Very readable summary, thanks. A few alternative perspectives on the same material. I'll have to check 5,000 years; I thought coin was invented 1000bc in Phrygia; are you referring to the antecedent then?
As for solution set: too complicated. Yes, resource allocation requires a complicated tracking system; luckily we have developed very sophisticated logistics already. The core problem is the relationship of money to ownership. No amount of exchange-based currency is going to change this. Other solutions have been proposed, time-banks etc. One that hasn't been explored yet: decoupling number from exchange, treating the number as a vector, not a scalar. The time aspect is built into the vector, and it maps to intention and responsibility of a relationship, not exchange. It is a different fundamental economic. As easy as sharing, in fact easier than exchange.
We still haven't talked. Which is a shame. But I understand. It is challenging for folks who invest their time, identity and thought to justify and support the mainstream traditional system; it is equally hard or harder for those who think and attempt and commit to realise alternatives. Such is the multi faceted wicked problem we face! Thanks for reading, be well!
Hi David. My group's proposal called Creditism decouples number from exchange. It's incorporates all of the wisdom and ideals of P2P Commoning with a new flow of 'number' not tied directly to exchange but rather to participation. Reach out and let's chat: remzib @ gmail
Dear David, I am referring to the kind of material shared by Marcel Mauss in the Gift, and David Graever, in several of his books, such as the Anthropology of Value (if I remember the title correctly) . They basically describe various circulating tokens in Polynesia and such, stressing their difference with market mechanisms. I'm regularly available for zooms, weekdays on thai time zone.
I feel I must be advocating for the wave of changes after yours then, because my ideal would be no money.
Instead having an Abundance Centred Society (ACeS) or Post-Scarcity/RBE whereby using access abundance, closed loop material flows and automation means we can have such abundance that there's no longer a need for money anymore.
I put a lot of extra effort into adding midjourney generated images for the 3rd Episode (on the first TAO of ACeS) so it would be more interesting as you pointed out you had more video time than podcasting time.
Maybe future complimentary currencies should be pegged to a basket of localized useful "energy currencies" exclusively useful for a region's circular economy. This gives it real store of value, in actual commodities, useful in a region, and as a check and balance or hedge against currency managers pushing out more paper-digital tokens in such currencies (thus blocking use value inflation of currency). Instead of these 'energy currencies' suggested here, https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Energy_currency
I would suggest a regional financial currency, based on a basket of more "circular energy currencies", to coin a phrase, in order to facilitate a circular economy, like:
- ammonia (a cheaply-created form of hydrogen economy easier infrastructurally to manage, and recycled FROM animal waste from across many different industrial categories, and easy to put into a common feedstock of use in many other categories of social use),
- methane (green-recycled/derived, from animal sources or from biomass and organic garbage), etc.
- biodiesel, etc.
--all of this would be useful for catalyzing more links regionally for a circular economy and finding profitable waste uses for secondary uses as well as a common feedstock. Pricing would innately balance out based on the supply curve (i.e., more ammonia, methane or biodiesel would be desired, so the price in the regional energy currency would go up, and encourage more production of them, and when "too much" of these energy currencies exist, the price of them would go down, and less production would be required, and yet more utilization of them would happen (as they would be cheaper), and then the social inflation/deflation cycle would be good for us--more ecological and homeostatically good--instead of destabilizing!
So Michel writes, "Beyond fiat money and crypto, how do we measure and reward systemic contributions, i.e. contribution to common infrastructural and care value ?"
Question: Why wouldn't this simply incentivize the import of convertible waste, if that convertible waste could be acquired more cheaply outside the bioregion?
Great article! You mention at the end the importance of preparing local communities for the shift to come. How might us readers do that? Are there some resources or articles that speak more directly to that preparation?
Dear Daniel, thanks for your reaction. For me, the important things for local communities to realize is the degradation of market and state capacity to fulfill human needs, as historically established. So the first order of the day is, a bit like Transition Towns, to start mapping out, bioregionally, what the resource base is for a local economy in times of stress. The second step is then to plan for securing continued access to such resources, and that involves thinking about governance and property formats that may be appropriate. A good practice in my view is that of the Stroud Commons, and how they see property and financing. Generally, my wiki is dedicated to observe such local practices on a continuous basis. I have sections on property, governance, but also for each domain of provisioning, i.e. Transportation, Housing, Energy etc ... Getting a local group together to start thinking through these issues seems like the essential first start. And if not, to start by yourself. No one is going to do this 'for us', but we can learn a lot from our peers and predecessors. The Stroud Commons material is at lowimpact.org and our own documentation at wiki.p2pfoundation.net
The ways of transition is worth co-designing as well. Many open source, community building types of experiments with transitions. Buy in with fiat, or work or affiliate marketing, into the new systems. I propose a few such as Tumbla prepaid discount swap voucher which is issued and sold at a discount by merchants. Voucher increases in value until the time of redemption which is a limited period, followed by rapid loss of trade value. Coupled with a voucher swap market.
Another experiment is common reserve fund, deposits are receipted with locality tokens. A boost or degradation gradient of distance is built into wallet, to incentivise returning value to original locality.
Another is co-living prepaid credits, short term accommodation visitors subsidise longer term. See links at hubway.net
Dear Michel, I like your report. I will get back with you about that. I am otherwise occupied, but will respond to your content as soon as conditions allow. You be well and be in Good Spirits! Yours, Reed
Michel, I recommend read Karl Schroeder's science fiction novel, STOLEN WORLDS. Karl directly addresses the issues you discuss in this article and does so by creating interlinked value generation, accounting, and decision systems all embedded in what appears to be a game, but is in reality a new circular eco-restoration based economy. Here is an excerpt where a one of his characters explains how the main cryptocurrency, Gwaiicoin, works:
"“We couldn’t have done this without the newest technologies. Just one example—smart money—money that makes its own decisions. You all use Gwaiicoin, right?” Everybody screams happily. “Gwaiicoin is a potlatch currency,” says Pax. “If you own Gwaiicoin, your own coins do a regular check to see how many you’ve got, and if you’re rich, they redistribute some of themselves randomly, to low wallets owned by other people. Gwaiicoin provides a guaranteed basic income without the intercession of any government."
That Karl's Gwaiicoin is a potlatch currency which distributes value within an economic commons is just one fragment of his larger interwoven system in the novel. I would call just one possible vision of a fully ecologically regenerative Cosmo-local economy. Karl's book gives us a necessary example image to help us understand the scope. It is clear from it that we will need to co-design and co-evolve (or co-transmute) new systems of systems with each other in order to create new integrated ecologically & humanistic flourishing interlinked Cosmo-local economies. I guess my one question is, what changes can we make to currencies which will tend to naturally advantage the co-creation of new economic accountings and away from the old monetary systems?
Wonderful Tim, I stopped reading scifi some years ago, but this one seems one that is worth taking up. Personally, I believe this principle is the right one, i.e. guaranteeing minimum incomes through mechanisms such as this one. I'm part of a community which finances UBI internally, but it has to remain discrete as we can only handle a limited number of candidates.
we now have conditional basic incomes, means-tested by governments; a UBI would be unconditional, and therefore independent of any government; it just needs a transmission technology; whether it is feasible is another question.
quote: "a UBI would be unconditional, and therefore independent of any government"
I am surprised of these optimistic opinions of UBI, given the massive corruption of current states, and given it is the WEF technocrats themselves that uber-global fascist group themselves, are ones pushing UBI to control people from around 2015 onward.
I am surprised that anyone still expects any UBI would be somehow a "departure" (as Marco implies) from "a punishment-based social credit system of technocracy" (my phrase) instead of applied as a further turning of the screw and enhancement of such a dystopian technocracy of central control, because it would likely be equally means-tested and designed to nudge and coerce people into all kinds of individually-undesired and unrepresentative state-administered conformity (to take untested 'medications' or for 'dangerous' opinions, or how it would be digitally permissioned on only certain centrally allowed purchases, and/or blocked when you allocation is used, or just for other unconnected 'bad think' that is doubleplusungood.
UBI presents itself as a carrot to get people to swallow it, yet it is really a stick or a hook in the throat--deep behavioral control afterwards on millions at once from a central point. An unrepresentative state would have even more extensive power of the purse on literally EVERY individual citizen's spending patterns and thus behavioral pattern entrainment without dissent possible or your allotment is ended. UBI sells itself as freedom from want, yet UBI would be a centrally managed and permissioned beck and call, and thus against any actual freedoms of individual innovation or freedom, and would become just state administered consumptive supply-side priming and individual state-based reward systems and punishments for certain behaviors.
Same with the 'health passes' of Nazi Germany or modern China's increasingly health-based social credit system of public vaccine mandatory registration (that the EU is still pushing today)--sold for ostensibly functional goals, yet once the infrastructure in place it can just be a means to isolate people from travel or even encourage them to injure themselves by the threat of turning it off. CCP/China in the past few years used the fresh 'CV19 digital health pass' and set it to 'off' for millions of people in cities that started to protest against bank corruption or stealing their life savings for instance, thus stopping public meetings/protests, travel to them, and purchases and public transportation purchases being blocked. Any UBI is the same as CCP's social credit system: a technological management system would be used for anything dystopian that some despot wants in the future, far beyond its original and ostensible selling point.
UBI has a very long history, and the current iteration and proposals by WEF members and Silicon Valley technologists have their own motives. Historically, at least since WWII, the supporters of UBI where the working class voters of the progressive parties, facing the opposition of conservatives. This is pretty much still the case, conservatives and market liberals are opposed to it, while in the WEF, it's a mere discussion item. Your are outlining one possible scenario, which is not actually a UBI, again, by definition, a UBI would be unconditional; if it is conditional, it's not a UBI, so you are not talking about UBI but about conditional support schemes controlled by governments.
A UBI can be either terrible or a freedom-enabling part of a new currency system. It's all in the economics design. If you implement it within a debt-based circulatory redistribution scheme like Capitalism, it's terrible. It would require constant redistribution schemes from government authorities to curtail inflation. But a Flow currency system with UBI is viable, stable, and infinite. Here's my group's proposal for a Flow currency economics called Creditism just revealed on our site Common-Planet.org
Very readable summary, thanks. A few alternative perspectives on the same material. I'll have to check 5,000 years; I thought coin was invented 1000bc in Phrygia; are you referring to the antecedent then?
As for solution set: too complicated. Yes, resource allocation requires a complicated tracking system; luckily we have developed very sophisticated logistics already. The core problem is the relationship of money to ownership. No amount of exchange-based currency is going to change this. Other solutions have been proposed, time-banks etc. One that hasn't been explored yet: decoupling number from exchange, treating the number as a vector, not a scalar. The time aspect is built into the vector, and it maps to intention and responsibility of a relationship, not exchange. It is a different fundamental economic. As easy as sharing, in fact easier than exchange.
We still haven't talked. Which is a shame. But I understand. It is challenging for folks who invest their time, identity and thought to justify and support the mainstream traditional system; it is equally hard or harder for those who think and attempt and commit to realise alternatives. Such is the multi faceted wicked problem we face! Thanks for reading, be well!
Hi David. My group's proposal called Creditism decouples number from exchange. It's incorporates all of the wisdom and ideals of P2P Commoning with a new flow of 'number' not tied directly to exchange but rather to participation. Reach out and let's chat: remzib @ gmail
Common-Planet.org
Dear David, I am referring to the kind of material shared by Marcel Mauss in the Gift, and David Graever, in several of his books, such as the Anthropology of Value (if I remember the title correctly) . They basically describe various circulating tokens in Polynesia and such, stressing their difference with market mechanisms. I'm regularly available for zooms, weekdays on thai time zone.
I feel I must be advocating for the wave of changes after yours then, because my ideal would be no money.
Instead having an Abundance Centred Society (ACeS) or Post-Scarcity/RBE whereby using access abundance, closed loop material flows and automation means we can have such abundance that there's no longer a need for money anymore.
I talk about it more in my Podcast www.abundantmars.com
Thanks Michael, will definitely check
Cheers,
I put a lot of extra effort into adding midjourney generated images for the 3rd Episode (on the first TAO of ACeS) so it would be more interesting as you pointed out you had more video time than podcasting time.
Maybe future complimentary currencies should be pegged to a basket of localized useful "energy currencies" exclusively useful for a region's circular economy. This gives it real store of value, in actual commodities, useful in a region, and as a check and balance or hedge against currency managers pushing out more paper-digital tokens in such currencies (thus blocking use value inflation of currency). Instead of these 'energy currencies' suggested here, https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Energy_currency
I would suggest a regional financial currency, based on a basket of more "circular energy currencies", to coin a phrase, in order to facilitate a circular economy, like:
- ammonia (a cheaply-created form of hydrogen economy easier infrastructurally to manage, and recycled FROM animal waste from across many different industrial categories, and easy to put into a common feedstock of use in many other categories of social use),
- methane (green-recycled/derived, from animal sources or from biomass and organic garbage), etc.
- biodiesel, etc.
--all of this would be useful for catalyzing more links regionally for a circular economy and finding profitable waste uses for secondary uses as well as a common feedstock. Pricing would innately balance out based on the supply curve (i.e., more ammonia, methane or biodiesel would be desired, so the price in the regional energy currency would go up, and encourage more production of them, and when "too much" of these energy currencies exist, the price of them would go down, and less production would be required, and yet more utilization of them would happen (as they would be cheaper), and then the social inflation/deflation cycle would be good for us--more ecological and homeostatically good--instead of destabilizing!
yes, this seems very sensible as potential proposal!
So Michel writes, "Beyond fiat money and crypto, how do we measure and reward systemic contributions, i.e. contribution to common infrastructural and care value ?"
Circular energy currencies.
Additional Discussion Here: https://x.com/mbauwens/status/1827289512478961703
Question: Why wouldn't this simply incentivize the import of convertible waste, if that convertible waste could be acquired more cheaply outside the bioregion?
Asked differently, why wouldn't this make Reason's playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAyPWcqiwzY&list=PLBuns9Evn1w9XhnH7vVh_7C65wJbaBECK
Thanks you, I will check the playlist.
Great article! You mention at the end the importance of preparing local communities for the shift to come. How might us readers do that? Are there some resources or articles that speak more directly to that preparation?
Dear Daniel, thanks for your reaction. For me, the important things for local communities to realize is the degradation of market and state capacity to fulfill human needs, as historically established. So the first order of the day is, a bit like Transition Towns, to start mapping out, bioregionally, what the resource base is for a local economy in times of stress. The second step is then to plan for securing continued access to such resources, and that involves thinking about governance and property formats that may be appropriate. A good practice in my view is that of the Stroud Commons, and how they see property and financing. Generally, my wiki is dedicated to observe such local practices on a continuous basis. I have sections on property, governance, but also for each domain of provisioning, i.e. Transportation, Housing, Energy etc ... Getting a local group together to start thinking through these issues seems like the essential first start. And if not, to start by yourself. No one is going to do this 'for us', but we can learn a lot from our peers and predecessors. The Stroud Commons material is at lowimpact.org and our own documentation at wiki.p2pfoundation.net
The ways of transition is worth co-designing as well. Many open source, community building types of experiments with transitions. Buy in with fiat, or work or affiliate marketing, into the new systems. I propose a few such as Tumbla prepaid discount swap voucher which is issued and sold at a discount by merchants. Voucher increases in value until the time of redemption which is a limited period, followed by rapid loss of trade value. Coupled with a voucher swap market.
Another experiment is common reserve fund, deposits are receipted with locality tokens. A boost or degradation gradient of distance is built into wallet, to incentivise returning value to original locality.
Another is co-living prepaid credits, short term accommodation visitors subsidise longer term. See links at hubway.net
Dear Michel, I like your report. I will get back with you about that. I am otherwise occupied, but will respond to your content as soon as conditions allow. You be well and be in Good Spirits! Yours, Reed
Michel, I recommend read Karl Schroeder's science fiction novel, STOLEN WORLDS. Karl directly addresses the issues you discuss in this article and does so by creating interlinked value generation, accounting, and decision systems all embedded in what appears to be a game, but is in reality a new circular eco-restoration based economy. Here is an excerpt where a one of his characters explains how the main cryptocurrency, Gwaiicoin, works:
"“We couldn’t have done this without the newest technologies. Just one example—smart money—money that makes its own decisions. You all use Gwaiicoin, right?” Everybody screams happily. “Gwaiicoin is a potlatch currency,” says Pax. “If you own Gwaiicoin, your own coins do a regular check to see how many you’ve got, and if you’re rich, they redistribute some of themselves randomly, to low wallets owned by other people. Gwaiicoin provides a guaranteed basic income without the intercession of any government."
That Karl's Gwaiicoin is a potlatch currency which distributes value within an economic commons is just one fragment of his larger interwoven system in the novel. I would call just one possible vision of a fully ecologically regenerative Cosmo-local economy. Karl's book gives us a necessary example image to help us understand the scope. It is clear from it that we will need to co-design and co-evolve (or co-transmute) new systems of systems with each other in order to create new integrated ecologically & humanistic flourishing interlinked Cosmo-local economies. I guess my one question is, what changes can we make to currencies which will tend to naturally advantage the co-creation of new economic accountings and away from the old monetary systems?
Wonderful Tim, I stopped reading scifi some years ago, but this one seems one that is worth taking up. Personally, I believe this principle is the right one, i.e. guaranteeing minimum incomes through mechanisms such as this one. I'm part of a community which finances UBI internally, but it has to remain discrete as we can only handle a limited number of candidates.
before even reading this...
Q: "What kind of money do we need for the next value revolution ?"
A: "Whatever, as long as it makes Universal Basic Income feasible"
PS: If I can help working on these topics, just call! :-)
UBI is a terrible idea. The foundation of a punishment-based social credit system of technocracy.
Let's ignore that "a punishment-based social credit system of technocracy" is what we have today.
I would seriously, really appreciate if you could spare some time to substantiate your rejection of UBI by:
1) reading this post of mine on the topic: https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/ubi-ai-and-reality-always-in-the (starting from the "Real problem" paragraph at the end, and then the whole thing)
2) quoting the SPECIFIC points you find wrong there, and explaining why
Thanks!!!
2
we now have conditional basic incomes, means-tested by governments; a UBI would be unconditional, and therefore independent of any government; it just needs a transmission technology; whether it is feasible is another question.
quote: "a UBI would be unconditional, and therefore independent of any government"
I am surprised of these optimistic opinions of UBI, given the massive corruption of current states, and given it is the WEF technocrats themselves that uber-global fascist group themselves, are ones pushing UBI to control people from around 2015 onward.
I am surprised that anyone still expects any UBI would be somehow a "departure" (as Marco implies) from "a punishment-based social credit system of technocracy" (my phrase) instead of applied as a further turning of the screw and enhancement of such a dystopian technocracy of central control, because it would likely be equally means-tested and designed to nudge and coerce people into all kinds of individually-undesired and unrepresentative state-administered conformity (to take untested 'medications' or for 'dangerous' opinions, or how it would be digitally permissioned on only certain centrally allowed purchases, and/or blocked when you allocation is used, or just for other unconnected 'bad think' that is doubleplusungood.
UBI presents itself as a carrot to get people to swallow it, yet it is really a stick or a hook in the throat--deep behavioral control afterwards on millions at once from a central point. An unrepresentative state would have even more extensive power of the purse on literally EVERY individual citizen's spending patterns and thus behavioral pattern entrainment without dissent possible or your allotment is ended. UBI sells itself as freedom from want, yet UBI would be a centrally managed and permissioned beck and call, and thus against any actual freedoms of individual innovation or freedom, and would become just state administered consumptive supply-side priming and individual state-based reward systems and punishments for certain behaviors.
Same with the 'health passes' of Nazi Germany or modern China's increasingly health-based social credit system of public vaccine mandatory registration (that the EU is still pushing today)--sold for ostensibly functional goals, yet once the infrastructure in place it can just be a means to isolate people from travel or even encourage them to injure themselves by the threat of turning it off. CCP/China in the past few years used the fresh 'CV19 digital health pass' and set it to 'off' for millions of people in cities that started to protest against bank corruption or stealing their life savings for instance, thus stopping public meetings/protests, travel to them, and purchases and public transportation purchases being blocked. Any UBI is the same as CCP's social credit system: a technological management system would be used for anything dystopian that some despot wants in the future, far beyond its original and ostensible selling point.
UBI has a very long history, and the current iteration and proposals by WEF members and Silicon Valley technologists have their own motives. Historically, at least since WWII, the supporters of UBI where the working class voters of the progressive parties, facing the opposition of conservatives. This is pretty much still the case, conservatives and market liberals are opposed to it, while in the WEF, it's a mere discussion item. Your are outlining one possible scenario, which is not actually a UBI, again, by definition, a UBI would be unconditional; if it is conditional, it's not a UBI, so you are not talking about UBI but about conditional support schemes controlled by governments.
A UBI can be either terrible or a freedom-enabling part of a new currency system. It's all in the economics design. If you implement it within a debt-based circulatory redistribution scheme like Capitalism, it's terrible. It would require constant redistribution schemes from government authorities to curtail inflation. But a Flow currency system with UBI is viable, stable, and infinite. Here's my group's proposal for a Flow currency economics called Creditism just revealed on our site Common-Planet.org