This research area is developed with support of One Project and explores the potential of planetary scale computation as economic structure and 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. But how so?

Does the present macroeconomics represent only one image of the possible networks of value, and as such enforce that particular image? Present models not only represent economic activity, they constitute it. Other economic images are possible and necessary.

The term “Catallaxy” refers to the shared values, knowledge, information, and communication of those participating in a market economy. 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.

The Antikythera agenda 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.