# PROTOCOLS FOR POSTCAPITALIST EXPRESSION - A DISCUSSION
### A discussion on postcapitalism with *Dick Bryan, Jorge Lopez & Akseli Virtanen*, the authors of the Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression (Minor Compositions / Autonomedia, 2023)

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<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/952372595">ECSA - PROTOCOLS FOR POSTCAPITALIST EXPRESSION</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user107362054">Economic Space Agency</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

[A discussion held on Tuesday 21.5.2024 18-20, The House of Text, Helsinki](https://www.tekstintalo.fi/tapahtumat/protocols-for-postcapitalist-expression)

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*“To change our economy 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!

The recently published book ***Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression*** (Minor Compositions / Autonomedia, 2023) by [**Dick Bryan**](https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/dick-bryan.html), [**Jorge Lopez**](https://hackmd.io/TqBLkWl_Q6am7SrQsfnQig?view) and [**Akseli Virtanen**](https://hackmd.io/@econaut6/S1GEgoSLY) has been said to be a major contribution in pushing political economy into the information age and opening economics to politics.

The book argues that money is a very interesting networking technology and an interoperability protocol. Furthermore, it shows how the recent developments in distributed computation and record keeping have given us now the ability to create – in a decentralized way – similar economic collaboration protocols as money has historically been. Yet to unlock the full potentiality of an informationally mediated economy and the autonomist politics it could enable, we need a new understanding of the economy: understanding economy as a network — a group of agents interacting according to certain shared understanding about the relations that make the network and its state — and opening these interaction protocols as a design and expression space for everyone.

The digital revolution has pretty much failed us economically. Social media horizontalized our communication, but left the information and protocol layer called the economy untouched. We can’t control the economic protocols that underpin the value capture of our communication. The book architects a next generation economic medium which can redesign the default convergence of communication, finance and computation in ways that are programmable from below.

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 it 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 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 space of what can be said and done, when, by whom, for what purpose. For example: what counts (can count) as liquidity; what counts (can count) as collateral; and who gets to decide these?

The issues of liquidity and collateral go to the heart of what drives capitalism as a financial system. To challenge what counts as liquidity and as collateral under capitalism is the basis on which to open up the agenda of building the postcapitalist economic network. This focus, and the construction of an economic protocol for distributed liquidity and distributed collateral 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 with the authors where they share about their project on developing an open economic medium to 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.

[**Dick Bryan**](https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/dick-bryan.html), [**Jorge Lopez**](https://hackmd.io/TqBLkWl_Q6am7SrQsfnQig?view) and [**Akseli Virtanen**](https://hackmd.io/@econaut6/S1GEgoSLY) are members of the Economic Space Agency, a collective of post-structuralist economists, economic kubists, software engineers, game designers, artists and intangible asset creators deeply passionate about the economy.

**Reading material**
*[**On Economic Intelligence**](https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/rJSza2HxR)*(Foreword) by Jon Beller, Prof. Media, Pratt NYC
[**Table of Contents, Ch 1 & Ch 2**](https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/B1DPptiMC)
[**Postcapitalist discourse glossary: A map to postcapitalist space**](https://glossary.ecsa.io/accounting)


*“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

*“The most sophisticated understanding of finance as a political tool I’ve seen”*
Robert Meister, Prof. UCSC, the author of Justice is an Option

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

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

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