# Programmable economy The economy is a programmable space. It is catching up with the new substrate of high speed computer networks with high informational capacities, bandwidth and connectivity. They are elevating the economy into something that resembles an expressive medium. As a medium, the economy is fundamentally a communication and writing system: an economic messaging protocol. Understanding the economy this way – as a communication network on a programmable substrate – reveals our economic relationships to be networking protocols. We believe *economic* *networks* are the new economic abstraction, a value-producing, value-sharing and value-expressing form of informationally mediated society. Economic networks will be for Web3 what social networks were for Web2, and “shared keyword” networks were for Web1. The key to making them accessible is in their programmability. Accessibility means ability to define value, what counts as liquidity, what as collateral. So not values just as ideas, stripped of power; here, values as new kinds of assets and collateral that can enter into circulation and change the outcome of events large and small. This expressive power needs to be made accessible — programmable economy must be endlessly, ceaselessly made accessible to all, with equal functionality and equal rights of expression. That is why our economic networks need to become distributed. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://glossary.ecsa.io/programmable-economy.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.