Economic network

Our economic organization is catching up with the new substrate of high speed computer networks with high informational capacities, bandwidth and connectivity. We think this will elevate into something that resembles an expressive medium. What does that mean? Just like social networking applications (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.) gave us social media, the emerging economic networking applications – applications that can be used to create economic relationships (i.e. production, ownership, investment, debt/equity, joint risk-taking, opportunity-opening and upside-sharing relationships) – will give us economic media. In social networks connections are established by reading messages, re-posting, sharing content, liking, friending: the network-making is social and the ties of the network are themselves “social”. In economic networks the connections are created through offering and re-offering, rewarding, incentivizing, entering into risk and value relationships, creating credit relationships, stakeholding relationships, and other financial relationships. The nature and quality of the network is economic. Economic networks are thus a new economic abstraction. They are the basic economic unit, the networked means of producing, sharing and expressing value in an informationally-mediated society. They are expressions of the networked nature of informational value creation. Economic networks want to be born and understood but the current narrow economic language, which we’ve inherited from the industrial centuries, is unable to understand and express them - the nature of our economic composition is always bound by the expressivity of the language that we use to conceive it. In other words: we need a more expressive economic language to describe our economic networks and the networked “commodities” they produce. A language that would actually correspond to the new capacities afforded by the new informational and computational substrate.