Geert Lovink on Sat, 4 Mar 2017 17:42:47 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime-ann> Economic Space Agency in New York City (March 6/7, 2017)


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Economic Space Agency in New York City


Imagine software architects developing post-blockchain distributed smart contracts platform, economic and financial thinkers working through organizational and political potentialities, game designers and social experimenters innovating with form and function, artists experimenting with new economic worlds - all working together on concrete designs and architectures for new economic, financial and political forms. Welcome to Economic Space Agency.

This Monday, March 6th, ECSA will be leading a discussion on the unrealized potential of ICOs and presenting the State of the Project summary of where ECSA is headed next. The events will take place at Pratt Manhattan in NYC, 2pm-6pm ET, and the entire program can viewed live (via Zoom, register here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/71f9f64a71aea8ef7510d14dfea9e911).

3/6 Monday

ECSA workshop: Initial Coin Offering - a ritual to reopen the field of the possible

1pm-6pm, Pratt Manhattan Campus, West 14th street Room 213 (Directions to Pratt CampusesMap)

Detailed schedule and readings: http://ecsa.io/events

To view it live register herehttps://zoom.us/webinar/register/71f9f64a71aea8ef7510d14dfea9e911 

The Initial Coin Offering discussion (2:00pm-3:45pm) will explore the deeper and broader potential of what an ICO can be. The power of finance in our hands doesn’t need to be just about raising funds or making money - it can be an invitation to risk and speculate together to open up possibilities that were not there before. We usually think of finance as an extractive practice that takes more than it gives. But what if at the heart of finance we find a logic of active offering? An offering gesture - a ritual - that both opens up and holds open new economic spaces? We invite you to take up a unique economic, ethical, aesthetical and political challenge: re-inventing finance as a collective practice of crafting futures at the end of the economy as we used to know it.

Shootout Q&A (4:00pm-4:45pm) on the necessity of inventing new economic, financial and political forms. With Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Benjamin Lee, Akseli Virtanen, Jonathan Beller, Robert Wosnitzer.

ECSA's State of the Project presentation (5:00pm-5:30pm) maps out ECSA’s plan to re-engineer what an ICO can be and to make an offer to the econauts of the world to join us as we build the next generation smart contracts and smart communities technology, and give people the tools they need to design their own economic spaces.

3/7 Tuesday

New Economic Spaces: On the Democratization of Financial Tools

Pratt Brooklyn Campus (Directions to Pratt CampusesMap)

Room: Main 210

5-7:30 PM

With Douglas Rushkoff, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Benjamin Lee, Akseli Virtanen, Jonathan Beller, Robert Wosnitzer and special guests. 

Bitcoin broke the taboo on money, it showed that citzens have the power and imagination to reengineer finance. With the next generation distributed technologies, we are now capable of engineering even more interesting, adaptive and powerful financial and economic instruments and social relations. 
 
It is a radical moment: We are moving from the Euclidean economic space – a given, flat, rigid, linear economic space of equilibriums, scarce resources, neoclassical economics and game theoretical utility maximizing - into a Non-Euclidean economic space which is designable, n-dimensional, non-linear and abundant. It is a space where the laws of the old economy don't hold and where you can start to do new things. Think about it for a moment. What would you like to do? In what kind of an economic space would you like to operate? 

Economic Space Agency is calling for all econauts, the next-generation economic architects, designers and inventors of new economic, financial and social forms.

Quick reads and their key take aways:

Initial Coin Offering: A New Economic Logic (draft)

=>The economic logic of the offer starts from taking seriously the nature of the derivative and the gift, as recently articulated by Appadurai, Lee, LiPuma et al. As these authors observe, the gift is the opening of an interval. The offer, as ECSA conceives it, is an invitation to inhabit that interval and be invested by it. In other words, the offer is not only durational but also possesses a directionality, which is given to it through the movement of the gesture that invites in. Thus the offer is an invitation to participate in that movement too -- i.e. in the choreographies of different kinds of currencies and flows of values -- and to speculatively engineer a new social kinesthetics (as Randy Martin beautifully puts it), based on the making and sharing of new time, space and relations

A Brief History of Blockchain

=> ECSA is working with the "fifth major innovation on the horizon": world's first smart contracts and smart communities technology that is distributed and scalable.

What is Economic Space?

https://medium.com/new-economic-spaces/economic-spaceward-ho-231ba740f642#.8spwwn1q1

=>Technology is emerging that opens the coming economic and financial structures as design questions. What if we could bend the space itself to change the economy and world where we live in?

Programmable Enterprise

https://shift.newco.co/the-programmable-enterprise-274167dead0d#.e31ou7bjc

=>The firm of the future may be 10 million people working together for 10 minutes.

Post-blockchain smart contracts creating a new firm

https://shift.newco.co/post-blockchain-smart-contracts-creating-a-new-firm-7695a910ea31#.hmmbettwl

=> The new cryptocurrencies and post-blockchain smart contracts make it possible to leave behind the simplistic finance model of the industrial corporation. Fewer and fewer corporations actually look and behave like the factory model. Much of the wealth creating capacity of most modern firms is based on the skills and contributions of the various people involved and the ability of the organization to invite and to put those contributions to work.What if the reality of work today with shorter assignments and diverse gigs would be incorporated into our financial models?

What is Actually the Value of Cryptocurrency?

https://medium.com/@RafeFurst/the-value-of-cryptocurrency-675e7c790979#.jemj9fv2k

=> The naive view is of cryptocurrency suggests it’s a hybrid between money you can spend, and startup equity that happens to be fully liquid and tradable. Those on the inside see cryptocurrencies as prions, infecting and transmuting corporate structure into distributed networks.

Programmable money

https://medium.com/new-economic-spaces/programmable-money-d3a7e0524a27#.vklzfwlkc

=> The Economic Space Agency is creating a platform which allows communities to program new forms of money and value. One such example is COMMON Cents, a form of money designed to the needs and specification of the COMMON community. If you were to design your own money, if you could operationalize your value production, what would you use it for, and how would it work?


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