Economic Networks

Let the critics (Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek) go first. From http://www.cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/assets/writings/library/accelerate_manifesto.html

We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure.

We are guilty, to some extent. We work local-first and spread horizontally. We get their point about globality (more about that later), and we agree about technology.

We believe that any post-capitalism will require post-capitalist planning. The faith placed in the idea that, after a revolution, the people will spontaneously constitute a novel socioeconomic system that isn’t simply a return to capitalism is naïve at best, and ignorant at worst. To further this, we must develop both a cognitive map of the existing system and a speculative image of the future economic system.

We have a combined 60 years of large-scale software systems development that says your speculative image will not work. That’s called “Big Design Upfront” or “Build It and They Will Come”. That approach has mostly been abandoned in favor of agile and incremental development, always working with the people who will use the system as soon as possible, at first in small pieces loosely joined.

Lenin (whom they quote) would roll over in his grave. But then he had a revolution behind him and an army to support him. We are two old people living in a canyon in the woods supported by US Social Security, for as long as that lasts. So we do what we can do, which might be a lot. We’ll see.

But back to our strategy.

I’ve been working since about 1995 on a precursor to our current strategy, which you can read about at https://write.as/economic-networks/about

Lynn and I have been working on a subsequent strategy that came out of a project called an Open App Ecosystem, of which many variations have emerged which you can find in this search: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=Open+App+Ecosystem&ia=web

What it meant to us, was different people developing different software apps that could all work together and cooperate to form larger systems with replaceable, loosely-coupled components.

In the discussions for an Open App Ecosystem with an organization called Enspiral, we decided that the open apps would need one or more vocabularies to communicate with each other. So Lynn and I, along with some other people listed here https://www.valueflo.ws/introduction/contributors/ , started to work on a vocabulary for economic networks called https://www.valueflo.ws/ .

From the start, we intended Valueflows and its open apps that used it to grow into the administrative support for whole anti-capitalist economic systems.

“Systems” instead of “system” because such systems would need to start locally or regionally and then join together place by place until they might organize together into larger economic systems.

This strategy seems to be the opposite in some ways of the Accelerationist strategy, which seems to want a global system. But as I read more of their manifesto, they temper their enthusiasm and end up with something more like what we want to do:

Any transformation of society must involve economic and social experimentation. The Chilean Project Cybersyn is emblematic of this experimental attitude — fusing advanced cybernetic technologies, with sophisticated economic modelling, and a democratic platform instantiated in the technological infrastructure itself.
15. We do not present any particular organisation as the ideal means to embody these vectors. What is needed — what has always been needed — is an ecology of organisations, a pluralism of forces, resonating and feeding back on their comparative strengths. Sectarianism is the death knell of the left as much as centralization is, and in this regard we continue to welcome experimentation with different tactics (even those we disagree with).

So they might (or might not) welcome our experiments….

But there is a problem with our strategy, as it has evolved from large centralized platforms to decentralized networks. A platform has a center, a place to make decisions and set rules for all participants. A decentralized network does not. As in the poem by William Butler Yeats called “The Second Coming”,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

...and we are not anarchists.

The popular way that decentralized agreements have come to be implemented is via Blockchains, which created the first practical method for global consensus. But we don’t want to use them, because blockchains are huge, recentralized via all participants needing to use a copy of the same chain, and consensus decisions get slower all the time. An Internet search now says “In general, Bitcoin transactions usually take from one to one and half hours to complete.” That’s a long time to wait for your lunch transaction to clear.

And most of the time you don’t really need global consensus. All you need is agreement among the participants in a single decision. So we are working with implementations of local consensus, in two different decentralized technical environments: https://www.holochain.org and https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ otherwise known as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

Why do we imagine that we can create the operating system for a new economy? Well, first, we continue to organize as much help as we can get. But second, both of us have a lot of experience with large-scale economic software. I worked in several https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning systems, the kind of software that most big capitalist organizations use, and Lynn worked on the software used by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve . So we have some basis to understand what is needed, and as described above, we will work on it in as many experiments as we can manage, and learn as we go, and organize other people to take over and move forward, because we are getting old.

Back to planning...

Here’s a survey of different proposals for a new and better economic system: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NwEcKf-AlD3WlvHFNCmGmDKp9NerPeAaHeTHTrdF628/edit?usp=sharing

The one that I like is called “Information Technology and Socialist Construction” or the “General Catalog” of provisions that should be produced. Assuming all of the producers on each level of the production chain have something like our https://www.valueflo.ws/concepts/recipes/ for production, all of the provisions can be planned recursively and all of the production processes, with their inputs and outputs, can be tracked and documented. It would like you are Cuba and know what needs to be produced for the whole island. And I assume Cuba knows and plans accordingly.