New @greenpillnet special season out now! 🌐 This guest season is by Akseli Virtanen, Jorge López and Jonathan Beller of the Economic Space Agency. The first episode kicks off Economic Media: A Laboratory, a new Greenpill mini-series exploring how protocols, ledgers, AI agents and computational systems are becoming the media through which economic coordination is recorded, interpreted and governed. They ask what changes if the economy is itself a medium: how screens and platforms turned meaning-making into value extraction, why accounting has a grammar of its own, and why blockchain distributed computation without distributing economic agency. Who gets to define an asset, recognize a contribution or change a network's rules, and what would it take for care, community priorities and long-excluded people to count? Along the way they discuss whether the economy is a medium at all, or an ecology of media, and close on why the series is a laboratory rather than a run of interviews: an experimental, interdisciplinary space for building economic literacy and new practices. For more detailed field notes on this episode, visit https://ecsa.io/?L=2.podcast,4.e01-introducing-the-laboratory Some of the materials we mention in the episode: - Digital Colonialism, a panel at the Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center (April 21, 2026): https://centerforthehumanities.org/event/digital-colonialism/ (video: https://vimeo.com/1185587529) - The Evolution of Economic Computation, from the Economic Space Agency: https://ecsa.io/?L=3.thesis,4.evolution-of-economic-computation-v2,4.evolution-of-networks-table 🌐 https://economicspace.agency | https://greenpill.network 🌐 Timestamps 00:00 – Introducing the Economic Media Laboratory and its hosts 01:02 – Kevin Owocki introduces the Economic Space Agency and post-AGI economics 02:47 – What if the economy is a medium? 03:58 – Jonathan Beller: from industrial labor to attention and screen-based extraction 05:20 – Jorge López: technology ownership, authority, and economic power 07:05 – Technology, social struggle, and the extraction of everyday life 10:30 – Computational networks, expressive fluency, and the distribution of power 12:03 – LLMs make programmability accessible to more people 14:03 – AI, digital colonialism, and contested technological futures 15:49 – AI capabilities versus economic intelligence: what economic media make possible 18:23 – Meaning-making and the hidden economic protocol layer 20:02 – Accounting and media: how grammars organize meaning 23:00 – Economic literacy and the asymmetry between users and corporations 24:47 – Accounting as a network of records and mutually recognized changes 26:01 – Accounting's syntax, semantics, and unexplored expressivity 27:59 – From shared economic memory to capitalism's growth rule 31:51 – Mapping capital's source code: intervention, extraction, and economic rule-making 34:46 – Paper-era constraints and the compression of value into money 37:56 – Accounting's efficiency, historical violence, and excluded realities 40:15 – From bookkeeping to blockchain: what changed and what persisted 43:08 – Bitcoin's limited expressivity, capital markets, and social goals 47:52 – Distributed computation versus distributed economic protocols 48:50 – Currencies as bets on futures: funding alternative possibilities 50:28 – What does economic agency mean? 52:26 – Redefining assets and recognizing care and plural values 54:05 – Social media rewards and control over what a network recognizes 58:35 – A disagreement: economy as a medium or a media ecology? 01:00:12 – Changing economic agents, events, resources, and their relations 01:02:22 – Recognition, sovereignty, and communities defining their own value 01:04:18 – Why a laboratory: experimentation, practices, and economic literacy 01:07:14 – Xerox PARC as a model for exploring a new medium 01:08:59 – Interdisciplinary inquiry and listening beyond disciplinary biases 01:10:16 – Disagreement, partial knowledge, and the fields needed for future inquiry 01:14:16 – Translation into code, economic literacy, and agency from the edges 01:15:16 – Closing and continuing in episode two
