The Grammar of Economic Space: Collaborative Finance and the Protocols for Post-Capitalist Economic Expression

Seminar summary

Just like social networking applications gave us social media, economic networking applications will give us economic media. How we relate to each other economically will be remediated by applications (formats, templates, protocols) in the same sense that our social relations already are. Crowdfunding, P2P lending, cryptocurrencies, DAOs and DeFi, liquidity and community farming, are just the first baby steps of this transformation.

The economy is moving onto a programmable medium. We want to create a more expressive language to describe our economic networks, their participants, the nature of their relations and how they change, what they value, how it is measured and exchanged. An economic grammar which open and free to use, gives everyone equal capacities of economic expression and does not collapse into single universal value definition of a fiat money or a “master token” (e.g. BTC, ETH etc.).

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 next generation media will redesign the default convergence of communication, finance and computation, and fuse messaging and economy in ways that are programmable from below.

These two projects, the redesign of communications and the redesign of money are actually one. We know that you only get democracy with economic democracy, and that both imply radical decentralization. Post-capitalist economic media redesigns this convergence to express different socialities.

How to attend this seminar

We welcome you to join this seminar online on Wednesday 29 March 2023 at 12pm.

This seminar is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

Speaker bio

Akseli Virtanen

Akseli Virtanen is an angel investor, radical political economist and finance theorist working with programmable economy: the economy as his design space. Based in Berlin and Helsinki, after 5 last years in California (visiting researcher at UCSC and Stanford University, reengineering financial instruments to reflect the capabilities of new software). PhD 2006, Docent 2012, Helsinki School of Economics (Aalto University).

Recent work on cryptoeconomics

Main focus now: Economic Space Agency (http://ecsa.io), an economic imagination & technology company that is creating “economic media” for post-capitalist economic expression: peer-to-peer economic networking protocols that natively speak information economy: can value intangibles, biosphere, care, social innovation and structure relationships around them.

Hardcore research background, eight books on the history and future of economy, transformation of money and value, and the affective-emotional landscape of work.