Economicgrammar Metagov
Speaker 1: Okay. Today, we have the pleasure of hearing from the Economic Space Agency, part of the, it's the first of two sessions that they'll be doing. This one is on economic grammar protocols for post capitalist economic expression with, Excelli, Vertanen and and Jorge Lopez. I think Excelli, the last time we saw each other was on an aircraft carrier. And I've over the years, I've just...
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- protocols 0.009
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- economy 0.006
- economic 0.005
- distributed 0.005
- money 0.005
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- value 0.005
- credit 0.005
- networks 0.004
Transcript
Okay. Today, we have the pleasure of hearing from the Economic Space Agency, part of the, it's the first of two sessions that they'll be doing. This one is on economic grammar protocols for post capitalist economic expression with, Excelli, Vertanen and and Jorge Lopez. I think Excelli, the last time we saw each other was on an aircraft carrier. And I've over the years, I've just really enjoyed and been, you know, constantly provoked by what by what Exa is is up to. Always kind of pushing boundaries about what what finance and and self governance and autonomy, can mean. So I'm really looking forward to this discussion. Axelian and Jorge, please take it away. You're muted.
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Nathan. Nathan, this is is we've been really like following MediGav for a long time and kind of wanting to, wanted to like getting engaged with you on these matters because we think that there's a lot of resonance in what we are working on. So there's now, yeah, good crew from the EXA team. So me, then Jonathan who introduced himself and Ben, Jorge, and we're gonna we're gonna talk about the the economic grammar and that's something that I know that with Michael, for instance, we've been jamming on before and let's let's hope that this is going to be a really good session. Now, Jorge, would you like to start or or shall I?
I guess I I'll start and and you feel free to to interject it. Sure. Yeah.
Cool. Let's let's do it like that. And let's let's try to have this as just like a like a discussion, like, as possible. We'll do the short intro and then Nathan, like, the the guidance was that fifteen, twenty minutes, and then we'll turn it into a good discussion. Right?
That's right. That's right. Great.
Alrighty. So let's
since I want to share with you guys one graphic that I'm going to use as a as a prompt to to guide you through the to the logic of the grammar. Alright. So excess take on on on economy and and cryptoeconomic design is one of revealing the the economy as a network and, more precisely, the economy as a set of protocols and different kinds of protocols, social protocols, financial protocols, social economic protocols, and attempting to to formalize them and architect them in in in a way that that it can become like a a a a stack. Right? We often in other talks, we have we have talked about the the extra stack. And in doing so, we've organized these these protocols into the following. Right? So at the layer, what we have is the distributed computational protocol, which has many parallels with how organizations or or or the formal aspects of organization work. So verbs in this grammar will be, for example, creating a space, joining space, introducing gears, declaring things to to to exist in these spaces, etcetera. So this this allows basically, it becomes a a network programming language that allows the construction of other protocols and other networks on top of it. So in other talk like the the talk some of you saw at the MIT, we talked about how is it that we see the core protocol of economy, at least a market based economy to be to be an exchange. Right? So when formalizing that, we come up with we what we're referring to as a distributor exchange And perhaps that that would fit this particular protocol will be the capacity to offer match and net. Right? Netting being a important operation that is going to to be very, very relevant for the creation, for instance, of distributed credit. Then we go and say, like, okay. So how liquidity can be created? And with this, like, we come up with with a distributed credit network, distributed credit protocol, where the verse in this grammar will be debit, credit, clear. And up in the pyramid, we get into, like, a value creation, value production, and and and and risk taking. And it's a form of distributed equity that grammar from the grammar perspective, from a language perspective, it uses a stake or the stake as part of the the operations that it uses. And the top, which is relevant to to to this group, is a view on a how to an encoding of value as an informational form, basically, that that where any kind of value can be encoded. Right? And we're calling this the performance.
Learning is easy.
Say that again? Sorry. So the performance the objective of the performance is an attempt to include not only physical value forms or familiar value value forms, but also any abstract value form that can be represented as a as a as an event or a series of events, and basically to include things like the environment or or health or things that are more abstract and that are not necessarily physical or doesn't necessarily have just one time one moment in time or one one place and space or one agent, but just conglomerates of of agents across time and space. So this this becomes like the the new value form, so to speak. This is is is, reflects, and we'll we'll talk about that in the discussion, a new form of governance. And we say new form of governance because it's the means by which collectives may join and coordinate their action across a shared goal. However, in this particular form of government governance, we don't have agents that are already assumed to be together or in the same place at the same time making a decision but the other way around. It's a decision that's already been proposed seeking to attract members to it right and most particularly resources you know in the understanding that that most decisions are resource sensitive and most decisions are about resourcing events right or the occurrence of things so it turns on itself the notion of decision making and with this sort of freeze the constraints of same time, same space, and even scale right, so that's something that perhaps would be particularly interesting, a perspective that will be particularly interesting from for this group. So I think that that would be actually the the general overview of what we're going to be talking about today, and please feel free to to ask anything to to go into detail into these types of players.
Okay. So let me ask you, Jorge, immediately like from the beginning. So first you said that so that the the economy is a network. Like, why is that important? The the that we can so and what does it mean? So it means that if economy is a network, so it means that it's just a group of group of agents interacting according to certain certain protocols, certain shared understandings meaning like who are the what what are the roles of the agents? What what can they do? What is valued? What's the state of the network? How it changes and and like that? And what do we realize when we because of this approach? Like, what's the what's the consequence?
I think I think that that that we can we can narrate it as we realize something, but also as, like, what we're trying to to to accomplish by revealing it in this way is precisely it's redesign. Right? So what we're attempting to do by by revealing the economy or or or what we deem to be the the core economic protocols of of a market based economy, we want to redesign it with while remaining interoperable. Right? So this is this is a very useful sort of perspective that the that the grammar angle or the the lens of a grammar, the lens of a language brings that the lens of systems and and and and the processes doesn't really mean bringing into the equation. So it's how is it, what is it, if the economy is a network and as a network it's a medium, it's a communication medium, What is the language that this network speaks and how can we take it from where it is to where we want to? Right? And the approach we've taken is rather than create something all different or presume the current protocols as as unchangeable or or necessary, we deconstruct them to then expand them. Right? So we can speak also within the same network the language expressions that are utilizing to to to bring integration the current economic network. But we formalize it a so it can be executed in a in a shared computational substrate, and two, to make it accessible to everyone rather than specialized agents and and and centralized agents that necessarily need to take on on on these specialized roles because it is impossible for you and me to engage at the level that is required, right, to interoperate with these economic agents.
Okay. Second question. And this is kind of pointing to the to the bottom layer there. Is the, like, what did we what did we start adventuring into the grammar? And kind of this is the question, like, I want to frame it in the sense that kind of if economy is a network, that's important part of our approach. But the second really important part of the approach is that we think that these networks need to be need to be implemented in a computational substrate in a distributed way. Which means that we need an other kind of a coordination mechanism than than the shared state or some kind of a global view, god view, one view from which the coordination happens. And this kind of led us into thinking into about the grammar or adventuring into the grammar like he was saying because it's a different kind of coordination mechanism, different way of thinking about coordination and innovation, like this like a spatiotemporal navigational agreement for a bunch of agents that that they can coordinate themselves, like, without the central central state, global shared state.
So Right? Yeah. Yeah. So so what I can expand on that is that, our take on the building of a of a, global distributed computational network is calling out the language and grammar artifacts that create a bias towards centralization. Because even though though, for instance, most networks are run over like many computers, we find that at the logical level, they're basically end up creating global shared state and some form of global shared state as a means of coordination. And we've we've concluded that one of the reasons this is the case is because most programming languages when understood as formal grammars, they encode a dialogue one to one relationship where it's the programming talking to the computer and then the computer eventually being being understood as as thinking the thoughts or doing the things that that the programmer thought. Right? So, there's no more, I'll I'll I'll leave them later on to elaborate of this, but meta pragmatic constructs that allows, self reference or the reference of others, other agents, a second person, a third person, and in a way that that allow for the inclusion of of more agents in in this programmatic constructs and the capacity to update and change themselves, right, within the the the the substrate itself and not outside from it. So we can go in in in more detail if if if the team is interested, but the summary is that we are expanding programming languages. So, compute it's not only a dialogue in in through programmatic expressions between programmer and computer, but each computer itself is exchanging programmatic expressions with each other and referring to each other and others as part of of the expressive capacity for for the creation of other protocols. And this is absolutely necessary to create distributed networks.
Yeah.
Otherwise, we end up having to predesign a program and then sort of install it on the network, and then every time we want to change it, we take it out or hard fork or whatever. Right? So when we have, like, a more malleable, more flexible, more expressive language, everything can be done reflectively within the network itself.
Can we open a little space for kind of a context for our project? I mean, you you mentioned the economy as as a network or a set of protocols.
Yeah.
And I just wanted to say something very briefly about the urgency of of what it is we're up to. Because, maybe it's obvious to everybody, but the the world organized by financialization is in terrible crisis. And, we we we think that some of that crisis is endemic to the treatment of information and agency by the financial protocols as they exist. So, allowing, greater functionality for people who might constitute themselves as agents in an emergent economic protocol actually changes the political and expressive terrain of the social. And that's that's the I mean, I I guess maybe that's the big picture for the kind of micro political engineering that we're engaging
in. Yeah. Absolutely. And kind of let me maybe continue from there a little bit why kind of originally we felt that we really need to go get into involved in the in the protocol level, in the protocol design because the protocols are really they are really about the organization of the potentiality space. Like what is possible? What can be done by whom and in which order? For instance like what counts as liquidity? What counts as collateral? Kind of which are the key questions defining capitalism as a financial system for instance. So this is like the level where the politics is played right now like who gets to decide design these networks, politics, protocols right now. Mhmm. And
one more thing maybe. Just just in in discussing this, we also wanted to, emphasize some of the, kind of met metapragmatic functions that we're thinking about. And so I just mentioned collateralization, and that's a a key thing. I mean, we we think it's probably possible to collateralize a whole new set of asset classes, things which the current financial network doesn't really recognize as a as a securing value, all the way to expression, actually, which if you think about it as what is, collateralized by, platforms like Google and Facebook. But we also want to think about ways of sharing stake, and combining agency, and structuring that agency, in both a stake terms and a temporal sequence, as we create new kinds of actors for performances on this network. So So we really have a very different model of what it means to be a subject and a verb in a financial context, which gives us this idea, which we're also using as a heuristic really, but more as a as a descriptor and maybe as an aspiration to create something that we think of as economic media, where expressivity and, which we think of in terms of communications and value transfer and and and instruments of of value, creation and relation, which we think of as being in monetary media or other financial instruments can actually be combined, welded together.
Yeah. Hey, Ben, maybe I could bring you to the discussion too and then we're Nathan we are ready to start talking with everybody, but this would be the question like where we wanted to kind of end and start opening is that why is it important or to how would I put it? The why is it useful that we understand the protocols as a as a grammar or, like, the meta pragmatic grammar perspective that you've you've, brought us? Like, what does it open to us? The meta pragmatic perspective? You're muted. Ben, you're muted.
I'll do a very brief history of this development of a meta programmatic grammar. Most of you will probably remember, the Chomsky hierarchy of languages, of formal languages that was published by Chomsky about forty years ago. And, that focused heavily on phrase structure grammars. And they were translated into first order quantification theory, extensional languages by generous semantics about thirty years ago. And, they developed, a thing called intentional logics, of which the most famous example were Montague grammars. And Montague grammars then allowed us to look at the logical behavior of indexical or pragmatic elements. That is, elements that shifted their reference with the moment of speech like the word I, which is, shifts its reference with everyone who utters it. And so the question was how to coordinate, shifting references and, monogrammed grammar, with what was called a Kripke semantics was able to do this. And what we're, what's important for us is that our Montego grammar is a form of a Lambda calculus. And the Lambda calculus is part of our protocol language. We have a very different interpretation than the standard monologue grammar which has been interpreted in analytic philosophy as dealing with necessity and temp necessity and possibility. That's what tricky semantics do deal with. We are actually trying to, look at, these kinds of models in terms of what, sort of a society you could construct out of them, out of these kind of languages. And that's a long tradition in anthropology and sociology ending up with Benedict Anderson's very famous, account of novels and, of, nationalism as arising out of the circulation of novels and newspapers. What we are interested in is actually the structure of social innovation. And so that's why we are taking this sort of radical approach to language, and meta pragmatic grammars as a way of framing our enterprise. So that would be a slight background for why we're doing what we're doing. People didn't mention yet, but we will mention, and I'm sure it will come up in the discussion, this notion of performance, which, basically allows us to stake innovations that are measurable, as quantitative measures of qualitative values that aren't necessarily monetary. So, what we are interested in is being able to create a holding environment for the development and liquidity of alternative values. Okay. So
Can Can I just jump in? Because I see see Seth has been asking a couple questions and I wanna try to Okay. Clarify. I'll I'll try to be brief. But in terms of the the larger aspirations and the problems with the current financial protocols, If one thinks about the structure of, value creation on Internet, even generally, what you see is you see that, in the name of horizontality that is from operation and the, opening up of expression and getting rid of blow roadblocks, we've actually unleashed this unbelievable accumulation engine. So people as they're trying to produce democracy discursively through speech and develop their own relationships to one another where they're semi autonomous and relationship to other people are actually producing a hierarchical society which is which dominates them. I mean, this is this is an opinion to to some extent, but it's also kind of dressed up with facts where you have massive accumulation of wealth on the one hand at the expense really of everyone else's expressive capacities. So we wanna sort of change, that asymmetry, which is an evolving asymmetry and has, in, mind you, put the world into tremendous crisis where you have, actors who are able to accumulate massive, collective power and then become the sole executors of what's going to happen with that power because they have captured the value of that expressivity and that value creation, which happens on the ground. That's an actual reenactment of what's happened in the history of colonialism and imperialism. So I see an arc going through colonialism, imperialism, and this kind of contemporary media capture, which is also in a way that's probably too much for this conversation here, although I'm happy to go into it, consistent with the kind of racialization that we've seen, you know, in modernity, if you think about it from the conquest forward. So those are the large things. And if you see that as the economic structure is actually profoundly informing mediation, computation, and consciousness, then what we're really thinking about is a possibility of decolonizing these structures Mhmm. And actually opening up the space so that agency is more available to everyone, not throwing away all the innovation, which has taken place historically, but redistributing that innovation and making it available to many more people than it is right now because of the way value is institutionalized, the way media is our value capture technology.
Let me answer Seth's email to everyone. I guess the way we would express it is that depending on the model of language that you have, the model of communication, and we have a particular one, you can, use that to build different models. For instance, the standard model, in, many years ago was to use transformational grammar for psycholinguistics, which led to, cognitive linguistics in its present form. Literary people look at the structure of narration, direct and indirect discourse and things like this, for stylistic analysis. What we, wanted to do was to look at certain properties of language that need to be put in for a distributed network, a decentralized distributed network, and their social and economic implications to be able to read that structure out of it. So, I mentioned Benedict Anderson, the novels and newspapers. That's a literary example coming from the structure of narration, third person discourse narration in novels and newspapers that, Anderson very famously, argued was the basis for we the people. That is, the, kind of sensibility among citizens who may never know each other. So what we were trying to do with this, meta pragmatic, model of language is systematically expand so that we could include, the economy and especially the process of innovation itself. So that's a little bit of an answer.
And what what what does the innovation mean there, like, Ben? Like, what does it mean to bring the innovation in?
Well, no. Because, Jorge actually kinda mentioned this. It's in in this, recursivity, and the distributed network and being able to be self referential and reflexes. And that's what meta meta pragmatic means is that, language has a structure that takes its own praxis as its object. Alright? And that's, that's for instance, isn't in a phrase structure grammar that, were part of the Chomsky hierarchy, you know. And, that basically, dominated the, relationship between computational languages and computational psychology for twenty years. I mean, I was involved in that. So I know material pretty well.
Seth, since since several several speakers have been responding to your question, do you have any more do you feel satisfied by their responses or do you have any Yes.
Yes. Thank you very much. I mean, I'll keep asking questions,
but but yes. Thank you.
Great. I wanna make a comment that may or may not help for people. This is gonna be kind of tangential, but I have the benefit of having chatted with the EXA guys for a long time. One thing that really stands out to me and maybe the overlap between sort of Medigov interests and the exit interest is the idea of that which one can express with what they're given. So we talk about modular politics and we talk about the different kinds of platforms that people can use to self govern online communities. And to the in Exa, this is maybe undertaking a much broader system, but still asking the question of, you know, what kinds of primitives or or modules are available through which to express institutional forms that are different from the ones that are currently being expressed or the extent to which the ones that are currently being expressed are continuously reproduced because we see them and we imitate them versus asking, you know, what we need in order to express alternatives and what those alternatives might look like.
Yeah. Exactly. Especially economic relations. That's that's the the area where we want to where we've been operating, like, re rethinking and and re re programming them.
I mean, if if, you know, people everybody here has probably heard of postmodernism at one time or another. But, you know, which is said by some of its expositors to have begun in, like, late sixties or 1973, some people wanna say, as a sort of intensification of modernity in the play in the moment where signifying processes were cut loose from their reference in a in a really radical way. And this has been like the cultural dominance, for a very long time. It's it's in the art world and and leading in the literary world and the the theoretical and the philosophical world. Mhmm. But what it means and why it's really important for us is that it was a cultural dominant that presupposed capitalism as something that one couldn't change. It was as if that operating system were set. And, you know, you've heard heard the phrase, it's easy to imagine the end of the world than just imagine the end of capitalism. Like and so it was actually taken off of the design space and off the political imaginary. So politics became cultural politics only, and people fought for a larger slice of the pie. But all of a sudden we were really perceiving with COVID, with black lives matter, with our own work and with many other factors that the economy is now a design space. The economy is up for grabs again. And that's a really and so what's arguing saying about what are the primitives? What are these basic functions which are part of the current protocol protocolized economy that we can actually reimagine and recon and reconstruct so that we can create other kinds of social relations, other kinds of sociality. And and one of the terms we throw around in excellent conversations is the possibility of forms of postmodern kinship, where you make meaningful long term relationships with other people, even if they're effectively strangers by modern terms. They become your comrades in other ways.
Can you see
I would like to
Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, Shumi.
I yeah. I have a question, a practical question. Now I I I understand the concept, and I really love the the metaphor of, an economic protocol, because, it's not being used, but it's, but but where does it tie in with, kind of psychology and collective psychology, individual and collective psychology? Because it's not a set of rules that is, like, outside forces make, and then people adapt those rules. It has to do it's like this constant feedback loop, between people and the systems that they create of how they well, their belief system about what money is, what value is, and how interactions are supposed to be, and whether people are more comfortable in top down structures or want to participate, etcetera. So, my question, to the Excel people is, like, where does psychology come, into play in your design thinking process in these protocols?
I'll just jump in again because we have you know, we've we've done a lot of reading partially of Marx and Hayek, both of whom over there have very different ideas about what money is, agree that, the money form and what Hayek calls the price system emerges behind the backs of people, which is to say it's it's a no one's nope no one designed it. Right? It's it's a it's a result of human beings' practical activity. So you get the rise of the value form and monetary systems, which are then, as you say, Sherman, dialectically sort of recursively and interactively designed. People have relationships to these phenomenon and then create innovate things. But the but it what it implies is that the whole financial system, constitutes a kind of unconscious, right, or a sub subconscious which informs psychology. I mean, I I well, the first chapter of my book is actually called the computational unconscious.
Okay. I'd I'd love to read your book. So because I think that this part, I see more and more that money for example, money as a protocol, an economic protocol, really, it's a religion. It's a belief system, and that has manifested over time, because the way that money is, like, if you look at the history of money and and why we, like, kind of created or needed money, and and and and we're holding on to concepts, so that we might not need anymore. And the good thing about crypto is that there is a window of opportunity to break this belief system loose, but I I on a daily basis, I face because writing the book and talking to people and on working on projects, people believe that money is needs to be or values have to be transferrable, that money does not come with an expiry date, etcetera, etcetera. It's a specific design of money, which we have today and which we've had for hundreds of years or centuries or millennia now, and people still stick to it while we could have different types of monies. Right? So this is a kind of it has to do with psychology with I think also pattern thinking, flock behavior, so systems are not created by outside forces. It's like this dynamic feedback loop of how people and and and and, institutions and their institutions interact with each other and what manifests as reality and the only reality. Right? So, so I think we need to take this and and I still owe you guys feedback on on the paper so that that I think we need to tap into the psychology much more probably also. Yeah.
I I I think that's a really really good point and we we are facing it too. That's kind of the the biggest biggest challenge but also the biggest opportunity in a sense. Yeah. Because we've also seen that you can see it in the people's eyes that when they get it, that it that when economy turns into a place of creation, like
Yes.
Then it then it's no going back. And that's the that's the that's the play, our play or what to to to which where we are going and kind of we think that when you look at it really, the desire is already there. We see that there's some really exciting experiments going on in the crypto community creation like the like these networks of DAOs kind of it's already there. The experimentation but the tools are still a little bit clumsy and
Yes. That's what we're thinking. It's but but it's not only the tools. I guess that's my point. Right? So we understand it's we're in the early stages of the technology. We don't have too many best practices of token, community tokens, etcetera etcetera. So but that's one part. And the other part, so it's a socioeconomic technology. Right? It's the belief system, how society works and and has to work. And so I think we have exciting times ahead of us, probably, with this with these new technologies. And and and something as Archen and me sorry. Last sentence. We were also talking the other day was that we need to bring or, like, combine also the aspects of computational constitutions, like blockchain networks, etcetera, and DAOs, but also with the power of AI, with all the bias that these algorithms still have. Yeah.
Thank you. I I just wanna ask, and and maybe this could help advance also Seth's, further question here. Like, can you describe where this, where this protocol could start hitting people's experience? I mean, what what kind of, prototypes or, or experiences do you have in mind for where this starts to, change practice? And and Seth, raises, this I think a similar question in terms of, when does this system be, become more robust against the capture that comes from the, you know, distributions of resources in the current system. So so both of these are kind of where does the, you know, where where does the idea hit the road, in your minds?
I I can talk just a little bit about directly Seth's question. The the first question about, like, hearing experiences is actually, and I don't know where where to start. Maybe you can cover that. But but something to to we kind of already implied it earlier, but to to emphasize is that centralization as we see it is really a a network scaling strategy that is very predominant in in our systems. Right? And that's why we see emergent, here are case and whatnot. So, our take is in that, even though everyone understand that that the network detection that is more like peer to peer will be desirable, is it's not practical. I mean, it basically if if everyone was to really speak as as humans, these these dramas that we're proposing, the networks were very very will be very small. And actually in different historical moments in time, people have been able to issue their own credit, have been able to issue their own notes and and whatnot. But that doesn't scale, right? So these institutions take on the role of becoming the dividing binding agents that that allow the network to to to grow in numbers. So when we, however, are have an opportunity utilizing a computational substrate that everyone has access to, namely the Internet computer networks, then the opportunity opens again to give this capacity to express express it capacity to everyone in a in a way that it can scale and does not necessarily need to to to follow the the centralized architecture strategy that we've seen operative that then can be taken advantage of, right, so so or abused even. So just to to to toosh a little bit upon the question of like landing into a user experience is that then the question of this this enablement of of every agent in the network to speak this grammar becomes one of user interface. And what I can say in regards to that is that one of the advantages of maintaining interoperability is that initially maybe most people will think they're still transacting in in the way they used to transact, but then they can start discovering new operations that were not available before. Right? And, obviously, we need to to make those or or think through making those operations accessible through through user interfaces. But it's really what we're what we're talking about here is creating a new form of literacy. So it is more than an app challenge or a UI challenge. It's one of how do you create a new form of literacy and how do you make that accessible, which again, it's it's the other the the next part of the challenge. Once you have the protocols, how do you make them easy to use and easy to to to interact with. So that's what I can
say. I I think that addresses the psychology issue as well and also what Ben brought up with Anderson and Metapragmatic Grammar about imagined community too. The the ideas of protocols by offering new possibilities for making economic partnership or kinship will allow for new kinds of subject forms, new kinds of psychological experiments, new kinds of practical experiments in productivity and creativity, which will actually create new social bonds and new social forms. And and and we see this as a as an emergent possibility as a an alt economy which people will, enter into to varying degrees depending as they sort of bet against capitalism actually. They actually put more and more of their lifetime into this environment, which could otherwise be spent making money or doing things that are already available. So even entering into the space is actually the seeking of a kind of alternative and the utility that the space would offer would be the capacity to make a with others on on new terms. So for example, I mean, one of the key things that one of the key innovations I think for us is peer to peer issuance of credit. And if you wanted to talk think about a place to begin experimenting and playing with I mean, this process of co issuance of credit, I think is a really interesting and rich, possibility which we haven't really been able to simulate, fully. You know, we've thought about it a lot, but to actually play with it and and be able to practice it, at some kind of moderate scale would be very, very interesting. Because now we have to go to the banks. Right? Now we have to go to, you know, there there's a FICO system which is gonna put us on a particular social graph of risk and decide how much our credit is gonna cost us. We're gonna change the valuation system and the and the evaluation of of creditworthiness and, make it a peer to peer process where people bring their networks to one another. They meet each other as agents who are connected to other networks, and an evaluation can take place for co issuance.
Alright. Zargan had a hand up.
So I'm gonna play the opposite of my normal role and try to be the one on the concrete side of the equation. So one of the the real examples that I have in my experience with sort of DAOs at large and participating in sort of novel forms of coordination is just the ability to show up and, you know, participate in the design of a policy rendered as an algorithm in in any number of, you know, Ethereum based smart contracts. And the reason I point this out is because the resonance that I have with the description of the Exa team of these sort of new grammars is actually with lived experience even more so than theory. Like, I don't have the same academic background that the team does, but that what I think is necessary for people to understand the concepts that they're expressing is a is actually to experiment with the construction of different kinds of agreements or arrangements with collaboration and with each other. And that when you start to experience a pattern that doesn't sort of match the canonical ones, then the idea is being expressed about the this is a design space, and you can try things out, think of new things, and, you know, maybe they all don't work. But the idea, first and foremost, that there's an opportunity to step outside of the, you know, the sort of fishes in the water, step out and see the water is there and consider alternatives is is, for at least for me, the the main thing that's compelling about the sort of, you know, expression of economic of economics that this this group provides, and maybe some of the difficulty is that until you step out of it, it's hard to see the the abstraction of it. I don't know. Maybe that's not as concrete as it could be. But I I'm emphasizing this because I think the path for people understanding this is more like just attempts to express or almost even artistic in the sense that maybe we don't expect them to be the persistent or structural ones, but just to show that you can do something else so that it clicks with people that this is actually a, a design space, not a fixed set of patterns that we have to operate within.
Before before our speakers, maybe offer a round of final comments, I just wanna give Seth a chance to to, voice his last, point here because mostly been hearing from Seth in the chat.
Oh, oh, yeah. I'm I'm perfectly content with that. I appreciate hearing from everybody. Thanks so much for sharing the vision. The last thing I I threw out, maybe you're familiar with pandas, but I actually, I'm I'm on the Wikipedia page now. It's Condina. They they've popped up in Mexico, West Africa, Caribbean, Asia, Peru, El Salvador, Chile, Indonesia, Brazil, Philippines, South Africa, and Pakistan under different names, informal loan clubs, rotating service savings associations. And that sounds like a like a concrete form of the kind of small scale kind of financial empowerment that you're describing.
Okay. Maybe around the final comments so we can wrap up on time. It's been a really rich
discussion. You know, Sargon's, kind of, intervention there. What we're trying to do is move between this larger notion of fixed collectivities and individuals by focusing on distributed networks. So that the, for instance, the agent of innovation isn't the individual or the company, it's actually a network. And to provide them with the liquidity and the resources, both, in terms of credit and collateral, but also in terms of data mining so that they can literally, weigh weigh a bet on their innovations and then understand how they spread or fail. Alright? And that's what we mean by being able to use these tokens to bridge in some sense. It's like money money having a memory for every transaction that it mediates all the way to credit and collateral. Alright? And that's what our system of tokens does. Alright? Is it allows relatively seamless application of these distributed protocols to, take advantage of almost the unlimited memory of, distributed protocols all the way to the issues of liquidity and credit and collateral, which we really try to network base in a way that we translate, for instance, Perry Merling's work, who's the head of the Soros Foundation on education. He's an economist. But, it applies to banks, but actually transform the issues of liquidity into networks. And so I think that's really the backbone and it answers, we can go into detail some of Sherman's question because in the past, as you know with Marx and other people, they've always thought that money came out of barter. And then the other end was contracts, all right? As David Graeber talks about in his book Debt, he was a classmate of mine, that didn't happen. There's no historical or anthropological evidence that money ever arrived, evolved out of barter. And so we have a very different approach to money, tokens, credit, innovation, and that harnesses in some sense, the memory potential of distributed networks.
Yeah. I think I think that's really a key point. And, just to put it in political terms, the current monetary system collapses so much information, so much agency. In fact, it's the fact that it has it's I guess, it's a mark of form. Right? That that it doesn't matter what happened before. And that means that everybody who worked to produce it in the factory or in the colony or wherever has also disappeared in monetary information. Money money right? But money with infinite memory and that that becomes then programmable and in a way can can can reach back and and be affected by those who produced it on the production side changes its properties tremendously.
Yes.
We can start on the social monetary systems can appear and have a exercise agency.
Yeah. Maybe I can also address because that's the kind of what what Nathan was saying. I I started to think about it but what what we what we are doing and what we really want to do right now is just is to to both to experiment with our own organization and kind of for primitives that we have here. Kind of using this this this this like economic expressions to create different kind of sociality, mutual stakeholding, credit relations, in in our, this is what we are experimenting right now. And this is kind of, which which I would be very interested in in trying to to like experiment with you too and think about that because I think it's time for that. We are we are ready. There are already these small forms of technology that actually allow us to prototype it and there are some already ongoing examples like a templates for bootstrapping this kind of development environments available. So so that's that's like our our next step and kind of what we would like to bring to the table that I don't know would you be interested in in something like that?
Well, I it sounds like that's a good segue to part two of this of this series with with you all for Vexa. In two weeks, we'll be hearing from you about your community protocol, and and I I think that'll be interesting for a number of reasons, including the fact that, you know, this Medigov community is also trying to figure out how, how we organize ourselves. So that's, we agree. Yeah. So, let's take a moment, to thank our guests. We unmute and and applaud in three, two, 1. Thank you so much.
Great.
Thanks.
And, and we'll, we'll see you all in the Slack. Thank you thank you so much for being part of this, and and we look forward to more.
Great.
Yeah.
Alright.
Let's chat. Bye.