Designing post-capitalism with the Economic Space Agency feat. Akseli Virtanen
The Blockchain Socialist | 2021-01-03 | 1:09:17
For this week's podcast I spoke to Akseli Virtanen (@econaut6), one of the founders of the Economic Space Agency (@ecospaceagency) (ECSA), an organization for exploring protocols for post-capitalist economic expression. Akseli previously founded the Robin Hood Cooperative Hedge Fund and has been referred as The Andy Warhol of Finance. During the interview we talk about how ECSA is exploring the creation of post-capitalist economic media through the creation of a new "economic grammar"...
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Transcript
Speaker 0
0:17 – 0:38
So hello again. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast, and I have a special guest. His name is Axel Evertanen. He is the cofounder of the Robinhood Cooperative Hedge Funds and the Economic Space Agency, which is an organization for researching protocols for post capitalist economic expression. So hi, Axeli. How are you doing?
Speaker 1
0:39 – 0:42
Hey, man. Nice to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Speaker 0
0:43 – 1:23
Yeah. Of course. I had to invite you because when I found out about Xa, I got really excited. It was a very interesting project, and, it almost seems like this organization of Marxist academics and technologists coming together to look at blockchain, but I guess with using blockchain specifically in constructing post capitalism, which is something that is, I think really interesting for me. But so before we get into Exa, which is the Economic Space Agency, maybe we can first start with your introduction and maybe you can talk about the story behind the Robinhood Co op and Exa.
Speaker 1
1:23 – 8:41
Yeah. Sure. Thanks. Yeah. That was a that was a pretty, interesting introduction to to what we do. So so I'm, I'm, I'm a political economist. The emphasis on the on the both words. I'm, both political and economist. I've written quite a lot about the in my PhD in the School of Economics in Helsinki, I've written quite a lot about, history of economic organization, economy, its conventions, also about its future, and finance too. And what I've if I've learned something, it's maybe that economy actually it has a history. So it has not always worked in the way that we think that it works now. It has not always meant the same thing that we think that it means today. And one of the key consequences of this is that if it has a history, it also has a future. And this is kind of what makes me excited. And one of my favorite, financial finance theorists, for instance, Myron Scholes, who won the Nobel Prize back in '97 with for the Black Scholes option pricing, theory formula, He said it in his Nobel Prize speech that, you know, it's important to understand that, for instance, debt and equity, they are just historical institutional arrangements and there will come a time, well, when when the distinctions between debt and equity, for instance, will blur. And this is the kind of what he meant was that that, yeah, they are just historical arrangements and they will change. They are not something something set forth in stone. So when when right now, like, derivatives and, the cryptographically enabled economic, well, distributed applications are changing the conventions of economic organizations, just like the, you know, the joint stock company and the emergence of stock exchange in the 1840s and 50s changed completely the irreversibly the way that the production was organized in the same way now that we are or I can be part of this this this moment when we are actually capable of re engineering and rethinking these future economic categories and formations. That just makes makes me super, super excited. So that's, like, one part of my my trajectory here. Then, so I'm a political economist, but also an organizational experimenter. So I've organized quite a few large scale experiments, creating these new economic and social financial formations. There was once, this one's, newspaper article, and it was characterizing me as the Andy Warhol of finance, which back then I thought was really funny, but on a second thought, I thought it was also important that he kind of, touched something important because the place where art and politics meet, it's this place where the old forms, the old forms of subjectivity, old forms of organization, old forms of society, of economy start to collapse. And we are anticipating the new ones, these new forms, new forms of life and organizing these new formations. And that's that's, kind of, has been the the project for us. And, yeah, that's how I think of the history. And Robinhood was the was, like, the first our first attempt with the team to to re engineer finance or to create this new kind of social financial formation. And there, we this was back in 2012 when we established this decentralized hedge fund. And first thing we did was that we released this massive data mining algorithm, which was following all the transactions at The U. S. Stock exchanges. It was identifying the best actors and in particular stocks and then imitating their emerging consensus behavior. So, in a sense, we were turning them into data banks and used then big data analysis and structured finance to share, like, the most their most important means of production, you know, their knowledge, their relations, their positions on the market. And then we imitated, like, what they were doing, and shared this knowledge with all the members of the cooperative. So, we were organized as the decentralized hedge fund. The governance we chose was a cooperative, so one member, every member had one vote, and every member also then decided, like, which part of the profit they put to a common pool, And then and then, well, the members of the cooperative decided together which kind of commons producing projects we invest from this common pool. So it was kind of for this first attempt at re engineering finance, cash and risk flows. And it also showed that you actually have the power and imagination to do it. And you could tell it when you could see it in the people's eyes that when they realized that, shit, hey, we can actually do this, then there was no return, no coming back from there. So we were, like, using finance as the matter and medium of our expression, really. So, so here, the next immediate thought was then that, okay, so if we can do this, wouldn't it be cool that if everyone could do it? And that was the thought of EXA, of the Economic Space Agency. And so so what if we had this toolset for expressing this medium for expressing different financial, different economic organizational formations? That was the the, like, the original idea of of Exxon. And then that quite quickly gathered a group of very, very smart people around itself, from different disciplines. So we have political economists, software architects, game designers, finance theorists, economic anthropologists, monetary, historians and theorists, artists, you know, the kind of group that you really actually need to to rethink and re engineer what the economy could be.
Speaker 0
8:42 – 9:40
Yeah. And and so I guess yeah. It sounds like Robinhood, it's taking an institution that people find, I think, for the most part, somewhat reprehensible in the sense that when you look at some of the top hedge funds and, like, the amount of money and the amount of profit that they make off of, particular trading strategies that they have, whether they be legal or not. But then you sort of rework that into a more, I guess, communitarian approach where it's more I mean, it's a cooperative. And then you think, okay, since we're able to express ourselves, we figured out a way to express ourselves differently than what a maybe traditional capitalist organization would on the market. We can try to reproduce this type of organization over and over again through, you know, modern technology and such like that. Is that sort of how the progression went?
Speaker 1
9:40 – 10:36
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And kind of, with the from the kind of a political angle, we we can sort of, still, talk about Robinhood as minor asset management. It's a term, political term, from our philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gattari. They are some of our favorite, thinkers from with, like, and it's a lot of based on their thought that we've been thinking about these things. So so it's like we kind of created this imitation, this replication of of the what the what was happening on the financial market, but with a little difference. So it kind of was this, simulacrum, which started to create a repetition with the difference, which started to open into a new new economic space. That was the politics there, really. Yes. Continuing on that,
Speaker 0
10:36 – 11:04
what are the goals of Exa? Cause, I mean, in on on the sites and and the different writings and, videos that you guys have out there, you guys talk about building a different economic and political reality, sort of thinking, you know, like you said, if there's a history, then there is a future. So at some point, most likely, we're going to reach a post capitalism. But do you see this type of post capitalism as a socialist one in a sense, or is it something that's more up in the air?
Speaker 1
11:05 – 14:30
Yeah. So so I'm I'm basically I'm a pragmatist, so I don't really care if it's, it's a, socialist post capitalism is something we we think it's it defines it quite well, the direction we're going. But but the if if you're asking what's the goal, that's a that's a good question. I think that the our goal is to to open the media of economy, open the language of economy so that so that we could give everyone the same rights to express, to create, literacy, agendas of economy to to for ourselves to express ourselves. And why? Because because we need to we need to decentralize the authorship of features And that just requires it means the means open sourcing and decentralizing that which remained still centralized in the in the era of social networks, which means the information and protocol layer called, the economy. So that's that's that's what we are thinking. And the goal kind of for, second way to another way to think about it would be maybe to say that we are really our goal is really to think that what kind of economics, and politics becomes possible when when our economic organizational composition becomes a software design question, basically bounded become it becomes bounded only by our imagination. So that's like where our thought space is. That's where we are working. Like like with these new network technologies, what kind of economy, could become and politics could become possible? And it seems to be one of the most difficult things to understand that this there is now with the with the cryptographically enabled, technologies, there's this potential to cause the crypto networks to have a potential to cause an irreversible change in the in in how we understand, economy, like economy in itself, economy and its conventions as a design space. So so taking this in consideration, when you think about, what is happening in cryptoeconomics or in decentralized finance, and there seems to be very little attention in rethinking the economic component or the finance component, and rather there's this implicit embrace of a pretty conservative economics orthodoxy of what is money, what is value, what are markets, what is credit used for, what kind of incentives create the best social outcomes. And we think that it's this orthodoxy which is actually blocking the real potentiality of the situation, including the potentiality of the distributed computational substrate right now. So that's our goal that we want to expand this this this, what economy is. We want to bring that really into the to the information age.
Speaker 0
14:30 – 15:34
Well, I mean, first, I want to say that I was nodding my head a lot because, yeah, I agree definitely the it seems that the current state of DeFi and cryptocurrency, for the most part is a little bit lacking in creativity, in the sense that it is more a lot of it is a replication of sort of how the economy exists already today just on the blockchain, and that's sort of it goes against really what was I would think is was the original intention of something like Bitcoin. It was really meant to, you know, they really had to stop that they would they would change social relationships, I think, in a sense. And that's something that I think is missing besides what has already been done in DeFi. But so when you say that cryptography you know, has the potential to drastically change the economy, how how why do you think that is? Like, how what is special about cryptography and like what it's able to do in changing economics?
Speaker 1
15:35 – 16:25
Yeah, that's that's that's exactly the the the right question. So so, let's say that from our perspective, in fact, there is quite a lot of creativity in the in the in the DeFi right now, a lot and I enjoy it, following it, and trying to keep up with it also, quite a lot. But it seems that the, the nature of the our economic networks, the nature of the financial protocols, it's bound by the expressivity of the language, that we that can conceive them. So we really want to create a more expressive language to describe our economic and financial networks. That's kind of what the the where the potentiality space is.
Speaker 0
16:26 – 16:52
So just just to go back to to the question about, cryptography is the to make it clear, I guess, for people why this why cryptography has such a an impact, is it because of the potential of using that technology for creating, I guess, economic institutions that are quite unbreakable to a certain extent.
Speaker 1
16:52 – 16:55
Yes. And programmable from bottom
Speaker 0
16:55 – 17:31
up. That's the that's that's that's the landscape that it's really opening. Yeah. So that I think that's that's that's the really interesting part of it is that yeah. It's opening up the creation of financial and economic organizations, to people which was something that was really restricted to, I mean people in banking, people in finance, people with, the legal knowledge on how to create an LLC for example and being able to do that is now something that is, a bit more, attainable for, you know, random people on the Internet essentially.
Speaker 1
17:32 – 19:03
Yes. Yes. Exactly. So so back in in in 2000 and, '13, it was it was '14 when the Ethereum white paper came out and, I mean, we were reading it. We were reading it and, like, it was hurting in our head, like, what is this? What is this decentralized autonomous organization? What what what how can it work? And we were not the only ones. It it kind of you could tell that when the when the meetups started to to just, happen everywhere around the around the world almost, You could tell that it was the time time was right for that. And and the key thing there really was that it kind of opened up the idea that it's not only this market relation or this this quick, like, transactive action relation which collapses all the sociality, but there opens this more longer term relationships between people, this more longer term, more dimensional, relation, this space, this what we call economic space, it opens up as as a programmable, as a design space. And that's that's really the the exciting, place, I think, for us. And what we see in in the DeFi, kind of for the composability and, the the integration of of DAOs and these, more financial money market protocols, what is happening, it's that's the that's the that's the direction.
Speaker 0
19:04 – 20:26
Yeah. It's which is, I think, particularly interesting, and we'll talk about it more later, but it sort of goes against the Hayekian sort of idea of price being, like, the ultimate, value and that it's able to reduce all these other things into one, whereas actually, which, you know, Hayek is someone that a lot of these crypto people really like, but what's actually being shown is that potentially we can expand that so that price isn't the only type of value that's able to be expressed, or like monetary value is able to be expressed. So for my next question, in the writings of Ekso, you guys talk about, a social derivative. So I'm curious, what what do you define a a social derivative? And do you think there's any danger in mixing the financial and the social? Because there's has been, particularly recently, you know, with the rise of neoliberalism, a lot of left wing academics in particular have written about the dangers of financialization and sort of the, yeah, the the the extent that banks and other financial institutions are willing to go to financialize, or privatize, certain things, basically, that used to be a part of the commons, maybe historically.
Speaker 1
20:29 – 23:51
Mhmm. Yeah. I I from my perspective, there's no question about it that the financial and social, they are already mixed. So that's that's I mean, social media, it's already economic media. That's our basic thesis. Social media it's already our economic media the problem just is that we don't have any access to this to these economic protocols that social media, uses and that's one of the the main main problems and why they need to be also decentralized. The same thing the the that economic media or monetary media it is already social, You know, finance, it is already social. The money is it's a social relationship, certain kind of relationship, social social relationship, a set of protocols. And then that's kind of for the starting point. So the risk really is that we don't enter this space, that we don't enter into this protocol design and and start to, like, re engineer re engineer this convergence between financial and social. So that's the that's really the that how we are thinking. And because if we if we don't get into this space, if we don't get into these protocols and start, like, designing them ourselves, we don't have politics. We are, like, out of out of out of possibility of affecting our own life and our own futures. That's that's that's what it what we think. So so so we're we're thinking that we are moving from, I'm now trying to get to the social derivative, which I think it's a it's a great concept. Economic media, it's it's important one for us, but so is so is the social derivative. So we're moving from this, you know, like, in the in the social networking, you peer socially by by you read, messages, you repost, you forward content content and so on. You you you that's that's that's how you you operate in the social networking space. We are thinking that we are moving into this from social networking into economic networking. So, so in the, in the economic networking, agents, like using the economic media, agents kind of start to form these disintermediated economic alliances by offering and re offering, by entering into value relationships, by issuing, redeeming, engaging in the creation of credit, equity, other financial relationships. So they can they can peer this they can peer through a shared economic protocol, a shared economic medium or economic grammar to form a networked economic system. So that's that's how we see that, what we want to do and where we see that this is this is going. So so if you think of Kickstarter and Patreon, which I think that you're using too, the the the some of the DeFi protocols, they are like the first baby steps of this transformation.
Speaker 0
23:53 – 25:47
Hey, everyone, and happy New Year's. If you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and join the crypto leftist communities on Discord or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. If you want to be sure that more content like this could be created, you can donate to my efforts through Patreon. So if you go to patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist, you can donate starting at $3 a month or more to help me out and join the newest patron, Corbinian, and the 16 other existing patrons. At the moment, I've spent more on this project than I've ever earned from it due to hosting costs, so any amount really helps. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode like I just did and access to monthly Patreon exclusive Q and A episodes where you can submit questions about blockchain and socialism that you'd like me to answer, and I'll give my thoughts in about twenty to thirty minutes. On the latest episode of the Patreon exclusive Q and A series, I actually gave my thoughts on the question about markets versus planning under socialism using blockchain. So, of course, I'll still be making content that is free, like this interview, so I can help spread the message that blockchain doesn't need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. So so by transformation, is this sort of like, what Patreon and services like that have done is, like, allowed people to support someone like me, who's just creating content to, like, share information with people and people can pay or not pay and they use, you know, fit certain fintech technology to try to make it feasible for someone to give $5, $10, like a little bit of per month as a way to sustain a creator like an like an artist whereas maybe in the, you know, medieval times a a patron was someone who paid was usually like a royal, you know, part of the royalty or something like that. You know, in that way I guess it it has changed, economic relationships.
Speaker 1
25:48 – 27:40
Certainly. And with the transformation, I mean that it gives you it's a expressive tool for you to start express an economic relationship between you and a patron, kind of, for that that becomes possible. You can express that, hey, I have this great project. Would you like to, support me? And you can you can express it and you can you can execute it. So that's what I mean. And these are, like, the first baby steps of this expressive power and when we talk about the economic media we mean that we can express more, more kind of relationships, in a more granular way, with, you know, like what I was saying that you can do it, by by engaging in creation of credit, equity relationship, other financial relationships. You peer through this, this, doing this. So nothing like in the social networking, the peering is different. Here you do it through this economic, through economic networking. You do it through this sharing the economic medium or the economic grammar. So this is what we are thinking that that it is these these things that are emerging, that we are discovering. And it's not only we, but it's the time, again, that we are all together. We are we are about together to right now to discover this new value form, this new social organizational, relational value form, value formation, which is characteristic to the information age. So if you know, like, Marx Marx, was writing in in the Capital. I'm sure you read it.
Speaker 0
27:40 – 27:43
Of course. Everyone has read it.
Speaker 1
27:43 – 32:21
So the volume one volume one of of the Capital, how he so the capitalism is a great book where he tries to reveal the economic patterns of capitalist mode of production. And how how does he start it? What's the first chapter of the of the volume one, one of capital? It's the commodity. So, it's this commodity form, this commodity form of production of value, which is a particular kind of a form in which things are bought can be bought and sold and in the circulation of which is the it's the starting point of capital where the product is the money. So, so, Marc starts from there and he shows, like, like, it is this form, this this commodity form, where the social relations between people because that's what capital is it's a social relationship it's a form in which this social relations between people take the form of, relations between things. So, you you you it seems to you that you are just exchanging these things, you're buying and selling things, but what what is actually happening is the social relations. So, and that gets that gets that gets hidden hidden or forgotten in the commodity form, and the commodity form was, for Marx, the it was the basic economic cell of the of the capitalist industrial society. So, what we are saying that we're saying that it's no longer the commodity form which characterizes the which is the economic cell of our society, but it is this this emerging new value form, this networked, social, organizational, new kind of value form value form, what we call the economic space. So the economic space is like this new layer of economic abstraction and the EXA EXA protocol, the economic protocol that we are describing designing building, it is to express and execute these new social economic formations. That's it's the new language, the new medium to express these things. Yes? So the social derivative, it's it's another name for the economic space. It's it's another name for this emerging new value form, social value form, which characterizes the information edge. And why we use what we use derivative community is another name we use but why we use it is because, well, first of all, we want to show that the derivative actually has a social logic, that it it it's, it's a risk generating practice. It's with the sensibility of arbitrage. It's a it's a social logic which takes which takes us beyond just mere profit extracting a relation or ownership as the only social relations. It's like a different kind of, sensitivity. It allows us to value and sense how we are linked together. It allows to it allows us to leverage coming together by being able to come together and act together in a way that the new opportunity opens up and we can grab it. It allows us to this collective enjoyment of an upside created, by facing this risk together. So this is kind of the we are trying to say that, the social logic the derivative has this social logic which the finance industry has just, like, appropriated and objectified and used, but it does not belong to it. And we want to reappropriate it and and use it. So so when we think of EXA, of of the Economic Space Agency, for instance, we think of it as a social derivative. It's it's like this derivative social so where where we are coming together, this group weird group of people, we are not like one. We're not in any kind of symbiosis. We're heterogeneous people coming together with different contributions. And by doing this, we're leveraging this coming together in a way that an opportunity opens up and we are able to to to grab it and and collectively enjoy the upside. So that's the that's the that's a source of derivative.
Speaker 0
32:22 – 33:58
It's basically being able to define what the value is from social networks and from, like, the network effect, I guess, of it. But so one of the things that I find, really interesting about Exa is this coopitation of financial jargon, for imagining a post capitalist and, you know, a more egalitarian future because I think, one of my critiques of sort of socialist movements in the past, especially in the West, is sometimes their their rigidness. When there's something new or your or unique, that comes out of, left wing movements, however, it tends to get co opted by capital. And so I think it sometimes makes it difficult for the left to try and create new things because they're afraid that whatever they make is just going to be dominated by capital and it's going to swallow it and then repurpose it, for capitalism's sort of need. So it's sort of like this, you know, capitalism is able to sell anti capitalism even today. You know, you can buy shirts today, from a company which is a very capitalist company, but it says, you know, I hate capitalism on it or something like that. And you know, there's, like, the we lose the the the irony of of the whole situation. It's kind of gotten out of hand. But so this idea of co opting capitalism for, you know, more egalitarian needs, I think, is is very cool, and it puts the left in the position of, offense rather than always on defense.
Speaker 1
33:59 – 35:16
Yeah. Yeah. I I agree. Absolutely. And I would say that it it's more than just the words. Even if we are kind of very explicitly also taking these, certain words like the derivative, we are, like, deterritorializing it from meaning just it's not just a financial device. We're turning it into a way of expressing the social itself. Or we're taking interest and and redefining what what what it is. Or arbitrage and kind of overturning these meanings and recapturing it because it's like I was trying to say in the beginning that we also, kind of, these new forms which are emerging and I think we all feel it, but we don't yet have the right words. That's kind of a part of the part of the things that how you recognize this new new word this new new forms, which I imagine that you you can't exactly, like, say you don't have the words yet. You you know it's there, but you can only, like, point there. Yeah. You know? And and that's why we need to also create the new vocabulary, the new language to express what what what we what is happening and what we want to do, what kind of economic networks, we want to build.
Speaker 0
35:17 – 35:32
Yeah. Well said. So then, you know, knowing all this, what was it that attracted Exa towards distributed ledger technology and blockchain? Was it something that was being considered already from the beginning of the creation of Exa?
Speaker 1
35:33 – 36:03
Yeah. Yeah. It was the Exa was the our move to to to start working with this technology, really. So, kind of our point was that can we use these new, these peer to peer, networking technologies, these new information networks can we use them to open up new framings of economy, new framings of politics? That was the and still is the what we are excited about.
Speaker 0
36:03 – 36:52
Yeah, it is very cool to see a left leaning organization to have already had Blockchain in mind. I think it's pretty rare. But one of the problems that we face, on the left, I think, or even more broadly in general, people who are skeptical of this technology of Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies as having any sort of use is that they say that blockchain is usually a solution looking for a problem. So I was curious, you know, is that something that you would agree with? Because it seems that and I think you would not agree with it because it seems that EXA has been able to identify, some of these problems that it could help with, especially from a, like, from the left, like, from from the perspective of being an anti capitalist or wanting to move beyond capitalism.
Speaker 1
36:53 – 38:12
Yeah, absolutely. That's what I think that, though I don't quite see it that way at all. I think that we there are there are these these questions or problems like that we need to we need to decentralize, what has in what has what was left centralized, now still in the era of the social media, which are precisely the the, disinformation layer protocol layer of money and and economy. And the only way to do it is with this kind of a technology, which allows us to start from the bottom up, bottom up, start creating these peer to peer networks, which which which can be trusted, which can be, execute which executes securely and reliably. So we need this kind of a substrate. There's no no question about it. Blockchain, I think it's just, it's it's a it's a in the in the beginning, these first generation technologies that we have now, there are still problems that need to be solved. And we are also working on on the technology level and and think that we see where the direction needs to be going like, towards this more ecologically decentralized network layers.
Speaker 0
38:13 – 39:03
So what are the popular academics in the crypto libertarian space, the sort of the largest, you know, somewhat political group, in cryptocurrencies and blockchain is Friedrich Hayek. So he was a, you know, famous Austrian antisocial or antisocialist Austrian economist. So as an organization like Exa which is exploring crypto and blockchain through this post capitalist lens, there's a bit of a contradiction with the crypto libertarians who believe crypto to be the perfect example of, why pro capitalist and market fundamentalism of Hayek was correct. So, I know you guys have written a bit about it, but how do you synthesize this Hayekian market fundamentalism in cryptocurrencies with your, what seems to be more of an anti Hayekian vision of post capitalism?
Speaker 1
39:05 – 42:08
Yeah. That's a, that's a great question. And yeah, that it's true. We've written quite a lot about Hayek, but not only Hayek, also Marx, Keynes, Schumpeter, and kind of we which is our take that we we just want to publish soon the extra economic paper where we basically try to take this the, this, kind of where we situate the economic protocol we've been building, and the kind of economics that it makes possible, into the history and future of economy. We are trying to take what we can learn from these these thinkers, but trying to take it to the to the information age. So Hayek, yeah, so he is definitely an anti socialist, was an anti socialist thinker, but he also had a conflict with the neoclassical economists too. So and he was kind of a pretty marginal figure until Thatcher, brought him to the daylight. But smart guy, I gotta say, especially the later writings of Hayek. It's very interesting what he what he, says, and we are taking very seriously what we can learn from him. So so his his kind of position is that, yeah, market market is the natural side of freedom of expression and means to generate spontaneous social order. He thinks that kind of, the market is not the problem, but the problem is the inadequate specification of private property rights property rights and and rules of the market. And it's the state when the state starts to interfere, they just mess it up. So including including the the provision of the state sanctioned, the money monetary system, the fiat system. So it's so in that sense, on the surface level, it does seem like a perfect fit with the with the crypto, economics, and, and there has been a lot of a lot of, people, like, referring to Hayek and things have been built from this from this same kind of perspective, like the radical markets thesis. I don't know if you know it, but kind of the point is for us is that you got to remember that you cannot separate economy and politics. So with the pact with the Hayek also comes the idealization of the individualism, profit, and market as the foundational social relations. So, kind of from our perspective, Mark Hayek thinks that market is something natural. It's it's a culturally and economically foundational thing. It's it's this, neutral technology.
Speaker 0
42:09 – 42:21
And this is something very common with, with, I think, a lot of economists that markets are a natural or like as if humans have always sort of, existed in a market organization,
Speaker 1
42:22 – 50:49
I guess. Yeah. And they just come there they just come there with their strategic interests and then then that creates either equilibrium, which is the neoclassical, or then a spontaneous order, which is the high strand of economic thinking. And, like, and from our perspective, markets are not natural. They are not they are not, not, something, innately innate, you know, instruments of capitalism, but they can be created and structured. We are, redesigned protocols to open different spaces of possible. So so this is kind of what we we we do with Hayek. We we rethink the knowledge market relationship in the sense that for us we turn markets and profits and price into just a protocol. Not something, you know, something natural or foundational, but just a protocol, which means that it can also be redesigned. So, I can explain to you a little bit more because this is kind of interesting and important. So, we take the, we like I said, we kind of deconstruct certain standard economic categories because we want to learn learn from the earlier thinking. Hayek, yes, but also Keynes, especially from his take on credit. He and he writes beautifully and I know it's written so well that that money actually comes out of credit. But we want to take this this, this, this thinking into the information age. So we deconstruct what, what these economic, theories so that we don't unnecessarily bring those parts of the thinking into what we want to do in this now, in the information edge. So we kind of take seriously what Hayek says about, about the market and the price, but in a sense kind of take him from behind. It's a classical Deleuze move so that a monster is born and we kind of give him a derivative treatment or we frame him frame what he's saying from the perspective of the derivatives and synthetic finance. So, so that's that's that's how it goes. So, basically, what he says he has this, very famous, text from 1945, Use of Knowledge in Society, where he's saying that what he calls economic calculus, that it actually solves the problem of resource allocation and he's writing against the central planning. So he says that, it solves the resource allocation, especially when information is dispersed. It's incomplete, it's contradictory, it cannot be known by one one central, somebody to make the decisions and the about the resource allocations. And and how it does it is through price. So he's saying that price is this price can act to coordinate people. It's the price is this embodiment of complex information. It's the simple representation of that complexity, of this complex knowledge about society. It gives this numerical index in which all this information is condensed. So it's great it's there's a great functionality, there's great, economy of knowledge in this sense and by that he means that there's this symbol which passes this essential information and only to those who are concerned. So it's great like economic knowledge. So he's saying that price system is really a machinery for registering change and guiding people, to act in a certain way. So it's like a navigational system. And this is, in fact, this is very, very interesting and the analysis is, is very precise. But, but so then we ask that, okay, but why is the price the only index of valuation? Like, like, and this is what I meant with the derivative treatment is that if we think of knowledge like like Hayek for instance is describing it it is it's actually a synthetic asset so it's the knowledge is it's it's assembled of of processed information which we can we can we can break it into these underlying elements. Right? So so this this all this knowledge, this this complexity of knowledge, we don't necessarily need to combine it, bind it, and link it into this one index the price. There can be other things other kind of indexes, can be combined out of this, assembler knowledge. So the purpose, so the purpose of creating this index doesn't need to be just the formation of the market price. So if we think about the price like in the technical terms, it is really a derivative, a knowledge derivative. So it's just an exposer position, on the underlying knowledge. So and in technical terms, what Hayek means with the price, it's really a strike price on the option on the synthetic asset called knowledge. Okay. So in Hayek when we look at Hayek from this perspective, it becomes clear that Hayek's approach on spontaneous order is just an excessive, excessive reduction of information to a single, totalizing unit of measure. And we can deconstruct it into these components that are behind price and we can link it to a different measure. So so it's important really to understand that price is just an index. It just it just measures relative values. It's just a navigational protocol, but it just gets treated as, as an absolute measure, but on its origin it is a social and political construct. And that's it. So then the follow-up question is that, okay, if this is so, why is the price the privileged, expression of valuation? Why is the price the index of valuation? And we think that that is so because it expresses the values of the capitalist society, the priorities and the behaviors of the subjectivity, of the capitalist subjectivity. But from our perspective, when you when you open it up, it just it turns out to be a very, very narrow expression, very narrow grammar to understand what value is and how it gets, composed. So so we are thinking that kind of these these, these capitalist values, the the social and cultural norms, these ways of behavior and subjectivity which are embedded in them, They follow to a critical degree from the nature of ownership, collateralization of assets, the control of issuance and acceptance of credit, and access to the money well, access to money and credit. So, from certain protocols and when you start to redesign them, re engineer them into something what we call risking together, distributed ownership and distributed issuance of money, then also these social and cultural norms, our subjectivity will be profoundly changed and challenged. That's the kind of how we how we read him or how we used try to use him.
Speaker 0
50:49 – 51:57
That that that is interesting. Yeah. It's sort of, this obsession with with price as a very, I mean, it shows that capitalism is extremely subjective, and it's not only that. It's extremely narrow, and it and it's very limiting in how you can express yourself. And, you know, you know, it just shows the amount of truth in sort of, like, you know, people feeling like they cannot express themselves. I mean, as capitalism has developed, it just becomes more and more difficult as your life is mediated by more and more market relationships that it's difficult to be able to have non capitalist relationships, you know, ones that aren't based on, you know, transacting, or, like, you know, you know, what can you get out of a particular relationship and purely thinking about it in that way. Yeah, using basically Hayek's writing to prove how how much capitalism sucks.
Speaker 1
52:01 – 52:39
Yeah. But kind of, and and this made me think of the Patreon again, kind of, from your perspective, it kind of it has opened up this space of expression a little bit for you, no? That you can express a little bit more what you want to do, in economic terms. Yeah. I mean, definitely. That's right. So we do the we treat Hayek, like this. We give the same treatment to Marx. We give the same treatment to Keynes, and and in order in in developing our, what we call the economic space protocol, then. So I'm happy to share stuff with you.
Speaker 0
52:39 – 53:49
My next question is about this term economic grammar. It's something that you you use a lot. So what is the significance of using this word grammar in an economic sense, which, you know, it's mostly used as we're talking about language. And I guess for me in the technical sense of the word, when you think about language, you can think about it, of course, in programming language and the grammar of a programming language and whether or not you put a semicolon here or there to make your function work. But I think as well in a network sense, it seems to me it's like, another way of saying the data standardization and standardizing data so that people can transact, with each other. So if people have the grammar of, particular data standards like the Bitcoin data standard where you're supposed to have, you know, one address here, one address there, what's the transaction amounts and that And by having this type of grammar, people in the Bitcoin network are able to to economically speak to each other in a sense. But maybe I'll stop there and let you explain, you know, sort of what what EXIM means by by grammar.
Speaker 1
53:50 – 60:19
Yeah. Sure. No. No. It's it's like like I said, I we are really excited about this, the the grammar perspective where we we'll at at first, we were talking about pattern languages, and and then the grammar we finally understood that that's it, that's it. And, well, if you think what what I was just saying about Hayek, kind of, it's the if everyone is speaking the language of price and pursuit of profit as the singular index of decision making, then it causes what Hayek calls the spontaneous order. It market interactions create spontaneous order. That's the but it's a grammar. It's like a grammar of of of social interaction, and the result is then, what it is. So that's kind of for the our perspective. It's the meta. Now it means that from the ground perspective it opens economy as a network. So we can start to think economy as a network, meaning a group of agents interacting under certain agreements, shared understandings about what defines the relationships between the agents in the network, what's the state of the network? How the state changes? What is valued in this network? So, the and it makes us understand that really that the nature of our economic networks, it's bound by the expressivity of the language that can conceive them. So that's that's it. And that's why we want to create a more expressive language, more expressive language to describe our economic networks. Like what kind of participants can there be? What kind of relationships can they be with the with the agents? What's what's the relate nature of these relationships? How how can they change? What is valued? What kind of values can you express in these networks? How is this value exchanged and can you accumulate it? You know? So, this is the kind of what opens up from the grammar and the language perspective. So, the language framing, it reveals the protocol as a communication agreement. So, it reveals that the protocol it's essentially about the capability to create as a language, as a grammar. The protocol is about the capability to create new spaces and new agents through conversation, through expression. So it also means that governance, it's not so much about structures, but it's about expressions, like who gets to express and what. So that's the that's that's where we are we are we are what's open opening us with the language framing. We can also express and this is, kind of very important from the technical perspective also we can express the capacity of the network to define itself as an agent to and to redefine itself. So basically the network as a grammar, it can talk about itself. It can start to reflect on itself. Now the third thing is that it reveals it reveals the symmetricity in the approach. So we are thinking that if everybody speaks the same language, then everybody has the equal capacity of expression by which can by which then then they can then start to define different roles and different sub languages. So that's super important that everybody has the the language perspective opens this access, more and more access perspective. Then, like, I was saying, yeah, earlier we were talking with you, maybe the most important thing with the grammar or what opens with the grammar perspective is that it's, it's a different coordination mechanism. It's a it's a coordination tool, grammar. It's a coordination tool that doesn't require a global clock like block all blockchains do. So language coordinates differently. So we can have with no synchronization. So so so we can have, like, multiple conversations going on in different places, different locations in the world, but they can still relate into each other. They can still understand each other past ones and the future ones. And that makes you think like it's it's it's a really interesting, way of coordinate coordinating. So so it doesn't coordinate with with synchronization. So basically that you need to have one global state which everybody shares, but rather with valid validation by indexing, by embedding temporalities to another one by indexing, basically referencing. So so it coordinates any potential conversation past, future, anywhere, with no central time. And this is something something, in fact, which we think that will be very, very important soon. And it kind of points to a more fundamental understanding of the communication system, which the protocols are, they're just communication systems, versus the efficient market model or the contract model. So it's a more fundamental understanding of the communication situation and it redefines what a distributed system is. So that it kind of opens that the distributed system, it's a whole defined by the changing relationships of its parts, which does partitioning by indexing. So it doesn't need to choose between, consistency and a fork. So these are kind of very interesting, discussions that are opening up. We have some extremely good linguists like, Benjamin Li from the from the New School, for instance, in the team with with with whom we've been, like, really seriously working on the also the the grammatic or the meta grammatic or the group to semiotic, perspective to what we do.
Speaker 0
60:20 – 60:32
That's that's interesting. Yeah. You it's like you need a new language to think about the language of economics, which is super meta and, yeah.
Speaker 1
60:33 – 60:35
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Welcome to Exa,
Speaker 0
60:37 – 61:05
man. Definitely. What are some of the use cases that are using DLT and blockchain blockchain that, Exa is advocating for, Logan? What what how how can you get a listener to think about what are the type of, relationships that may use distributed ledger technology that are mediated through that, that Exa would want to try and create?
Speaker 1
61:06 – 61:11
That's a that's a very good question. Can I can I, throw it back to you? What do you think?
Speaker 0
61:13 – 64:09
Well, I think I think you're asking me because you want me to repeat what I said, before we started recording because right. But so what what it sounds like to me, with with Exa and this talk about economic grammar. Alright. So to me, it's it sounds like, data standardization. And, you know, by having a standardized, structure of information, you are able to communicate with others who have the same structure of information. Like, that's how computers talk, essentially. Right? And it's taking this idea of how computers talk, but instead applying this to how, how people talk or how organizations talk. So, you know, organizations, they as well have data standardization in certain sense and that they share particular that they have shared knowledges about something that they can, express with one another so that they can talk about details of of a particular project they may be working on. And so what is interesting, I think, with the use of blockchain, especially with ledger technology, is that it's able to recreate or identify the, structures of information and data into back into a computer. So taking the economic language and then translating it into, computer language, but that still expresses economic activity or, any other type of activity you wanted to, express. But so then this is particularly interesting from, the left wing, perspective because the left is obviously very divided and very sectarian, because you have Trotskyists on one side and Marxist Leninists and, you know, anarcho, communists on all these different sides who all disagree on different things, but they still have, some shared, goals in the sense that they want to bring about, you know, the a new economic system that is not capitalism, that is more like some type of socialism. And so these organizations or small groups of Trotskyists and Anarcho communists, they are able to debate with each other about, you know, philosophical minute details that, that they think matter, but they're not able to use that same language to achieve a certain goal. And so by having creating a grammar and creating a protocol in which they're able to communicate with each other and have economic relationships with each other, I think in that way, they're able to at least work on the things that they're able to overlap on, and therefore have a stronger left rather than such a divided left as we have at the moment.
Speaker 1
64:10 – 66:49
That's sort of how I see some of the work that X has been doing. Certainly. That's that's a that's a that's a very good way to to put it. So there the key point really what he was saying was that the share like, the coordination, happens not through sharing a state, but sharing the protocol, the the grammar with which everybody can express. So that kind of for that's that's our key insight in the in in in there. But, yeah, I I we also think that there are, like, well, you you are very good at use case, for instance. I mean, people who are creating interesting content, want to create a community, want to, like, bring people together in a way that, something new opens up and then you want to share this upside. You want to share the risk and the upside of this end of war. And that's that's for which the the grammar is really meant so that we can actually, well, express different values which do not need to be profit oriented. So it can be care, it can be environmental the environment, the BS fair, health, different intangibles, open source that we can start to bring these different values into the accounting system, circulation system, staking system, create collateral out of out of these different, value productions and open credit lines between people, with these different, value productions. So that's that's the landscape that is that's opening up. I I know that there are a couple of and maybe more, that I even don't know about, like, interesting experiments going on in the in the blockchain and and DAO space also where where people are already thinking that kind of how do we move from these siloed protocols into in the most symbiotic ones? How can, decentralized exchange, what kind of a relationship can it create with this, this different money market protocol, for instance? How could two DAOs, do our stake swap or create a mutual stakeholding, and and kind of the tools tools for this kind of thing? That's the where where we are thinking and and at the moment also, building some first experiments.
Speaker 0
66:49 – 67:02
Yeah. Thanks a lot for for taking the time to speak about Exa. Maybe to top it off, where can people keep up with with your work and what you're doing and as long as what EXO is doing? Where should they go?
Speaker 1
67:02 – 67:35
Yeah. So the website of Economic Space Agency is ecsa.io. We we are kind of active there. You can leave your email and join the newsletter. You can you can email me or message me in Twitter or in Telegram. I write at, at, my handle is econout. We also have a blog where we write about crypto economic stuff, which is called the econout medium.
Speaker 0
67:36 – 67:38
Like astronauts, but, economic.
Speaker 1
67:40 – 67:54
Economic. And it has to do with the navigation kind of. We are thinking the econauts are the agents of the of this new economic space who speak the new language, new new language of post capitalist economy.
Speaker 0
67:55 – 67:58
Exploring the new frontier of economics, I guess.
Speaker 1
67:59 – 68:43
Exactly, exactly. We really think that it's like the Renaissance. You know, like the Renaissance scientists, Galileo and Da Vinci, what they did, they really they they invented these new instruments for the emerging new space space time, you know, the macrocosmos, which was opening up the telescopes that they could actually see and start to understand what is going on there. So also the microcosm, you know, the they started to study gravity, acceleration, different navigational instruments. We also need to create these new navigational instruments for this emerging new economic space time, the new economic space. Yeah. Absolutely. I agree.
Speaker 0
68:44 – 68:54
Well, thanks a lot, and good luck with Exa. I can highly recommend people check it out. They have a lot of very cool events that they host as well, so you can also take part in those.
Speaker 1
68:55 – 68:59
Great. Hey. Thanks for having me. Bye.