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Synthetic Catallaxy
The future of computational economics, pricing and planning
Economic information senses and calculates value and thus it becomes a form of value, all of which is computation
Synthetic Catallaxy explores the future of planetary scale computation as the basis of macroeconomic infrastructure. The ultrafast calculations that span the globe linking markets not only transmit information but produce and constitute information: about labor, about value, about predicted future value and the value of those predictions. Value becomes information, and information becomes value.
The term “Catallaxy” refers to the production of circulating information, calculations, ratios, and prices. The present macroeconomics represents only one image of the possible networks of value, and as such enforces that particular image. Our models not only represent economic activity, they constitute it. Other economic images are possible and necessary.
Contemporary cloud and commerce platforms complicate any strong distinction between planned and market economies, with many setting prices, planning infrastructure, and modeling and generating demand in real time. These platforms drive a kind of Synthetic Catallaxy: price and pricelessness emerge not only through the compression and expression of information, but through the structures designed to compress and express.
Antikythera presumes that the economic genres of the next century will not be a simple extrapolation of the present, nor will they be necessarily legible through the now traditional lenses of public vs. private, state vs. market, top-down vs. bottom-up, centralized vs. decentralized, pre-vs. post. A different architecture of economic information will be produced, modeled, circulated and expressed.
If writing begins as accounting, the production of information about economic relations begins by indexing transactions one at a time. The planetary economy that is now based on planetary computation will ultimately give rise to a planetary economics that emerges coterminously and continues to co-evolve.
Central to this is the financialization of information. Information is indexed as value, which is coordinated in economic circulation. The boundary between simulation and reality is deliberately perforated so that one may teach the other. The model of the market is more than a representation; it is the driver of its form.
Value becomes information, and information becomes value. Between and across the two the information technology called price is the interface between sequences of exchange. But price itself is not and has not been one thing, it evolves and is evolving as are all information technologies.
Present macroeconomics represent only one image of the possible networks of value, and as such enforce one particular image. Present models not only represent economic activity, they constitute it. Other economic images are possible and necessary, they are inevitable.
Contemporary cloud and commerce platforms complicate any strong distinction between planned and market economies, with many setting prices, planning infrastructure, and modeling and generating demand in real time. These platforms represent, in this way at least, a kind of Synthetic Catallaxy.
Antikythera focuses on several emerging areas of Synthetic Catallaxy research:
