalism.

**ECSA Tech Stack – A Technical Session**
*October 4, 2018 Starfish, San Francisco*
An exploration session on the lower levels of the ECSA Tech Stack: Distributed runtime + Programmable language for organization + protocols for value expression, measurement & exchange. *Gravity*: Distributed Runtime. Gravity node provides with secure computational containment, serialization, persistence, networking, and hardware interfaces to be utilized up the stack. *Gravity Protocol*: Informational Integrity. The Gravity protocol provides event ordering, scaling, strong security, fail recovery and high availability. It ensures network wide consistency, and enables distributed atomic transactions. *Space:* Organizational Expression. Space is a capability oriented organizational development environment and language to easily reason about, describe and program organizations. *Space Protocol:* Organizational Interoperability. The Space Protocol allows distributed applications “Spaces” to interoperate, regardless of their implementation substrate.

**Distributed Exchange, Synthetic Indices & Network Derivatives**
*18.9.2018 Token Engineering, Outlier Ventures, London*
Space is a modular organizational grammar and an organizational development environment that allows us to describe agents, relationships, protocols and organizations through an offer centric association grammar. Space allows us to describe existing, but most excitingly, new organizational forms while allowing them to remain interoperable. Economic Space is a modular economic grammar – allowing not only decentralized exchange but also the design of distributed value production and its organization. It opens a new economic design space of a more longer term (persistent) and multidimensionally value creating social relationships (of belonging, interacting, governing, risking together) than just issuance and exchange of tokens which collapse relationships. Token Engineering Session #3, hosted by Outlier Ventures.

**Cryptocurrencies And Its Discontents**
*September 26-27, 2017, E-flux & Pratt, NYC*
The Occupy Wall Street movement raised an essential question that we haven’t quite been able to answer yet: How to occupy an abstraction? Financial capitalism hangs above our heads like an extractive cloud that escapes our grasp. It uses monetization as the mechanism by which social, cultural, economic, and ecological values are all flattened out and made equivalent to one another. And obviously, this whole extractive architecture is inherently hierarchical: some privileged few are allowed to issue money, while everyone else can only issue promises to pay money. How can we shift from the individual precarity generated by extractive finance to new forms of mutual indebtedness and metastable stakeholding? For starters, we need to conceive of money as a technical object of social design; that is, something that can and needs to be re-engineered to serve our collective aspirations. In that sense, the excitement around blockchain and crypto-currencies is an excitement around a new means of encryption that takes one huge step towards the democratization of finance through techniques of decentralization. Organized by E-Flux.

**“[A Distributed Exchange Protocol]**(https://youtu.be/TGuPuXapz68)” (MIT)
In concise descriptions, Jorge Lopez (Chief Architect, ECSA) outlines an innovative model of a distributed exchange protocol and its computational implications.

**Poly-Centricity. Blockchain Meets Object Capabilities**
*ECSA at UC Berkeley, 2017*
How blockchain technologies can leverage the secure computation model of object capabilities to expand its reach, capacity, and interoperability towards open web platforms and open web infrastructure, without forsaking security and data sovereignty? Current blockchains provide trustless third parties and the ability to operate smart contracts on a public ledger. Meanwhile, object capabilities are based on transmitting tokens of authorities and rights that allow token-holders the ability to securely perform operations in a distributed system that is private, granular, and scalable. Blockchains make compromising information incredibly expensive through massive replication of data. Capabilities extend the promise of security through more light-weight mechanisms such as “Proof of Authority” and greater decentralization at the application layer.

[**Protocols for expressing postcapitalist economic organization**](https://youtu.be/T_axyq1JjX4)
(CryptoCafe, Madrid 2023)
“Economic Space Agency (ECSA) is one of the interesting projects working with collaborative finance (CoFi). They are developing protocols for expressing postcapitalist economic organization. The first layer of their economic networking protocol stack is functional and passing most specification tests. They talk about it as a new kind of a medium, a formal medium for creating economic organization (an economic media). They call it the economic space protocol. It is an economic networking protocol that gives people the power to create economic networks. Economic networks, they believe, will be for Web3 what social networks were for Web2 and shared keyword networks were for Web1. Economic space protocol is a grammar for creating economic networks. It enables a programmable network where participants can publish, validate, and value each other’s contributions. It introduces a novel value primitive and a transaction type that involves exchanging stake for access to each other’s output and reciprocal credit lines. The protocol redefines wealth by recognizing stake as preferred stores of value and incentivizes cooperation by rewarding those who align their performances with one another. It establishes distributed governance to decide what should be valued and forms an economic medium in which all agents have universal issuance rights.

**The Next Frontier: Blockchain Meets Object-Capabilities**
*Foresight institute, San Francisco 2017*
We co-hosted a symposium with the Foresight Institute at Alamo Square, SF, entitled, “The Next Frontier: Blockchain meets Object-Capabilities.” The panelists included Mark S. Miller, Zooko Wilcox, Brian Warner, and Jorge Lopez, and the discussion was be moderated by Michael Casey from MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative. For us, starting this dialogue was very important, because our aim is to implement security and trust/trustlessness in a very different way compared to the more familiar approaches in blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The object capability framework, we feel, is less well-known than it deserves to be, and we hoped that this event created awareness of its possibilities by explaining how it expands the way in which distributed computation and ledger systems are currently seen. Here is [Mark Miller referring to our work](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SuqIrgRJU).