S.10 Ep.3 – Protocols for Post-Capitalist Expression: Rethinking Capital with Akseli, Dick & Jorge

Transcript

Welcome to a new season of the Green Till podcast. We are exploring how technology, community, and new forms of coordination can be used to fund, build, and accelerate what matters in the 21st century. This season, I'm talking with builders, thinkers, and innovators who are pushing the edges of what's possible. From onchain capital allocation to Ethereum to AI alignment to reimagining markets and governance. Together, we'll uncover how these ideas can bring us closer to a world that's improving every week, month, or quarter. or what we call protopia, preferable realistic future that is constantly improving through small incremental changes over time. If you want to learn more, visit our website at greenpill.network where you can download the Greenpill books for free, play with some of our ecosystem projects, join the telegram or participate in the network.

All right. Today on the podcast, I have Exceli uh who is the co-founder of the Economic Space Agency, a political economist, writer, and researcher known for pioneering work in postcist economics, financial innovation, and the reimagination of capital as a tool for collective expression. And we are also joined by his co-authors on the book Protocols for Postcist Expression, Dick Bryan and Jorge Lopez, who uh worked together to publish this work in 2023. I really really enjoyed this book. It was one of the few books that I've read that is very specific and has a systems level architecture for what this economy is going to look like and uh is also really bold in pushing us towards a more postc capitalist world. So um I really really

really liked this book. I read it on the beach this summer and just found it to be incredibly illuminating and has kind of created new lenses for how I think about Bitcoin 3.0 and uh where this space is going. And so I can't emphatically recommend the book enough. If you want to pick up a copy, click the links in the show notes and that's where you can get a copy of the book. All right, enjoy the episode. >> Hey gentlemen, welcome to the podcast. >> Hey, thank you. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Glad to have you. Let's maybe start off with some intros. Uh Alexi, let's start with you and then go to Jorge. Okay. So, I'm Axeli uh I'm a political economist originally and now I've been very much

involved in this economic space agency project. >> I'm Jorge Lopez. I'm also a researcher at the economic space agency and uh yeah, my job is giving formalization to all of this. >> Hi, I'm Dick Brian. I was uh before a few years ago an academic economist at the University of Sydney working on politics, economics and financial derivatives was my particular point of interest. >> Okay. So you're an academic economist and uh what branch of economics we're coming into now? Uh but it's exciting.

the the yeah the coming one >> uh let's say I was in in a department called political economy which which gives the edge to it being partway between economics and politics. >> Okay. Well um I have been reading the book that y'all wrote protocols for postc capitalist expression and I love the book. I've really just enjoyed all of the discussions that it's brought up and I'm wondering if you could introduce the book to the audience and I think that'll serve as a launch pad for the rest of our conversation. >> Okay. So >> if the book has a p thesis uh I I think that it's it it is that our computational networks they are really a a new fundamentally a new economic

medium but they are running an antiquated economic logic or their economic computation is trapped in an in an antiquated logic. So, so in a sense the our current economic system has a has a language problem. The language it speaks it's incredibly limited. So, it can't express and thus like coordinate around certain things which I for instance thinks think are think think are very valuable like our ecological health uh community resilience uh opensource knowledge care. So we're kind of saying in the book that if we want to unlock this this computational networks

as the substrate as or as the new economic medium we actually need to upgrade this logic this economic logic and and this is kind of what the book says and does and the key to this upgrading is that we start to understand u economy as a networking protocol. So it's a agents interacting according to certain shared understandings about what are the relationships that make the network its state uh how this state can be changed who can do what. So, so underlying there are this this this set of rules like a formal logic which defines how dictates how values defined,

coordinated, measured and distributed and also this sets the the limitations and outputs of this network and it defines like the what kind of economic agency does it enable to its participants and this view kind of for is the is the thesis of the book I And it enables us to do really two things. First to denaturalize capitalism or kind of that we don't need to approach it as some kind of a force of nature or ideology or we can't do anything about but we can see it precisely as a as a as a like a formal uh economic coordination protocol.

uh which also means that if we want to change it, it play it kind of points to the exact place of intervention which is the the protocol. So we want to change our economic reality then we need to we need to change the the protocol. I I think the little thing I'd add to that wearing my hat as an economist is that conventionally if you want to talk about something after capitalism it usually implied bureaucracy you know in in the left and if you were after distributed networks you were being aligned with the extreme right with Hayek I think we sort of had this notion that we shouldn't concede distributed systems and distributed networking to the right wing to the Hayekians that we needed to to

save to retrieve that and say this can be part of a coordinated distributed communally based collective agenda of coordination and it's by meeting these guys that I suddenly that that I suddenly had this awareness that there were ways of of building an alternative to capitalism that wasn't going to be about endless friaking meetings to get to make decisions or just reverting to hierarchy. So if if if you have any particular questions for for me actually that that I can answer too. Otherwise what has been coming to my mind that might be a sort of like um also very grounding is like perhaps we can share a little bit of how the book came about to

contextualize it. That'd be great. >> Yeah. >> Well, I'd say I got sick of you guys just wanting to talk and talk and argue and I decided I'll just start writing the freaking book. >> Let's chip something. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> So basically it started with Dixim initiative as our white paper on the early blockchain days and it became our surface of collaboration for many years actually because really one of the things that you probably already noticed is that it is a multi-disiplinary effort and bridging across disciplines is non-trivial. as as as we we found found out one of the most valuable things that the book provided is a surface in which

we cohhere our ideas and sort of like reflect them upon each other upon an artifact that was emerging. So it went through of course many revisions the book itself and and the artifact itself kept kept evolving through that >> and um yeah I think that is important important to highlight and and uh bring to the four. It implied a lot of trust too because it it sort of required each of us from our quite diverse backgrounds to say when the other person says I can see something I I can't nail it but I can see it that the other people go with that and say well we'll try and facilitate that and and reinterpret it to within our own knowledge backgrounds

but so so it's it's there's been a bit of treat warfare along here too intellectually But but you know it it has had a common spirit of saying whatever we talk about as a social form of coordination. It can't just be through the eyes of programming or just through the eyes of an economist or just through the eyes of a political scientist or a cultural studies person or a game designer and they're all the people we have on our team. It's got to be finding the sweet spot between those domains. >> Yeah. And so I'm wondering how you all landed on protocols as the unit of progress or the unit of of analysis here. I mean what makes protocols a better language for postcapist expression than like things from the each of those domains money markets

contracts culture. Uh why protocols? >> Yeah, that's that's also like a question right to the right to this point. I think I there are at least two very clear reasons which kind of for me it took a little bit of a little bit of time also to to understand it's um like power earlier kind of for I was talking about self-evidences things like that but but really there there protocols and what I'm meaning here is that kind of from from our analysis like political analysis that from that perspective it kind of has been clear for a long time that in this era of you know like semiotic inflation like posttruth

AI generated content uh like this um constant crisis of trust we we know it's here and this overflow of oversaturation of of meaning and in in this kind of a situation the the politics moves to the level of of protocols. So, so if you try to win a political debate by at the level of competing in interpretations or images or kind of this is it's a losing or demonstrations, it's a it's a losing losing game. We we are sure that power it's clear that power has actually shifted around. It's shifted to this decides of environments, decides of the conditions of our our economic intervent

uh interactions. So that we we we talk about protocol politics and the mean what we mean by that is that protocols not just that they are kind of a opinionated infrastructures they they encode world views how value is counted who gets to act they actually set the pos possibility space of what can be done and I would go so far as to say as that if we don't intervene in that level in in protocols we actually don't have politics.

So, so from that perspective, it's like the it is the place where we should uh u uh intervene. The second thing is I don't know hor maybe you want to say about this but it's the it's the that that by understanding like capital as this formal uh uh accounting protocol network accounting protocol it actually gives us a power to re-engineer it almost with a surgical precision and and kind of we we are thinking of it as as a kind of our magic move this this generalization or understanding it as a protocol It's distributed like architecture and abstracting it which allows us then to

to to uh uh like make its categories and functions programmable. >> I don't know both of you. So I think that that when we met we we all intuited that yes intuited that the point of intervention was in protocols and we had already some sort of path pointing towards that direction and we didn't quite understood I think that took us a while that capital is a protocol. We sort of like um you were using in the early days uh the the protocol almost as a metaphor and not not as a formalism.

And as we progressed and uh we brided more of our disciplines and um sort of like internalized more of of each other sort of worldviews what became really really clear is that capital is an accounting protocol. Accounting itself is a protocol. It's a formal calculation substrate. And it became very clear as we were sort of like trying to create alternative an alternative protocol with different categories that there were parallels that there were things that like for instance in our own designs uh were missing that we were sort of kind of blind that capital was doing.

And as we were sort of trying to see like okay why capital works why is this like wooden bootstrap or wooden scale or will like we will end up referring down to to capital. And what happened is like we found ourselves coming up with kind of functional uh equivalents of capital categories. But the general pattern was that they were more open, more abstracted and that abstraction allowed programmability. And that that move across all the different functions of capital as an economic uh stack will satisfy all of the design principles that we were aiming at. So I it is it is a um a very very powerful framing. So it

allowed allows us to shift the discourse from capitalism or post capitalism into capital and post capital which is uh a much more I think effective uh uh form of of of engagement with a field. The other thought that I don't know we should go into and I I defer to to you guys if if if you think is like how is it that protocols connects to this notion of formal grammarss and how formal grammars and accounting as a formal grammar allows us to bridge politics uh uh economics media theory game design basically how it emerged as this like interdiscursive uh bridge. Yeah, that's

a good point because the it was the time of the books publishing. I think that we it it was really like the we were talking about economic grammar especially and like you said it emerged as the common surface which we could all kind of inter interoperate through >> and understand each other. >> Yeah. >> Yep. I was gonna answer my own prompt and uh say that the thing that came to mind as I was reading the book is there's this idea that Bengitash Ralph always talks about it's called a whitehead advance and it it basically goes like this. Civilization advances by increasing the number of complex operations that humans can do without having to think about them. And to me

that's where protocolization comes into play. Something as basic as a handshake was a protocol that we invented on the savannah to show like hey I come in peace. I'm not going to, you know, stab you or attack you or something like that. All the way up to democracy and now we're looking at protocols for postcist expression. So I I I'll put that in the in the in the pot and uh and stir it. I don't know if you have any reaction to that. If not, I have another question I can I can lob about there. >> I have an instinctive response to that, which is to say this is absolutely right and some of the um the equivalent of of forms of greeting are dominant in the uh in the ruling system. is that price everything reduces to price and price is

defined by reference to profit calculations. So the issue that we want to hold open is that there are ways of measuring that aren't a monologic that there are multiple logics of measuring. Multiple logics of measuring require that we keep data rich that we're not all the time trying to collapse to a to a to a single index. and protocols provide us w with the the language as well as the technology to say we can measure in multiple ways simultaneously. You know that that's that's that's now feasible.

We can we can greet in multiple ways. Intuitively it's a very complex process to think that you're going to you're going to calculate in multiple ways. But I think what we're talking about here is that we can normalize that and that the next era should be about thinking not what's the price of something but how should we measure something? How would a different mode of measurement give it new social meaning or or social recognition of of what's already there. Yeah, I I I'll just continue from there that Yeah, exactly. that it's clear that the that the new economic medium it can do already like much much more demanding much much more complex like calculations and that's the direction we should be

headed. It's just the logic the economic logic that is like uh uh restricting right now. >> Yeah. So, so what I that that to this exercise of of mapping all these all these different attributes of the system we're trying to describe and and um and what we're saying is that yes social practices become sort of conventionalized and that's a step to formalization and then they get mediated and accounting is a perfect example of this started like just changing stuff I mean Even before barter it was like gift economy I give you this you later give me something that. So there was this

obligation exchange already just operating on memory and language and as it evolved we started using different media rights uh paper uh computers like so the story of protocol evolution is a story of social convention uh evolution social uh practice evolution and uh medium of interaction evolution so and mediums of interaction when it reveals networks and wires and whatnot as social media like from the get-go and and and for us economic media. And that's a a really good concept to to hold um in the space of this this conversation economy

economic media or what we also were terming recently distributed economic media as what we're pursuing. And I guess where that leads me to as we're sort of picking apart the main ideas in the book is so the book is in is protocols for postc capitalist expression and we we've kind of played jazz on top of protocols for the last five minutes. I want to talk about post capitalism for a second there. So what's wrong with capitalism? Or maybe a better way of framing this question is what transcends capitalism in in post capitalism? What what even is postcism?

Maybe we could start with definition. >> Yeah, you'll find three answers but let's go. you will um so I I'll I'll I'll start knowing that that that what I say will be overridden by two other people. I mean there there are lots of criticisms of of of capitalism around both in its general form and in and it in its distinctive current form particularly in the US but not uniquely the the US. But I I I think the position we got to is we along with others can mount critiques of capitalism on on distributional grounds, environmental grounds, discriminatory ground, all sorts of grounds that everyone listening to this will be familiar with. But I think the point we got to was that we wanted to say while a

critique of the current order triggers a new way of framing, we don't position ourselves as saying we just run via critique. We want to say capitalism is one particular mode of organization, one particular style of production, one particular form of surplus generation, but there are others. And when we start to explore capitalism as but one possible form, then you start to say, hey, there are others that can be designed intentionally in a distributed way that don't require us to simply um adopt a hierarchical system that gives so much power to states, so much power to banks, so much power to finance. and that that

that there is the possibility of collective self-design of what economic and social order should be about. So I think that's really we don't want to prescribe a post capitalism. We don't want to say this is how we should measure. This is how governing processes should occur. This is what the central planners should do. We we specify none of that. Hence not just the word post capitalism but post capitalist space. We are designing a space in which further design can occur.

>> Yeah, really good. I can take it from there, Deacon. [laughter] No, really, it's the it's it's important that post capitalism it's really it's not a opposite of capitalism. It's it's it's what becomes possible when we when we stop taking capitalism as the as the only grammar uh uh for for economic interaction. But then in fact I was expecting that you would you would uh go to a little bit further dick and uh I'll try to do it. So in the book especially in the in the first chapter kind of a our wager is really that post capitalist value creation it will emerge from finance as the frontier of of capitalist

economic change. So explaining that uh connection forms really the substance of of the book. So in the first chapter we start and I I really love it's one of my my favorite sections. And uh by the way I didn't I don't know Kevin did you know that you can actually get the um fragments of the book as uh uh NFTTS the paragraphs you can you can co-publish them with us and I have I have co-published or selected that particular paragraph to me >> which is uh uh >> why I'm I'm also kind of going through it. Did you know that?

>> Yeah. So I think I saw that on the uh the the website which is linked in the show notes you can highlight a portion of the book and then publish it as an NFT. Is that right? >> In a sense it's we we talk about the units of discourse that you can co-publish with us but but I I'll I can explain that later but I'll I'll go to the answer post on on post capitalism. So in the chapter one we we describe the difference between capitalism and postc capitalism as a as a as a financial spread which is defined by the different answers that certain questions get in the capitalist and the postc capitalist economic networks. And these are really the key questions like what gets answered differently are like

what what counts as liquidity what counts as collateral what counts as surplus and who gets to decide on these. So what what the book is working on what what the EXA project is working on is a is a grammar for postc capitalist economic organizational expression that basically allows you to formulate these new answers to these questions. So that's how I think about and the Yeah. >> And just look just to pick up on that for a second because H no doubt has things to say. This notion of a financial spread means that the way we see the relationship between capitalism and post capitalism is not that one that

post capitalism will replace capitalism. We're not in a position to determine that history, but that people will what we the term we use is people will live in the spread that they will of course part of their lives is going to be in a capitalist economy and part of their lives part of their economic activity part of their finance can can be in a in in a post-c capitalist economy and it's important that there's the ability to move between the two. So, I mean, one of the dangers of the book, I think, is it could be seen to to be setting up this utarchic economic logic and and you got to go in there and and live the rest of your life there and you can never get out. That's a danger that that might be read into the book. And I think what

we'd say is it's really important that people can people finance commodity outputs, all sorts of outputs. They can move between the two systems. And gee, did that take some some design work about about about how to get the movement that could go in both directions without being de destabilizing? But that that moves on to another question. But I don't think we should be see be seen as part of the tradition that says we are advocating the collapse of capitalism and and we will emerge triumphant and and and ex will rule the world.

>> So yeah, I would add one thing but do you want to >> No, no, go ahead. Go ahead. >> No, no. One thing which I I which has become kind of an important part for the definitions for me is the distributing economic agency that's that's where the post capitalism begins when the economic agency gets distributed to the network edge and that's kind of what we are pushing pushing for. So yes that's perfect following for what I was going to say that for me at this stage it's hard to separate postc capitalist from economic space agency as we have defined it what it means perhaps we should best a little bit of of time in there and um just just to share the way we talk about

economic space agency or why why we refer to to economic space agency is that economic space agency is a capacity to co-author economic networks and sharing the surplus that we could create with them. So it's very simple but also very all-encompassing uh uh definition. So this is what Axel means by by pushing the economic agency to the end. What kind of economic agency? Well, economic space agency the capacity to define to program these spaces uh of economic interaction. I understand that post capital and post capitalism post capitalism as a discourse we don't have we don't own it. It's it's it's already like out there. But we we are taking a

position of what it could look like a financial system. What we are describing in the book is a financial system. It's just one one not predicated on on capital and um still predicated on accounting and this this markets and all all the uh armature that makes our system a distributed computational network. that is like millennia old and and uh um leveraging on this scaling properties that it has. I'm deep down the the widths of of a paper on the post capital space protocol formal specification. So it's very hard for me to decouple what we have claimed as a formal definition

of what post capital is in that paper as an accounting category. So one of the things that that that that um the paper does in order to explain post capital as an accounting protocol, it juxtaposes its categories to those of capital and it starts by noticing that an economic system what makes it economic at least at this level of um distributed accounting uh calculation is that it has a surplus. surplus uh a surplus generating economic function. So basically there is a self-recursive loop

in the in the economic machine of each like in the case of capital firms or economic agents but also there is there's there's a self-recursive uh uh mutually reinforced function for across the network agents right so in the case of capital um that is the the profit uh logic and the liquidity of capital is predicated on the profit logic. So when we understand that economies computes surplus value what we can say is like okay so what does post capital as a protocol computes?

So it also must compute some sort of surplus something that it aims for something that is constantly revising itself towards in every iteration. And uh in the case of pass capital formally what this surplus is is utility. So we're talking about a shift in the pre primacy of exchange value uh with uh use value. And big I'll pass this down to you because you can speak to this uh much more lucidly than I than I do. But basically what post capital does is allows the calculative logic of um what an economic network pursues to

be tailored for a particular kind of utility while preserving interoperability. You can say capital really as the interoperability protocol and is basically the standard protocol the the conventional economic protocol that we we all choose and that's also why it has so much power like protocols establish establishes protocols too they have network effects and traction and all these kind of of things adoption curves and and whatnot. So what pos allows us to do is computing this distur utility such a way that it also preserves interoperability across utilities. Of course it leverages sort of the design patterns that we find in capital but sort of like instead of

being collapsed into a singular purpose and a singular metric of success, it sort of like opens them into multiple uh metrics while remaining uh interoperable. So from that uh definition of a different surplus category all the other categories uh uh open up but what I must say is that it does not as a protocol does not dictate what those utilities are. It just creates the programmable space for those utilities to be defined. So this is also uh what we mean by by creating economic space right creating a space for these new forms of value to be to be defined.

And the last thing I will say as as an important attribute because I before I hand this over to Dick is that in post capital what we've also noticed is that there's many institutions that have taken on the role of uh network coordination and social scaling that become sort of centralized hierarchies because of historical amortization costs and network effects like the banking system exchanges clearing houses and what we've detected or or or we determined as all of These are just protocols and there's nothing stopping from sharing the whole grammar the whole former grammar of all the protocols and sort of like putting them all into the edge. So one of the things that we did

in post capital is risk assessment and risk takingaking what the stock market does liquidity provision and uh credit uh management what banking system does all these functions exchanges uh what markets do they they all have been indogenized and sort of um express as edge protocols to really allows us to have this like distributed topology all throughout the network. So is a formal protocol that's the big sketches that that that that I can give on the attributes and I pass you the the ball big on like why >> uh hey Kevin I I think you need to be aware here that we could talk about this

for hours and and and you might have some other questions that you want to get to but but just to add add one little thing cuz Hi tagged the difference between exchange value and and use value which you know has a long history in classical economics going back 300 years. It sort of disappeared in the era of of the love of markets. But I think we would all recognize that the virtue of investing in good stuff that's not profitable. You know, everyone would should say society should do that. Everyone would also say in the current economic system where the market doesn't work, where there's market failure, where price signaling doesn't doesn't tell the system what people want, where where you need public goods

because the market signaling fails. I think we we want to say when we shift the emphasis to use value and the quantification of usefulness that these things that that the market economists have to scratch their heads about and say what do we do here? Oh, we need the state. We need public provision. We need taxation. We're saying but these are value creating activities. They create usefulness. The problem we have in capitalism is there is a reluctance to measure them. And even if we measure them in some way, we can't incorporate that into accounting. It sort lies out there as the ethical domain, the the the the alternative world. And we say no, we want to in defining postc capitalism, we

want to define all these useful things as creating value, potentially creating surplus. And that opens up a quite that's where we get to a quite different framing of what are prices, what are markets, those sorts those those sorts of things have a different answer in post capitalism so as to incorporate the diverse ways in which value gets gets expressed in a in a in a society. Mhm. Yeah. And what I find kind of interesting about this is the system architecture that will allow us to um create a substrate for provisioning public goods but without the state. It feels like it's very decentralized uh here and and I think that that's kind of

the holy grail of what a lot of public goods people I hang out with are are looking for. >> Sure. you know, with with public goods, everyone agrees that they should pay for them, but they want to do it through tax, and they have to do it through through through paying tax to for state provisioning because there's there's no way of articulating these public goods as as creating value in themselves or then like like I mean you've been experimenting with the with these or kind of a different innovative coordination mechanisms also having kind of a >> to to to that. Yeah.

>> Yeah. So, uh, you know, things like quadratic funding, retrofunding, deep funding, conviction voting are the things that people in my network are exploring. And I'd say that they're proven at a small scale, but they're hard they're several orders of magnitude away from what you would have to have to have a state like Australia or the United States actually provision them in that way. >> Sure. And our focus is on not just how you inject some funding for for these activities but how having injected the funding you can declare value creation and reproduce them within a postc capitalist system that they become self-generating because they are declared as value as value creation. So

just to to open a little bit more what dick means in there and like what articulating not articulating it's like this this what capital has is a problem of categories. It doesn't have accounting categories to express all of these things because it just the whole calculation is predicated on monetary exchange and and and and price capital accumulations right so everything needs to be compressed into those things. But if we generalize those things while still allow like having sort of the same self-reproduction patterns in principle there's nothing stopping to making these forms of value self-reproducible. So basically value generating surplus generating and so financially self-regenerative.

So that's that it's not it's not just like an input to the good things and then just like we benefit from them in commons but giving them a logic of self sustainability lifty by allowing the whole network to see how the generative flows of that particular value changes the general the generative influences or fits into the generative flows into another kind of value and so on so forth and so forth instead of thinking of them as externalities or market saviors. Yes, indeed. But all right, that still leaves one question that and and uh uh that that uh uh they still need like bootstrapping liquidity.

>> How do you solve for that? >> Is it possible? [laughter] Yeah, >> I I I don't know if if if um uh there's there's other questions in there about these or clarifications because that's a big big shift. >> Yeah. Okay. So, let let me ask see if I can give an answer in in two sentences. Part of what I was referring to earlier about living in the spread means that this bootstrapping phase does require an injection of capital from the capital markets on the promise to the capital markets or the bet for the capital markets that this post-c capitalist economy will outperform a capitalist economy. It's a good

investment for capital to get in and say there is this new way of doing doing economic calculation, this new being of an economy. You might want to get involved if you're looking for a good investment opportunity, but you're going to have to inject capital. And so the liquid the the bootstrapping liquidity provisioning has to come from the capital markets, but then it has to cross this logical bridge and reproduce elsewhere. It can be pulled back out. But while it's alive in in this in this post-c capitalist economy reproducing, our bet is that it will perform really well as a financial asset.

>> I mean, it feels like postcism confers an evolutionary advantage to the people who embrace it or the societies that embrace it. And that's how you bootstrap liquidity. That's how you start to build momentum into this parallel society. >> Indeed. I've just got my eye on the time and it looks like we've got 12 minutes till the bottom of the hour. So, um I am going to have to start moving us towards some closing questions. And you know, in doing so, I just want to just want to put out there that my my goal here is to give the audience a broad idea of what the ideas are in this amazing book that y'all have published. Um Protocols for Postcist Expression. You can pick up a copy in the show notes. Definitely recommend it. I think it was one of my

best reads in the last couple years. Yeah. Is there anything that I didn't ask about the book or the work that you all are doing that that that you want to say and and and maybe we'll we'll use that as our as our final closing question and and wind down the episode in the next 10 minutes uh on that. But yeah, anything I didn't ask that y'all want to say? >> Well, I'd like to hear from Jorge and Axley about about what I mean that that book was written 2122, published 23, you know, so here we are 3 years on from that. The first first full version was ready end of 18 early 2019.

>> Well, that's true. That's true. So, I guess the question I want to ask you to is what what do you think the innovations have been since then? I think the bridge is an important one and uh the recognition once once sort of we understood capital as as an economic protocol and we we've sort of like nail down what an e economic protocol formally is noticing that a lot of our own struggle and sort of even almost like cognitive dissonance over the years is trying to raise capital to create something that goes beyond it sort of resolves when you understand that capital must calculate for profit in order to provide equity. So it's

basically it has an integrity that must be respected rather than than than opposed or or sort of like uh just critique it because we're all actually embedded into the practice uh whether we recognize it or not and and we benefit and seek it ourselves seeking liquidity for for the materialization of this project. that realization that okay so it's not about only protecting post capital values from market speculation and all because that was our narrative for many years >> it's about respect respecting the calculative integrity of each system once we sort of shifted our thinking that way it allows us to design a bridge that respects each other's okay capital we want sustainable liquidity we'll give

you profits whose capital we want sustainable utility we'll give you uh access to capital resources So um that that just just to comment to that that that was an important shift in thinking but also an important that led to an important innovation which is the bridge is the most recent sort of like artifact that we've articulated. >> Yeah. But we always knew that we needed a bridge, but we kept kicking the can down the road. And and and you know, I I think as a person who who wasn't particularly uh central to organizing the bridge, it it it works in a really clever creative way. I I I I think we should be really proud of that that design. I would also kind of go to that direction. the the

that's why my thoughts were already going there that how do you how do you solve for that and you do it by understanding that also the integrity of the capital side needs to be respected because it it's not like a moral question but it does that because that's what it does that's the logic and it will give you liquidity only if you according to that that logic and so so kind of really realizing that it's not some kind of a tension between some values or kind of ideal post capitalist way and some fallen or kind of a the reality of capital flows and speculation. It's it's it's really um kind of um

it's a spread that that there are these for it's a design field where there are these predictable kind of a forces generated by these different economic protocols. They make different they have different logics. They they they they make different things possible. And we just think that the post capitalist one makes just much more possible. But like we know like from the protocol culture that if there's no if we have this really powerful protocol, there's a lot of users that they are not just going to jump to different protocol just like that. There needs to be migration path.

uh uh and the the new one it needs to do everything that the old one did and more and then you have a chance of of adaption and and people getting there kind of getting real about that and creating like a a real strategic path towards that. I think that has been the really important uh move in the in the development in the in the in the in the last uh in the recently which means kind of that we are we're designing really these instruments or devices to to capture the value of that spread.

That's that's how I I've started to think about it. Just one more thing I'd say here without without uh touching a raw nerve between us. Um the the the book was written by the was pros by an economist me a a and that discourse does tend to to dominate the mode of communication. I think since then there has been the need to formalize in in in you know in the programmability of of of an economy which is something that that Hoy and Axel have taken over far more than me and and I I I know Hoy in particular could talk for hours about

the challenges that come from taking concepts that have sort of meaning within an economic discourse and saying how do you take them over and formalize ize them in a programming language because they're not they're not a neat fit. But but that's I think one of the great achievements of the last couple of years that that process has has been undertaken and executed or is being executed. >> Thank god AI. [laughter] >> It came just in time. Yeah.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, as we're closing, I just want to provide a fi final recommendation to the book to the audience. I I thought it was really articulate and really well researched and read and um you know, as a systems thinker myself, someone who likes to design these systems, but also is mindful of having to live inside of them. I thought it was a really incredible set of set of ideas. And so would encourage the audience to check out the book. Uh there's link in the show notes where you can check it out. And I truly enjoyed it. And if you read it and enjoy it, please get back at me and and uh let me know that you enjoy this.

>> Yeah. And also uh let let these guys know as well. Um is there a way to get involved in y'all's community and uh the Economic Space Agency um what's next and how can people get involved? >> Yes, absolutely. So we we kind of in the show notes there's a link to our newsletter which is our like a most it's the regular uh drum beat that that where we inform what's what's what's going on and kind of uh where we are. Uh then we are in a buildup phase of an economic media lab uh which might be interesting to al also the the audience audience here or the listeners of the podcast. Um we have some really good new

texts like a white paper coming right like next week or the week after hopefully uh which uh we will be really happy to share with with anybody who wants to leave. Uh uh check that check it out. And um what else? Well, I guess the only thing I I'd add there is my guess is that for a whole lot of people thinking in terms of multiple coexisting units of account ways of measuring is quite challenging because we've been so inculcated with with with capitalist logic that the thought experiments that are involved in saying what would what would be involved in existing in a society where you measure in in multiple ways and you're not always trying to

convert convert everything to a single unit of measure. Just opening up that mindset of of of how how could you do it differently uh would would be one way of getting in harmony with with what our underlying social political economic project is. >> Anything to before we break? >> I think I think I think I I've taken enough air time. [laughter] I'm realizing the next time we do a podcast together that I'll book a two or three hour slot so that we can really dive into some >> it would be nice. Yes, >> the book covers a lot of these topics in uh in in I think really articulate pros.

So would encourage everyone to check out the book. Links are in the show notes. Axelli Dick uh Jorge, thanks so much for joining and uh I'll I'll see you on the internets. >> Thanks Gals. Thanks so much Kevin. Bye >> bye. >> All righty. We just heard from Axeli and his co-authors of protocols for postc capitalist expression. I am just so inspired by this body of work. I think it's incredible. I want to work together with uh this community in order to bring more of this into empirical practice and uh I'm hoping to uh to to help to do that. And uh if you want to get involved, pick up a copy of the book.

There's a link in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to check out the links in the show notes and to learn more about the Greenpill Network at greenpill.network. If you value what we're doing, please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast, or share this podcast with a friend. Until next time, please keep building, please keep experimenting, and keep coordinating. Peace and love.