Social derivative

Social derivatives are the new basic economic cells of post-capitalist society: a new social and relational form – a form of risking and opening new opportunities together, and sharing its risks and upsides – that characterizes the information age and which the existing economic grammar cannot express or understand (it only talks “commodity”, “company”, “employee” and “ownership”). We are after a protocol designed for expressing such novel social-economic forms. It is the way we express, by creating social derivatives. They are our strategies for surfing the volatility of our precarious life and the joy in working together. Derivatives are much more than mere self-executing contracts that reduce the counterparty risk. They have a social logic that takes us beyond mere profit taking exchange and ownership as the form of sociality. The derivative is a logic that allows us to understand how heterogenous parts move together, how to value and sense the ways we are linked together, how value is made in motion and of change, and what it means to risk-together. ECSA (like all economic spaces) is a social derivative, a risk generating practice which arbitrages, speculates and leverages about being able to act together, on a certain opening. It makes our flows of stakes and risks intertwined in a way that articulates and expands the “indebtness” that we are in this together.