Foundations of a new political economy
An independent research programme studying what happens when economic action is carried out at scale by actors that are not persons and not firms — software agents that hold capability, mandate and recognition at once. The programme's present work is narrow and specific: the boundary between the private technical order that already authorises these actors and the sovereign law that does not yet recognise them.
The distinguishing fact is not that machines produce goods. It is that machines are increasingly permitted to act — to contract, price, allocate and settle — under authority delegated from someone else. The programme treats that permission as the object of study.
Doctrines of agency and liability were built for a principal and an agent, one pair at a time. The research asks what changes when delegation becomes a population phenomenon: many agents, interacting, at speeds and volumes the dyadic frame was never asked to absorb.
Each version is written to be attacked. Independent hostile audits are commissioned against the programme's own claims, findings are classified, and the surviving core is narrowed rather than defended. Corrections are published, not quietly absorbed.
A layered private authorisation stack already functions as commercial acceptance of autonomous actors. The corresponding sovereign legal recognition is substantially unbuilt. Working Paper No. 1 defends this narrow proposition and nothing wider.
Where public law is absent, private infrastructure writes the operative rules — and captures the rents that come with granting permission. The question is not whether such a layer appears, but who governs it, who is liable when it fails, and on what terms it can be contested.
The programme keeps a clean version chain. Superseded documents are preserved rather than rewritten, so that the record of what was claimed, challenged and withdrawn stays legible.
Working Paper No. 1 · v0.2
At the Boundary of Private Technical Order and Sovereign Law
The programme's current scientific paper. It defends two propositions that survived hostile review: that dyadic principal–agent doctrine is not adequate as currently applied to populations of delegated agents, and that the recognition layer has been built privately while its sovereign counterpart has not. Three unresolved problems — insurance, capture of the recognition layer, and enforcement of last resort — are stated as open rather than answered.
Under adversarial revision
Standing project method · open
Claim → Challenge → Evidence → Decision → Status
An open record of every load-bearing claim the programme has made, the challenge brought against it, the evidence that settled the challenge, and what was decided as a result. It includes claims the programme has abandoned and errors made by its own auditors. The ledger is maintained continuously, not at publication.
Strategic Venture Blueprint · v0.2
Project → Stress Lab → Observatory → Recognition & Authority Lab → Infrastructure
The private strategy document. It sets out a staged path in which each stage is independently viable and gated on explicit proof before the next begins. Its central commercial hypotheses — including neutrality and indicative pricing — are recorded as unproven and are to be tested, not asserted.
Private document
Executive Strategic Summary · v0.2
Strictly derived; never edited independently of its source
A condensed version of the Blueprint held to a two-page limit, produced only from the Blueprint and revised only when the Blueprint is revised. It exists so that the strategy can be read quickly without a second, drifting account of it coming into circulation.
Private document
The programme's working assumption is that a new research programme's first drafts are mostly wrong, and that the useful work is finding out which parts. Every version is therefore submitted to independent hostile review before it is advanced, and each finding is classified as one of five outcomes: it confirms a claim, qualifies it, displaces it, falsifies it, or opens new territory.
Findings that falsify are acted on. Between v0.1 and the current paper the programme withdrew a proposed production function, dropped a novelty claim about recursive delegation, corrected its account of the lineage of a term it had coined, and reclassified a proposed right as an open normative question rather than a finding. The surviving core is smaller than the original claim, and that is the intended result.
Sources are held to a three-tier discipline: decided law and primary documents carry argument; secondary scholarship supports it; unrefereed preprints support nothing and sit in an appendix. This discipline is applied to the programme's auditors as well as its author — an audit finding that mischaracterised a decided case was itself corrected against the record and the correction logged.
The full record of challenges and decisions is kept in the Revision & Evidence Ledger.
Independent researcher. Estonian, working internationally, with a base in Southeast Asia. The Synthetic Economy is an independent programme: it is not attached to a university, a government or a funder, and it carries no institutional mandate beyond its own record.
The conceptual framework, the taxonomy of branches and the decisions on what the programme claims are his. Research assistance is AI-assisted and stated as such in every document; independent verification and hostile review are commissioned separately from drafting, and the two roles are not allowed to collapse into one.
Documents carry a standing attribution — conceptual framework developed by Steven Alber, date of first formulation 30 August 2026 — together with a version number, so that any claim can be traced to the version in which it was made and to the audit that followed it.
Listed as factual context. Neither is a sponsor of the programme, and neither is a party to its findings.
The next reviewers should be human specialists. The programme is specifically looking for correspondence from scholars and practitioners in antitrust and competition law, payments and central-bank law, and commercial law — including anyone able to show that a claim in Working Paper No. 1 is wrong. Substantive objections are logged in the Ledger with attribution, or anonymously on request.
contact@[your-domain]
Please include the document and version number your comment refers to. Requests for the private strategy documents are considered individually.