AUTHORING FUTURES

PROTOCOLS FOR POSTCAPITALIST EXPRESSION

A discussion on postcapitalism and economic media with Dick Bryan, Jorge López & Akseli Virtanen, the authors of the Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression (Minor Compositions / Autonomedia, 2023).

TIME AND PLACE
Wednesday May 29th
Nome Gallery @ 18h
POTSDAMER STR. 72 - 10785 BERLIN
https://nomegallery.com/

ECSA - PROTOCOLS FOR POSTCAPITALIST EXPRESSION from Economic Space Agency on Vimeo.

“To change our economic reality we need to change our economic language, for the nature of our economy is bound by the expressivity of the language that can conceive it.”

Welcome to a discussion on postcapitalist economic-organizational expression – a theme connected directly to the black fugitivity of Kameelah Janan Rasheed and to the search for radical economic expressivity by Goldin+Senneby’s Spot Price, both at the Nome Gallery.

The recently published book Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression (Minor Compositions / Autonomedia, 2023) by Dick Bryan, Jorge López & Akseli Virtanen, has been described as a major contribution in deconstructing economic intelligence, historically sedimented in economic categories and practices, while reconstructing it as a ​new strategy for collective organization and creation of new value forms.

There is no doubt that our economic organization is catching up with the new substrate of high speed computer networks with high informational capacities, bandwidth and connectivity. This will make radically new economic-organizational composition possible.

The book’s thesis is that this will elevate the economy into something that resembles an expressive medium. As a medium, the economy is fundamentally a communication and writing system: an economic messaging protocol. And, as such, it can also be reprogrammed to say and communicate different things, with different logics, and with different network relations (who can do what).

This is important because protocols are essentially about the organization of the potentiality space: they set the interaction conditions for what can be said and done, when, by whom, for what purpose. For example: what counts (can count) as an ‘asset’, what counts (can count) as ‘liquidity’, and what counts (can count) as ‘collateral’; and who gets to decide these?

The issues of assets, liquidity and collateral go to the heart of what drives capitalism as a financial system. To challenge what counts economically under capitalism is the basis on which to open up the agenda of counting differently (how should we count) as a condition of building a postcapitalist economic network. This focus, and the construction of an economic protocol for distributed determination of how and what to count, is at the heart of what the book proposes. We need a more expressive economic grammar to answer the questions differently – for our economic organization is always bound by the expressivity of the language we use to conceive it.

Join the discussion on developing an open economic medium to collectively author futures, exercise and express economic agency, form distributed economic alliances, and to dialogue about what holds value, while creating it.

The book has also been released as an open access publication, but in a way that rethinks the economic space of open access publishing and experiments with text as a culture and network generating protocol. Test it out yourself: https://postcapitalist.agency

The book is available at a discounted price at the event.

You are also welcomed to stay afterwards for some wine and snacks and to get more familiar with the exhibition by Kameelah Janan Rasheed and the Spot Price by Goldin+Senneby.

Dick Bryan, Jorge Lopez and Akseli Virtanen are members of the Economic Space Agency, a collective of post-structuralist economists, economic kubists, software engineers, game designers, monetary theorists and intangible asset creators deeply passionate about the economy.

Reading material

Protocols for postcapitalist expression by Dick Bryan, Jorge López & Akseli Virtanen

On Economic Intelligence (Foreword) by Prof. Jonathan Beller, Media at Pratt, NYC

Ch 1: Introduction & Ch 2: From capitalist to postcapitalist economy

Postcapitalist discourse glossary: A map to a new economic space

Regions of interest, by Goldin+Senneby

That is complete. And knowledge is another, Kameelan Janan Rashedd at Nome Gallery

“ECSA is an economic heresy. I love it.”
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, philosopher, the author of Soul at Work

“A ​new strategy for collective organization and expression of collective intelligence”
Prof. Jonathan Beller, Media & Humanities, Pratt, NYC

“What an accomplishment! This is what economics can look like when it does not treat the status quo like natural law.”
Prof. Nathan Schneider, Prof. Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

“This book invites you to dream: the redistribution of money is possible.”
Prof. Geert Lovink, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam

“A major contribution in pushing political economy into the information age and reopening the field of economic possible.”
Prof. Douglas Rushkoff, Digital Economy, CUNY

”One of the few teams from whom I’d want to ask: What should be built?”
Dr. Michel Zargham, Founder, BlockScience

“The deepest economic thinkers in the space”
Vinay Gupta, Founder, Mattereum; Ethereum network launch release coordinator