TLDR - Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression presents a programmable economic grammar where value is defined, expressed, and allocated by networks—not capital. Through concepts like performances, reciprocal staking, and social derivatives, it offers a concrete design framework for building postcapitalist economies rooted in collective intent, not profit.
Review & Recap – Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression
Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression is an ambitious and rigorously composed book that meets the moment. It doesn’t just critique capitalism—it sketches a detailed architecture for what comes after, grounded in years of experimentation and intellectual heavy-lifting by the Economic Space Agency (ECSA). The authors—Dick Bryan, Jorge López, and Akseli Virtanen—aren’t offering a manifesto so much as a design protocol: a new grammar for expressing economic relationships based on shared values, not extractive logic.
The core premise is both elegant and radical: economy is not a fixed terrain but a programmable medium. The systems we’ve inherited—monetary, financial, legal—are just prior choices encoded into our current institutions. If we change the grammar, we can change what gets expressed. What Protocols offers is a way to encode intention into economic infrastructure. A language to make value—real, pluralistic, life-affirming value—legible and actionable.
Postcapitalism, as defined in the book, is a programmable, networked alternative to capitalism—where value is created, expressed, and allocated by peers based on shared intentions, not by markets chasing profit. Unlike capitalism’s centralized, price-based, and extractive model, postcapitalism enables plural, expressive, and outcome-driven economies coordinated through staking, mutual evaluation, and collective ownership.
A few concepts stood out as especially relevant to the work we’re doing:
- Performances replace “production” as the unit of economic activity. This includes anything from care work to cultural creation—actions that generate outcomes the network can recognize and reward. It’s a more expansive framing that makes space for the kinds of value that have been historically excluded from economic systems.
Performances and their outputs can be assembled in interesting ways:
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Reciprocal staking is how trust and commitment are expressed in this system. Agents stake not just capital, but reputation and attention—placing skin-in-the-game on what they believe should exist. It builds a network of mutual investment and shared exposure to the future, where the commons is composed through interdependence, not centralized planning.
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Tokens are not currency in the traditional sense, but programmable expressions of agreement: stake tokens (trust), liquidity tokens (credit), and commodity tokens (output). Together they map to different functions in an economy designed for legibility, coordination, and accountability.
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Credit becomes a function of recognition, not extraction. In this model, access to liquidity is granted through shared belief in an agent’s potential to generate outcomes—not through ownership of capital or alignment with state institutions. It’s a subtle but powerful shift: capital becomes a vector for coordination, not control.
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Social derivatives allow agents to issue semantically meaningful economic instruments—tokens that encode not just financial intent, but social purpose. They create optional futures that others can join, validate, and extend. This introduces an expressive layer to capital allocation that feels uniquely powerful for movements, networks, and communities trying to coordinate at scale.
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Agents express aspirations (what they aim to create), make predictions (claims about the outcomes their performances will generate), and are subject to evaluations (network validation of those outcomes). This triad enables decentralized accountability and turns economic participation into a form of expressive, measurable intent.
The book lands with clarity and complexity. It’s theoretical but grounded, hopeful but not naïve. And while some of its language can veer into abstraction, the implications are concrete. It suggests a world where communities can name what they value, stake on it, and allocate capital accordingly—without having to run everything through the reductive machinery of profit-maximization.
This vision resonates with me - for its clarity and depth. Especially now, when more people are questioning the defaults of economic life and looking for tools—not just narratives—that can help them build differently. Protocols offers one such way of thinking about these tools: not a silver bullet, but a scaffolding for better futures. And if we’re serious about designing systems that honor complexity, interdependence, and abundance, it’s a text worth studying closely.