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# System prepended metadata

title: 'SESSION 1: INTRODUCTION'

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# SESSION 1: INTRODUCTION

THURSDAY 7.5.2020 10amPST/1pmEST/7pmBERLIN/8pmHELSINKI

PLACE: ECSA ZOOM https://zoom.us/j/2022138511


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FOCUS: *What is an internet native economy? What is "post-capitalism" as a financial system? What is "economic media"? What is a "spread" between the network capacities of the economy with internet architecture and the network capacities of the current capitalist economy? What is "living in the spread"?*

READING: Sections 1 Introduction + Section 2: Design Principles

1 Introduction
 1.1 The economy is a network; its protocols designable
 1.2 The vision: The economy with internet architecture
 1.3 Post-capitalism is a financial system
 1.4 The ECSA offer: The long position and the Big Put
 1.5 Outline of the Economic Paper

2 Design Principles of the Economic Space Protocol are the same as those of the Internet Protocols

LINK TO THE TEXT: [THE ECONOMIC SPACE PROTOCOL (ECSA ECONOMIC PAPER)](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TuTnsh50jtB710D5YwEuIxPG-bT1ZkokCLErV0l8Z60/edit)

LISTENING (11min): [*What is the ECSA vision? Economic grammar for the information age*](https://soundcloud.com/user-177407194/ecsa-vision) Discussion with Akseli and Dick, at Supermarkt, Berlin 24.9.2019. 


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# [SESSION VIDEO](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw-UKY0yW7E)

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# SESSION NOTES

Intro round - we are 22 people 

**ECSA background** - how have we come here: 

**Dick Bryan:** Trying to convert a vision into something functional and analytically clear. 

Multidisciplinarity is exciting but also frustrating, as trying to harmonize is really hard.

We have a clear vision about the economy we want to build and the principles we want to include. 
Our first public meeting to asses whether we can pursue our vision with this framework, whether it has coherence. 

**Jonathan Beller:** A lot of people interested here about social transformation. Reformatting the economy, recognizing that extractive economy led us to most of the crises, current, colonialism, imperialism. That's one of the ways we are situated to thinking about this project.Not as the answer to history but as a
way of sort of engineering an answer from the ground up by by making people economic subjects in new ways.


**Akseli:** Engineering an answer from ground up is our aim. We understood from the beginning that it is really the ecnonomic angle.
We understood tech is gonna be there and what are the economic and political possibilities that we are now seeing that step us from the beginning our focus.
Getting these protocols have been much much harder than we always thought. But, here we are.

**1st topic:** 2 networks - internet that doesn't yet have its native economy and the other economic network, current econ. network. They are not yet compatible. That's the opening frame with which we come there.


Q1 How does it resonate with you?

**Cem:** fully on board with everything, it is just that the situation we find ourselves is sufficiently complicated enough that it starts 
to turn the words in its head. Scarcity is one of them. We are in a situation that abundance is creating scarcity. Imposing a scarcity on the receiving end of the economy. I wanted to highlight the isomorphism between effective scarcity and effective abundance. 
But I find the beginning pretty robust state okay

**Leanne:** I wonder why there is no citations. When there is citations I understand where you are coming from. I just felt like, of course it is white paper not meant to be academic paper, but I was curious why there is no citation. 

When you said internet doesn't have local economic system, I didn't understand what you meant there. 

**Akseli response:** we tried to say it in many many different ways. I am happy with the abstraction because it directly goes to the point. We dont want to idealize the picture of the internet. It was never as horizontal and peer-to-peer as it may be romantically thought. But we used it to have an effective way to start it.

**Cem:** :I also believe it has to be elaborated what you mean. From my background, I can understand where you are coming from. You are alluding to the notion of internet as being the democratizing force, and obviously force in our universe is defined in capital and so like it immediately becomes economics so like as if the internet would bring along a certain economic you know redistributive or democratizing networks but it actually remained only a communicative tool. it failed. It was not designed as a revolution. Designed as very establishment sponsored project.

The people had a vision and dreamed of such a vision, but internet was ready to be co opted. 

I think what you are alluding in this paper is nobody effectively designed an economics on top of like
information networks which I would of course point to the beginning of crypto economics.

Crytoeconomy and networks: beginning of change. ECSA is taking a multidisciplinary and more economically conscious approach to network design. 

**Adam:** :Wanted to reflect on scarcity as condition of profitability. There are two different possibilities.
You can say scarcity is imposed by dominant capitalist protocol that manages economics and which creates
an artificial scarcity where in reality there could be abundance. Position of a lot of the post-capitalist papers that came about. That of course is a possibility.

Another possibility is that it is simply a matter of questioning what is scarce. In our studies of p2p systems, they tend to share things that are abundant but they tend to sort of maintain very strong not exactly
property rights but rights of control on things that are scarce. If you look at free software deveolopment, source code is shared but the app is not shared, people try to capitalize on that.

Not a question of scarcity vs abundance but redefinition of what things remain scarce and what remain abundant.


**Michel:** Seem to counterpose internet with economy. We could also say internet is a new mediation, not different. I dont use this counterpositioning in my work. I make the point that accounting is the vision of reality. If we can change the accounting through internet mediation, then we can change how the real things are being represented. 
    
2nd point. I do think there are people that are seeing this, imagining that if we dont have capitalism we would have abundance. That's not my point. I do see capitalism as scarcity engineering technology. Even if something is abundant, it will make sure abundant will be scarce.
    Software is free but then they try to do it your licensing and they try to all kinds of things to to manage the flow of abundance to make it scarce again. So I dont think we can easily say things are abundant-scarce. 
    One of the tasks of new economy is to make sure that abundant things are not made scarce artificially.


**Cem:**  My other comment is about comparing reputation as sort of this scarce element in these
networks or communities which is like a very important aspect that is necessary for this type of financial engineering to take place. 

I think that differentiating factor is fungibility. We talk about abundance-scarcity of resources esp when we talk about fungible resources. Oil, money, most fungible thing.I think when you come towards reputation
you lose that fungibility you cannot trade your reputation otherwise it's like it inflates itself out of its meaning. So, I think we should keep our discussion of liquidity and scarcity on fungible resources for sake of simplicity.

**Jonathan**  : One of the things that were maybe discovered or decoded is that part of the way that scarcity is produced is through the choking off of
people's access to liquidity. Effectively leveraging labor so that who produce the world dont get returns. an This is an old argument, but I think we're understanding that fungibility of liquidity is a key mediation. 

We imagined how one might redesign the economy by creating this p2p co-issuance of liquidity. So this is a very direct intervention in the way in which scarcity is organized if not produced.


Other thing: Internet produces a global reformatting of ontology, basically changing nature of things and how they relate to one another.So, it is not incidental transformation but evolutionary vector of sociality and finance. So, seeing these things work simultanously is also an inquiry about the process of decoding preliminaries which are necessary to the proposel in front of you now. 

**Matt:** Liked your summary of intro. in the beginning. 

**Akseli:** There seem to be a promise of decentralization. But we didnt have the financial architecture, it wasnt decentralized, the revolution failed. We want to say it in the beginning maybe, in the intro.

**Olivier:** In intro worth diving into where are you heading to. The proposition about mutual staking system is expressed quickly and abstractly. I do agree with most of the analysis, but where are we heading? Take one two more paragraph to give more of the matter. To avoid being too abstract. 

**Section 1.1:**

**Akseli:** Very important that economy is becoming programmable. Convergence of historical reasons plus tech.reasons, financial reasons, which has shown how
arbitrary and political the economy is. Evidences are right now revealed in in front of our eyes. Evidences are revealed in fron fo our eyes. Tech is making things possible. We understand that economy as a history has a future, and we are arriving at this point.

There are couple of other important points for us. 
 This is the section where we first say that it is in fact a language. The protocol as an economic language. For the first time, we weould like to build a new form of economoy from within capitalism. What do you think of that? What do we mean from within?
 
**Jonathan:** If you think capitalism is global, the only kinds of outsides are imminent outsides. Outsides structured and encouraged by encroachment itself. 
 
 WE have to work within logic of capitalism. Key thing is to find and economy that is convivial and sustainable. Use some of the protocols that are already endemic in the capitalist system but begin a gradual
transformation into another space and that's so that's the fun within because I mean revolution is extrensic factor, many people dont believe it anymore. There are stil core articulations of resistence inside the system, if we understand them we are powerful to make change.
 
 
**Akseli:** We already feel and konw it but dont have the language to express it. Need a new language to express the unrepresentable within capitalism still. 

**Adam:** Pulled a quote: fairly unorthodox from MArxist pov. The point is that economy has always been programmable. Always there's been markets. Capitalism markets, certain class structure has been able to program it in a dif way. With tech, perhaps programming it now in a more democratic way became possible. 

Financial instruments were beyond the reach of everybody, but not it can be democratized. Now the market is programmable by us. We can now implement alalgorithm or management to markets without necessarily being amazon.com which of course is a advantage but of
course that then relates a little bit to what Jonathan's comment about inside/outside of capitalism.  I sort of made a point in a book I wrote a while ago that maybe what we're seeing right now looks more like that then well sort of the great transformations and the grand revolutions that we used to think about in terms of social transformation.

The question is how do you begin to realize a dif system within an existing system. It is especially important, what is the historical block that is able to mobilize people around new technological possiblities to reprogram market? Tech isnt enough, you need state instrument. It doesnt has to be nation-state, could be blockchain state, but it still has to be there. It is important to this question of redesign.

**Claire:** In the heading, economy is designable, my immediate response: yes but there is a political element to that. The main question arises for me: who is the agent, how is that redesign going to happen?

Some of them gets raised a little bit. One question: what are the material conditions for this to be happening, why are we interacting? What is the imperative to interact? 

Listening to these conversations, as a person who is probably young enough to know more about digital technology than I do but I'm not a
digital native and so the idea of the Internet as a democratic space you know that I have the capacity to program that doesn't feel the idea of the internet as democratic space that people have capacity to program, doesnt feel democratic to me. What kind of barriers does it create for the people who are foreign to digital worl?

**Akseli:**
Economic media is one way to answer this question.

**Thomas:**

I liked the programmable language. I program the legal system similar to language. Trying to create participants of the economy, constitution. They are defining the rules to interact in the economy. The challange is to implement the reality in the protocol, and lets see how it evolves. If we have all the possibilities to influence all these democratic ways, then it should kind of evolve into the economy we are imagining.

**Akseli:**

Governance questions have been well thought with Thomas' help.

**Jorge:** : I actually became aware of the beauty of law after finding the Swiss codes. As close as elegant programming as it gets. So well thought and designed, I thought these guys were really programmers perfect designers.

The questions are circling around this notion of interface. Protocol design is a design of interface. We were saying the incompability between the two networks- internet economy-, they have been in dialogue for long time. Internet doesn't have an economic zone for instance what we're saying the economic network is sort of making an interface pulling the internet
to look more like it in an attempt to interface. 

This concept of creatin an interface that can actually do the opposite is central. Also accesibility. How is it that internet gives accesibility to some more than others? This is another interface challange. how do we make the system compatible and accessible to wider public
audience.

I do believe and that's one of my biggest criticism of programming languages and infrastructures whatnot is that they are they're actually tailored to the to the predominant majority modes of thinking of modes of cognition that are the programmers but it doesn't have to be that way.

Interfaces dont have to be exclusive to programmers. It can be more accesible. Making this accesible is a design of interfaces and this is what the protocol is. 

**Jonathan:** bringing design closer to the interface and closer to people's expression what you effectively suggest is that expression itself can be a design principle and so people's actual claims their value
claims on the world can be translated into an economic expression of economic media and what this is going to mean ultimately just like cut to the chase in a way I think it'll help us think the direction of the conversation is that anyone can read a credit contingent claim in economic media which means that anyone can write a derivative contract. That's something that's not possible all right now the phenomena financial system has a compute monopoly on who writes a derivative contract. but if we
democratize that process so that people
can structure their own contingent
claims on the world then you have the
possibility for risking together and a
renegotiation of the power structure
which organizes economy today.


**Oliver Sarrouy:** In this section there is implicit critique of capitalism. The ability to design econ. protocol is new. critic is addressed to decentralization and to the economy and such. 

I feel this is maybe a trap. Even if you decentralize economy, it will still be economy. EConomy is also part of the problem. The way it realtes to future, the way it mortgages the present, the relationship btw people it creates. REdesigning doesnt change the way economy affects our world. I think decentralization is a really good idea, but I think ---

Another thing about decentralization. I feel like everything we see in crypto system is that even if you decentralize it doesnt decentralize, doesn't change the unfair
distribution of wealth and power in the
world. so even though everyone at the
ability to basically deal with some protocol and design some protocol we have to develop the access to media that will have to produce ah.

**Akseli:** We agree, when you look at crypto space economy didnt change. They havent redesigned, they replicated what is already there. 
We redesign through our protocol.

**Roberto:** :I was just thinking about how to highlight, economic grammar and post capitalism. Thinking about uncertainity. Ecsa talks about how non-linear strategies of p2p and protocols can actually become operable right now you know in a very concrete way.

When we talk about uncertainity, it is how economic models can fall apart. so I'm thinking how we can take advantage of this idea of the contingent claim. 

**AJ Adams:** :I think what is really appealing is it is structured not to be degrowth but to be parasitic. To operate within logic of capitalism. But I think this language is still tied to the forking narrative where you're pointing out capitalism and so now it's programmable. 

To Clare's point about you know technology being a barrier to entry is that many of us on this call represent a group that are able to start playing with some of these features in crypto economics but that's still just a different oligarchy and I'm playing with those features so I think what's what's most interesting to me is that you know for the last 30 years of internet culture the capitalism has been attempting to wrangle internet logic into its logic which has a lot to do with artificial scarcity but Bitcoin
is an example of you know internet logic breaking away from that.first example of saying hey we don't need permission anymore and the idea of permissionless ability to develop and you know things like derivatives and options and expanding the timescales and those things to cram their cooperation is huge. 

not so much just saying logic versus an economic logic but to say that certain elements of internet logic are now able to subsume economic logic and to do so in a way
that doesn't require very fixed.


**Dick:** One of the things I like about this section of paper: we are not anti-finance, wea re going to frontiers of finance. Liberating finance from capitalsim. Most people in the left would say is finance has been  too powerful. We're sort of turning that on its head and there's a sense in which we're wanting to say that writing financial contracts is the key to freedom and democracy.

How do we make that operable by people who dont want to spend their lives operating financial tables. The challange is to make this operable to people in a very casual way. I would hate to live my life standing at the screen of derivatives. It is not our goal.Articulating democracy should be easy and simple to manage. 

**Jonathan:** Pick up on AJ's point and Dick's.

Bitcoin: you can communicate only one thing in it.It's completely monological.
We're imagining a financial media or an economic media which is much more broadband which can actually preserve other values on the price signal and that would be a very different idea of a transmission of economic meaning .

Dick's point about the interface. I think one of the things that has been shaping some of our discussions is the recognition that something like working on social media is already a kind of wagering system right ,where someone on  Instagram kind of programming of the network or reprogramming of the network by producing new content and that content is actually a wager, a social wager but also an economic wager if you think about the various monetization strategies which are going on sort of simultaneously. the platform
itself is monetizing in the background everyone's expression people are also becoming influencers and various kinds of subjects or agents on that network as they sort of create their own economic persona or profile which is already welded to their meaning.

we want to see that these things can be just aggregated every program so that people can have more control not only of their expression but of the economic fallout of their expression.

Michel:

The way I see it is that what people are trying to do is create a different kind of value. Kind of price signal that amulgamates everything and excludes many things like externalities and contributions and care work and so. Partly based on Adam's study is that a lot of p2p communities try to play with contributory value systems. Some of them are succesful, but the big problem we have compared to capital is that all these value systems are differnet and not exchangable. Capital is one masure, can accumulate, power,  so they they
constrain everybody else's choices and then we the alternatives are trying to do 1,000 things differently but there's no way that we can transfer value 

ECSA creating a framework where communities can also be accumulating something, not the extract but to generate. 

I see Ecsa as ways to exchange comparative, generative ways of value. We can actually say, you are doing a good thing, we want to value it, and we have a mechanism for doing that.

**Akseli:**  If we share, things become exchangable.

**Felix:** I was wondering how do you relate to, programmability of economy to redesign. Is it taking further, or is it more about democratization of access to do so, or is it both? WE have had mechanism design attempts to get certain outcomes, but we didnt have the means to deploy them at low cost, or experiment as normal human beigns without state power. WE have come up with alternative grammars but didnt have the means to execute them. So, the question is how do you relate to mechanism design.

**Jorge:** By mechanism, you are talking about precise logic. It is both language and protocol. We see it as economic language that can be understood and engaged upon by participants, but it is also encoding on a computational substrate so when you're saying one or the other yes both I'm actually the fact that it's a accessible to everyone and be deployable at scale and at low cost they're both necessary requirements for these to work.


Language has to express capitalist forms but also beyond. That's the only way that it can interface with existing forms, but also reinterface with the individual. 

You will see that one protocol has actually has many protocols underneath. IT interfaces to protocol, capital, finance, user. How much of the language to expose to user is differnet from how much of language to expose to finance for instance. 

All these social systems can be modeled as networks. And networks can be expressed as protocols.


**Claire:** The challange to capitalism value, how does that manifest? The way that Michel characterized the attempt to value things that have noneconomic worht, there are lots of projects already where capitalism is trying to do that. I'm thinking about social impact investment, projects that put financial value on nonecon values. What precisely ECSA is challanging capitalsitic value, and avoid becoming another one of those projects?

There will be tensions between present and future. But it is not entirely clear to me how ECSA would avoid replicating capitalist accumulation?


**Oliviera:**  Dif btw ECSA protocol vs capitalism protocol: Diferrence is in simplicity and complexity. I see ECSA opening up to complexity and contributing to democracy. As ADam said of course markets are redesignable but this knowledge is not open to everybidy. The main question is how to rethink economy as redesginable space. I dont see somebody as sitting and redesginging, but as a protocol where everyone gets involved for their necessities. PRotocol as meta language than a programm language for everybody. 



**Akseli:** Next section is economy with internet architecture. The point is, yes, internet has given us the baby steps for new forms of economy. But, they are not quite enough, they are not going far enough. How do we think of stakeholding, and differing from crowdfunding. 


**Dick:** The challange we are dealing with is we want to move beyond capitalistic notions of value tied to profit and accumulation. But we dont want to define the new value, a singular alternative. Value has to be something that is open to continual reflection and review. The form of democracy in which there is constant individual evaluation and reflection of what constitutes this value. 

the way in which this can be best played out we we figure is through this concept of stake. I think stake opens up some quite difficult issues because there are
immediate analysis and some state takes us back to owning shares in companies. We want something completely unlike that but we want to skin in the game notion, so when people nominate what they think is valuable they actually commit to it but in a financial
way. Not a financial way that will make them wealthy but by signaling through their token votes if
you like about what sorts of values are important to them and what they think constitutes the social good. So, our programming complexity and where we've had arm wrestles for quite a long time is how do you open up the concept of
value, how do you move beyond capitalist value, how do you use the tools of Finance and particularly the contingent
claim to express stake so that social values become open transparent and contested in such a way that will not lock us into saying we know what good value is we know what the social good is. 
We're programming what social grins so a programming process is not outcomes and I think that's in a sense for me the big achievement of what we're doing in relation to value.

**Akseli:** It is abstract, more broadband, allows us to recognize and crack this informational valuation of the informational.

**Dick:** The deal is, things have to be measureble. If you're wanting to lay claim to value you've got to be able to verify that it's a measurable a measurable form and that's how we can define ultimately a surplus.

Surplus is not going to be like a profit but a the extent to which society can create value beyond that required to reproduce society.

**Akseli:** Other way to say this, it needs to be expressable economically. You need to be able to talk about it, make it exchangable, stakeble. 

**Akseli:** What is medium Jonathan?

**Jonathan:** The difficulty of creating economic archive is it is very plastic. Can be given new movements you know in order to address whatever changes whatever kind of volatility confronts it. It is really a question about kind of computation so as you see that constitutions although they're very useful and can be very powerful sort of didn't fall back into some of the things that Dick was worried about where you define a set of ideals once and for all.

Making process that can be continually modified that can be the economic engine for the platform. 

**Akseli:** What do we mean by economic media?

**Jonathan:** discovery space for us. The recognition that monetary media has certtain properties of collapsing all values into single price. Fundamental problem that internet has direct relationship to. You have the democratization of expression, but that is engine for pyramidial accumulation. Turned into opposite of What was sold as utopian form, space of equalization,horizontality. 

In economic media, we take internet's promise of expressive power and bind it to a computational substrate which has economic consequences so the people's facility could then program their economic Futurity. So People can program futures that are qualified. We aretalking about qualitative derivative. 


**1.3
Captialism is a financial system
Akseli:**

What counts as liquidity, collateral, who decides about them?

**Dick:** This was for me the biggest economic discovery. Coming from MArxism, what going beyond capital means. 

If you pose capitalsim as a financial system, what are its foundational propositons, and hence what are foundational propositions of post-capitalism's pivot points.

Who defines, what counts as liquidity gets to the heart of state-banking system that define and issue them.

In ECSa, everyone can be issuer of liquidity. and back them with their colalteral. What counts as collateral? Capitalism, collateral is what capitalsit coasset. In our world, we have other assets that are not counted for but we want to coasset.

So challenging the concept of what is an asset expressed as what is collateral and who can issue, who can issue credit, who controls the financial system are actually absolutely fundamental agendas or a fundamental reframing of an economy through the perspective of finance.

That then opens up whole of the rest of analysis. They are the political pressure points we want to build on. That's what makes it post-capitalism. It is located within capitalsim, markets, it is about restaking the collateral. this whole package of economic relations starts to flow out from this very basic challenge to the right of the state and the right of capital to decide what's capital and what's money.

**Leanne:** I like this idea, it simplifies, you can think of liq. and colalteral as the two foundations. What have seen in the past, bc of ineherent contradictions of capitalism we had to have stablziing force, like the state. What is your thinking here, if it is distributed it is stable?

**Dick:** What we can say is that in certain respects in relation to stability, the network is the state. The scalibility of network is what creates stability. If people can mutually credit each other or to the system, there is a sense in which liquidity crises that dominate capitalism dont need to exist logically. 

A long term crash of internet would be a significant problem. 

While in crypto, people define stability is price stability of coins or USD, our notion of staiblity is we can get a reproducible economy that will not hit the circulation problems of say that Marx defines at the beginning of capital. 

Having said that, we should acknowledge we are existing inside capitalism. We have liberties of enjoying the expansionist policies of capitalsit state, for now, and no longer needing facility of the state as a smoothing mechanism  ell how we deal with that you know in in the long-term future, that's that's a really exciting problem. 

Dangerous to say would be this system is crisis proven. But will they be the sorts of crises that we get in capitalist markets, you could say they are categorically not. They've been designed around exactly avoiding those sorts of systemic problems.


**Leanne:** Mutual credit systems impose imbalances. You have to zero-out. It imposes building debts and credits. 

**Dick:** It is a problem we had in early. But creditor is not about debt, but as facilitating the transaction. As a transaction
occurs, the ledger nets the credit dissolves.

The interaction is occruing through stake that backs the credit. 

**Michel:** I get a sense that behind your thinking there is a libertarian underpinning. For me there are two kinds. One is individualistic right wing. Every ind can make agreements and somehow create a society. Left wing is federation. Both assume there is never a third party that never mediates. I question that.

In open soruce movement, they have created states, they have their markets, community, but also foundation/mechanism that is not a field of direct epxression of the members, a field that protects the system. 

I have questions, in terms of realism, whether this dream is possible of no state?

**Jorge:** That's one of the challanges we've been struggling with. Often hidden layers of governance, what we concluded is that the minimum layer of governance that is both necessary and at the same time unescapbable is language. If you are able to define the boundaries of interactions, it is free, noone controls. Define from within also that is voluntary to participate on but that from within is even able to articulate the creation of economic relationships that then define governance, that is the path.

WE dont want to put ourselves as the governing body, maintaining the progression of the economy. We really want to get to a point where it is autonomous. Internet architecture has this potential of being self-modifier. That's our ultimate goal. 

The necessary phase of managent is the bootstrap phase. We want to let it go and run itself. That is the dream



**Last section- 1.4: Big Put**

**Akseli:** The idea of big put as financial instrument. The game opens when we say that our plan is to actually open a spread between these two networks. That becomes then a really interesting financial instrument, the big put. What do you think of that? 

**Dick:** This concept came from philosopher Bob Meister. Bob's position was, capitalism cant short itself. If you are in capital markets, you cant short capitalism, there is no way to go. If you could build alternative economy with alternative logic, you could produce a financial product, a way to short capitalism. People inside the economy could then bet against captialism.

Our long position: we are building an economic system that produces value. It is important both to our financial and political position.

We are also saying, we might have been conceived inside capitalism, but we are aboslutely alternative to capitalism. We would aspire possible to design financial products to trade the spread between the new economy we're creating and indexes of capitalist economy. 

**Jonathan Beller:** 
We have been doing spread for a while in relation to this project. I mean effectively taking our time or cognitive capacity or libidinal reserves and putting it into this process kind of wagering on this post capitalist system. We feel like the spread can open in this really interesting way where people who participate in an extra economy or our next platform to be very self-consciously engaged in the process of building an alternative post capitalist economy.

This sort of awareness of a historical project would actually inform the conduct on the platform one way or another. Which isn't to say that there couldn't be people trying to game it, people trying to extract from it and all that. The protocols are designed to prevent that as much as possible but nonetheless. There's a participatory dimension to this where people's energy goes into this alternative graph line.

**Michel:** What exactly is this post-capitalism? For me, capitalism is markets that only work for profit. What generates profit is destructive, extractive of people and things. Post-capitalism can be for me simply defined as any system where if there is surplus purpose is not gold. 

As long as profits are subsumed without accumulative goals, we are in post-capitalism. 

In terms of value, the key term is regenerative. Regenerative values that enrich life and resources. KEy problem is we can make money only with the extractive. For regenerative we depend on philantrophy or taxation. The key is revaluing regenrative activities. There must be a direct way for people who do these, like care economy, should have a claim on income. 

If we are making more money than capitalists, we are still in capitalism.

**Jonathan:**  What I've talked
about playing the spread is kind of conviviality. One cant institute new economy in scratch and having it be sustainable. One has to be parasitical on  apitalism and on stake forms to move the forms of value off the capitalist platform to new platform.

While we are living in both economies, we need interactivity to still buy sandwich in restaurant. 
This dual perspective, we need to be in struggle but also interact in both worlds.

**Felix:** What about the big put? I'm having an issue with it. I get long position, but the short position on capitalism would require that  ECSA goes up indiscriminately if capitalism goes down. But there are scenarios where both go down. 

I get why you frame it this way, but it doesnt look consistent to me. 

Another point on post-capitalist markets is property rights. In The new system, property rights need to be discussed about, maybe reconfigured. 

**Jorge:** This is what we are trying to answer precisely in what's coming.

We expect the system as post-capitalism to produce more of the value that we define as prosperous and particularly good at producing informational forms, which is something capitalism quite can't do yet. So, lot of the design is how do you value that is scarce, relation and network, the invaluable, conviviality, 
How do we grammar that express those dimensions of value and express them as spread as between how much of this value is worth for me vs the capital economy.That is actually going to create a spreading sense that I mention in which life capitalism is not good at or it fails are actually  the dimensions in which the new economy can thrive. That's where there is spread that can be priced. 

**Michel:** the way I see this is that we have to convince basically the state or private players to practice what I call circular finance. Lets assume: priority is to decarbonize. That's sth that public budget can agree to. State say we need to decarbonize and allocate a budget. Interface is a shared public ledger where citizens can input regenerative activities that can be verified and tokenized. 

I see ECSA as actually the mechanism you know to
distribute.

You got an input both from the state and anybody that wants to share the benefits from regenerative activities. They can co- finance this project.

On the other side, we need mechanisms that can flow in to the general population. I see the need for ECSA as mechanisms that can translate that kind of funding into following a new criteria. 

**Olivier:** I really like the idea of shorting capitalism. But also this is the most complicated thing, and asks question to the rest of the framework. -- voice cut

At the end people want to pay the rent and buy food, so you need to access capitalist economy. The question is how, whatever intelligent news about creating new cryptoeconomic incentive/mechanism, once it is tied to converse to fiat tokens, you switch back to one dimensional price mechanism that is ECSA is trying to escape from. What is going to drive people to invest to make profit from ECSA? You are back to simple price mechanism, which makes it really hard to build something new. 

Composition of people trading crypto, waiting in the space is not actually people like us but who try to trade it for short term profits. This is a trap situation. Is ECSA going to fall into that that is true for all other cryptocurrencies?

I have this token, complex economic dynamic, but people who are in the system can operate with fiat mentality. People investing in crypto space arent super cool people that align with ECSA's vision, they are people that mostly try to make short term profit and dont care about long term. I wonder how you can actually go beyond profit logic? 
How not fall back into trap of one dimensional price economy?

**Jonathan:** This is why the pedagoligical and political background is important as the community building. 

If this space is actually a convivious space that doesnt feel better than capitalism that like you know you don't sell out your family most of the time because there's certain things there that are more valuable than what the market might offer although people do draw on their families and really in heavy ways in order to remake themselves for the workplace. So if we can address some of the factors of results of capitalism and create an alternative economic space,which is nascent right now but could grow and the understanding of that possibility and the experience of that possibility in community is a key to the emergence of ECSA.

Creating, experiencing the possibility of alternative space is what ECSA is about. 

**Akseli concludes.**


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# **Zoom Group Chat**

From Abhishek : Does this helps in overcoming capital ‘creative destruction’ ?

From Michel Bauwens : anyone knows what the 'reaction' button is for ?

From Adam Arvidsson : finance is the empirical manifestation of the communism of capital

From Michel Bauwens : anyone familiar with the 'social code' movement in france; it's a methodology to create group constitutions, which can then be programmed in the workings of the group

From Michel Bauwens : they do 'refractions', i.e. regular adaptations

From quartagiulio : If there's time I have a question and I'm better at writing it. It's for ECSA, for Dick in particular:

What about DeFi? Surely you know the ecosystem and it's still much capitalist in his overall logic, but thery are actually doing what we are talking here for real! I mean, apps for ordinary people in which you can invest and also create derivatives 

From quartagiulio : create social derivatives and tokens. 

From quartagiulio : I perfectly get why it' not optimal for us that we want post-capitalist but still, want to know your thoughts on this: shouldn't it be a first step toward post-capitalis crytpoeconomics?

From realisation : It seems to me the recent trend of personal tokens  issued on the ethereum ecosystem are well situated as harbingers to the concepts wrestled with by the ECSA white paper

From Olivier Sarrouy : Hmmm. I feel like « ordinary people » won’t ever really use DeFi. I don’t feel like every one wanna turn itself into a lo-fi trader through that’s the assumption of DeFi. It lowers the entry barriers a little for people like me who are not rich but nuts and I think that’s it :)

From Jorge : Quartaguilo, yes, they are super interesting projects out there, already hinting at using finance as a programmable surface. Yet, they still lack interoperability and the question of how they are govern them, and who “owns” them, and how, is an important one. That are however important spearheading projects that are opening the design space.

From Abhishek : So its not only language but also language and bodies.

From Jorge : Yes: protocol + participantes/agents = network.

From Roberto : Brilliant stuff.

From realisation : I think everyone will use DeFi in the future, it will subsume the banking network and banks of the future will be interfaces to and higher level tokenizations of the DeFi protocols.

From realisation : I feel like the point at which DeFi over takes the banking network is the point at which people start to understand programmability and become able to engage in bespoke economic relations.

From Leanne Ussher : If the ledger nets

From Leanne Ussher : the third party might be an algorithm. But still had to program

From Jonathan Beller : yes, but one that is collectively programmed on held

From Dick Bryan : The DeFi development is really exciting. the issue is: what is the value system within which finance operated - what are the units of measure? But opening up a economy where DeFi is integral feels exciting to me

From realisation : Current DeFi protocols are heading in this direction. Compound recently announced their COMP tokens. Details on the distribution are oncoming but some of their thoughts is such that any time any one interacts with the protocol they receive COMP tokens.

From Jeff Emmett : DeFi is full of great experiments, but in my experience thus far, very immature in the understanding of rigorous systems engineering design that will build safe public economic infrastructure at scale.

From Olivier Sarrouy : Do we agree that the only people who will buy these derivatives are people that: 1. Have money to loose / risk ; 2. Have an understanding of financials things ; and thus are the one actually enacting capitalism … ? :)

From Dick Bryan : to Olivier  - i think that everyone facing risks have implicit derivative positions. we call it insurance, or strategy on jobs, or managing a household budget. we dont call these derivatives, but they are. so this is not about people using their spare cash (which they dont have) to be traders - it is about reframing daily life in a way that people can choose their risks and share their risks, and they can only d this if they are made explicit. Finance may not be the only way, but it is a precise and ‘doable’ way of initiating this.

From Leanne Ussher : So the spread is the capitalists buying a put, and cross subsidizing the post capitalist?

From realisation : DeFi has a wide gamut of competence regarding their engineering chops. Right now it is very early and it is just getting started so it is to be expected there will be some unwieldy projects. But on the other hand, there are very smart and rigorous people pushing code with an extreme attention towards security. The methods they are developing will be instrumental in securing anything regarding distributed ledgers.

From Jonathan Beller : @leanne: yes, a hedge even for the capitalist

From Leanne Ussher : So ECSA is selling puts

From Economic Space Agency : yes, a Big Put (a la the Big Short…. the movie :)

From Olivier Sarrouy : To Dick. Yeah but I’m really not sure people wanna take much time dealing with these things and making choices no one really understand, etc. To phrase it another way: shifting the economy in a desirable direction would mean lifting the weight of this stuff off of people shoulders. Cause in real life that’s a nightmare.

From Dick Bryan : Yes -  in effect selling puts.

From Jonathan Beller : Any activists organization is in that business…

From Leanne Ussher : It assumes I think @felix mentioned, that capitalism and post capitalism are opposites, and when one goes down the other goes up.

From Jorge : There will be dimensions that are inversely correlated, but not all

From Jonathan Beller : or that post capitalism goes down less than capitalism goes down

From Jorge : The spread will be captured by the differences in different economic dimensions, whatever they correlation or non correlation is

From Jorge : I.e. there can be a spread just if one economy ”produces” more value than the other

From realisation : How are people going to become familiar with economic programmability

From Jeff Emmett : To realisation:  Security & design for individual DeFi components is important (and largely present from what I can see), but what is sorely lacking in the space is the systems engineering consideration of second order effects that may result from composing multiple DeFi protocols together. If you can point to any groups working on that, I would be very interested to dive deeper!

From realisation : The DeFi community in general is nascent so what you speak of is a natural quality they would have. The first protocols had to be developed. Now the second protocols are being developed, and then the third, fourth, fifth… It is a nascent, growing space.

From Michel Bauwens : The key issue is 'recognition' of value, from within smaller project communities to the larger society

From realisation : I would say the key issue is digital literacy. Without that none of ECSA’s aspirations can happen, they will be reduced to informal spaces.


