Computational medium

The first distributed computational medium was most likely a network of bookkeepers and their ledgers bound together by their accounting practice, whether recording on clay, tablet, or paper. Even if such networks predate our current digital infrastructure by millennia, we think that they have given rise to it and are its ancestors. Computational networks with high informational capacities, bandwidth and connectivity are the new medium of our economic networks, hosting the record-keeping and the calculation historically undertaken by their primary forms. As a result, they have rendered the updates on our ledgers, our transactions, incredibly fast and incredibly vast. The ECSA vision is to open this computational media to the possibility of reprogramming the economic layer of computing by non-state and non-corporate actors – making our economic communication networks programmable from below.