A Letter to Agentic State

# A Letter to Agentic State From: The Economic Space Agency (ECSA) team To: Agentic State team Subject: A Synthesis of Economic and Governance Architectures for the Agent-Based Era Sent: 28.10.2025 --- ### Preamble: Two Protocols, One Mission Your work on ["The Agentic State"](https://agenticstate.org/) is extremely interesting. It correctly diagnoses the 20th-century bureaucracy as an obsolete protocol for governance, constrained by the static medium of paper and ink, and proposes a necessary shift to an adaptive, outcome-driven model fit for a new, computational medium. We, who are working at distributing economic space agency, approach this same historical moment from a parallel dimension: the protocol of the economy. We think our mission is the same: to make public goods and the commons sustainable, legible, and optimizable. We see your project and ours as two inseparable components of a single, necessary architecture for a Democratic Computable Society. This open letter is a proposal for that synthesis, arguing that a Democratic Computable State requires a Democratic Computable Economy, and that together, they can unlock a new era of sovereignty and generative value, for example, for Europe. ### 1. The Informational Critique of the State: From Central Actor to Protocol We are living through a fundamental shift in our underlying medium of coordination. The legacy protocols of both the state and the economy — Weberian bureaucracy and industrial capitalism — were almost brilliant adaptations to the limitations of their medium. In a world where information was scarce and computation was costly, the hub-and-spoke architecture was the only viable model to amortize costs and manage complexity. Hierarchies, centralized institutions, and reductionist metrics were pragmatic necessities in a world where computation was scarce and communication was slow. Today, the new medium of computational networks have rendered these constraints obsolete. We now have the capacity for vastly more complex, distributed, and multi-dimensional coordination patterns. This technical reality forces upon us a profound political and architectural choice, which can be distilled into a single, critical question: **In this new agentic era, who, or what, gains agency?** This question defines the two possible paths for the Agentic State: 1. **The State *as* Agent:** In this model, the "hub" remains. The central state becomes a more efficient, powerful agent, using AI to optimize its existing hierarchical control. Agency is concentrated at the center. This path leads to a more sophisticated "AI bureaucracy," but it does not change the fundamental topology of the network. The State keeps the agency. 2. **The State *as* Protocol:** This is, we believe, the more powerful vision. And the vision, we think, is the inevitable conclusion of the logic in your analysis. In this architecture, the state itself evolves from being the central actor to becoming the steward of a shared protocol for coordination. The logic of governance moves to the periphery, and AI agents act as interfaces for participants at the edge – citizens, communities, autonomous and productive entities. The agent is the mechanisms through which the agency at the edge is expressed. In this second model, agency is pushed to the edge. The state's role transforms from command-and-control to enabling and guaranteeing the rules of a decentralized network. This is not just a different method; it is a different form of society. A decentralized, resilient and evolvable democratic society. It also transforms democracy. Democracy is no longer just a periodic process for selecting the operators of a centralized hierarchy. It becomes the continuous, participatory process of defining and refining the parameters of the protocol itself – setting the goals, defining the rights, and adjusting the constraints within which the distributed network of agents operates. Yet this transformation cannot be achieved by redesigning the state's protocol in isolation. A Democratic Computable State, whose very constitution is a verifiable, interoperable protocol, must exist in a symbiotic relationship with an equally Democratic Computable Economy. ### 2. A Question of Economy: The Informational Critique of Capital Our work at ECSA is founded on an informational critique of capital. We analyze capital not as an ideology, but as a computational protocol with specific categorical constraints, itself a product of a pre-digital medium. Its reliance on a singular monetary metric, its institutional "hub-and-spoke" design (central banks, clearinghouses), and its adversarial debt logic are all architectural artifacts of a bygone era. Just as your work provides an informational critique of the state, we must apply the same lens to the economy. The new computatational networks are also a new medium for the economy. The question "Who gains agency?" is paramount here as well. Do we use new technologies to build more efficient, algorithmically-driven versions of the same extractive financial hubs? Do we use the new powerful computational networks to run just the same old extractive softaware? Or do we design a new economic medium — a Democratic Computable Economy where [economic agency is held in full by everyone equally at the network edge](https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/ryKS6XFSlg)? The logic is inescapable: The Agentic State proposes a necessary shift to a network of collaborating autonomous agents. But its success is constrained by the antiquated economic hub-and-spoke extraction protocol it tries to plug in. We *can* already compute so much more complex distributed economic collaboration patterns. The Agentic State requires a Postcapital Economy. ### 3. The Architectural Paradox: How the State Became a Debtor to Its Own Creation The relationship between the modern state and the capitalist economy is a tragic architectural paradox. The state is the foundational economic agent. It provides the very preconditions for the economy to function: * It creates the ultimate public goods — legal certainty, physical infrastructure, an educated workforce, democratic participation, social stability and national security — that the "external" economy depends upon but for which it cannot compute value. * It absorbs the systemic risks and "externalities" of the economy, acting as the insurer of last resort in financial crises and the mitigator of ecological and social damage. Despite being the foundational value creator, the economic protocol it operates within is architecturally incapable of recognizing and computing this generative value: * A Flawed Grammar: Capital's accounting protocol can only compute monetary profit. The state's generative activities, which are measured in outcomes like public health, knowledge, and security, are invisible to this grammar. They are categorically framed as "costs" to be borne, not as value to be cultivated. * Metabolic Dependency: To cover these "costs," the state must subordinate itself to the very economic system it enables. It must extract resources via taxation or, worse, borrow from private financial markets, trapping itself in a spiral of debt. It becomes a dependent entity, its sovereignty compromised by the logic of its own creation. * The Inevitable Conclusion: The capitalist economic protocol, by its very design, is categorically blind to the generative value of the state's most important activities. An Agentic State, with its goal of optimizing for multi-dimensional public outcomes, is fundamentally incompatible with an economic engine that only recognizes a single dimension of monetary value. A Democratic Computable State cannot run on such a narrow old economic operating system. The system will tear itself apart through its own internal contradictions. Just as we need a new governance logic, we urgently need a new economic logic. We need a Democratic Computable Economy. ### 4. A More Expressive Economic Grammar: The Superpowers of a Democratic Computable Economy We at ECSA have been working hard on such a more expressive economic logic. We call it the Postcapital Space Protocol (PSP). It is a formal architecture for a generative economic network, a fundamental innovation in economic computation: a protocol that [makes networks aware](https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/S1zv6yftex) of their own value flows, capable of computing relationships, optimizing across multiple forms of value, and coordinating directly at the edge. It gives networks a [full economic API](https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/S1DdaR8Yel). It moves not just data or assets, but value definition, coordination, and governance into programmable, composable forms. Value becomes compositional economic intelligence: the network's ability to intelligently organize itself and create complex value. It is a network-aware economic engine that could cohere with the Agentic State and empower it. By integrating with this more expressive economic logic, Agentic State would gain a series of "superpowers" that are architecturally impossible within the old economic paradigm, allowing it to resolve the paradoxes it is trapped in. The Ten Superpowers of a Synthesized Architecture: 1. **Metabolic Sovereignty:** The state can create and sustain its own public goods without relying on external monetary systems, becoming a self-sustaining, generative economic organism. By constituting public goods as self-sustaining "economic spaces," it transforms its greatest "costs" into its greatest generative assets, creating a virtuous cycle of value creation that is independent of external economies. 2. **Fiscal Autonomy:** The state is freed from the tax-and-budget cycle. Public services are no longer dependent on politically volatile budget appropriations or the boom-and-bust cycles of a separate economy. They are funded directly and continuously by the real, measurable utility they produce. 3. **Architecting Its Own Economic Reality**: The state moves from being a borrower and rule-follower in a global financial system to being the architect of its own economic reality. It defines what counts as value, issues its own forms of liquidity, and interacts with global markets from a position of strength, not dependency. 4. **The End of Austerity:** The false choice between social investment and fiscal responsibility is dissolved. In a generative economy, investing in public goods is the most direct path to creating sustainable economic value. Social agendas are no longer a "cost" to be surrendered to the demands of capital extraction. 5. **A Grammar of Value:** The state's agents gain a native, machine-readable language to coordinate around multi-dimensional outcomes. Policy goals like equity, sustainability, and well-being become computationally legible Performance Indexes, transforming vague aspirations into optimizable, economic realities. 6. **Performance-Contingent Finance:** The state can escape the adversarial logic of fixed-interest debt. Public finance becomes a form of performance-contingent equity, where returns are mathematically tied to real-world outcomes. This aligns incentives for all stakeholders, turning finance into a tool for collaborative success rather than extractive risk-shifting. 7. **Metabolic Accountability:** Accountability ceases to be a slow, external, and often political supervisory function. It becomes an emergent, metabolic process. An entity's economic viability is algorithmically and continuously tied to its verified performance. Ineffective systems don't need to be "defunded"; they simply and transparently cease to be viable. 8. **The Power of Decomposition**: The state gains a new tool for internal organization. Using Reciprocal Stake Holding, it can decompose itself into a network of autonomous regional or functional Spaces, replacing rigid hierarchical command with a dynamic model of mutual investment and shared, measurable outcomes. This is the blueprint for a truly decentralized and federalist Agentic State. 9. **A New Protocol for Geopolitics**: The state can form deeper, more generative alliances. International relations can move beyond treaties and trade balances to become a network of shared investments in common goals (e.g., climate security, pandemic preparedness), creating a new protocol for global cooperation. 10. **Economic Agency at the Network Edge:** By providing the economic tools for communities to create their own self-sustaining "economic spaces," the state empowers the periphery in the most meaningful way possible: by granting them economic agency. This is the ultimate fulfillment of the "State as Protocol" vision, where the state's greatest power is the power it gives away. --- ## More context items on ["What is Happening?"](https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/BJNHpLfrxl) <div class="context"> <ul> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/Byb-YJk9xg">The ecsa project in short</a></li> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/rkkUwdzBge">Economic computation</a></li> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/H1-O2OGSgg">Evolution of economic computation</a></li> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/rJZYQFGSge">Distributed economic computation</a></li> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/SkzrBIHHgl">AI is forcing a fundamental rethink of economic coordination</a></li> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/HJabbrHHlx">Protocol politics</a></li> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/SkU2jyBael">Why Capital's Logic Captured Crypto's Discourse</a></li> ## More context items for ["What is emerging?"](https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/BJNHpLfrxl) <div class="context"> <ul> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/Hk9fV7KHle">Economic media</a></li> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/ryKS6XFSlg">Agency born in protocol</a></li> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/S1iCrmYrgl">Network value protocols</a></li> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/BJCE-NYBxe">Internet-native</a></li> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/ryGqU7KHlx">Economic agent</a></li> <li><a href="https://hackmd.io/@ECSA/SyUNVEFBex">Internet native economic agent: a new paradigm in value computation</a></li> </ul> --- Subscribe to the ECSA newsletter: https://news.ecsa.io/