The Future Of Money: Conclusions

At the end of a series of interviews and an equally wide exploration of new thinking on the future of money, I find my thoughts line up pretty closely with those of author Neal Stephenson in a 2005 Slashdot interview:

[via interviews.slashdot.org]

7) Money - by querencia

[…]


You’ve obviously spent a lot of time thinking about money lately. Is
there anything going on in the modern world with monetary systems
(barter networks, for example) that you find particularly interesting?

What do you see on the horizon with respect to money?

Neal:

Actually, what’s interesting about money is that it doesn’t seem to
change that much at all. It became fantastically sophisticated hundreds
of years ago. Back before people knew about germs, evolution, the Table
of Elements, and other stuff that we now take for granted, people were
engaging in financial manipulations that seem quite modern in their
sophistication. So if I had to take a wild guess—-and believe me, it
is a wild guess—-I’d say that money and the way it works is going to
be a constant, not a variable.

I give up on the search for an abracadabra coming from future forms of cash.

I have talked to futurists, scifi writers, artists, and all manner of folks deeply involved in looking at money, and in the final analysis, money looks like a constant, not a variable.

There have been some very interesting advances in economic exchange, especially among the unbanked, with the proliferation of low-cost networks, like cell phones. In particular, the possible uses of cell minutes as a alt-cash is promising. Cell minutes can be transferred from one party to another simply by passing along codes: no physical exchange needs to happen, and the codes never have to be on your person. It makes them hard to steal, hard to track, hard to tax.

But the anonymity and trust associated with most fiat currencies make them very resistant to being displaced.

More than anything else, I have come to believe that complementary or local currencies will go nowhere, at least in the presence of strong fiat currencies. Much of the heat around local currencies is strongly linked to ‘transitional thinking’ as Alex Steffen of Worldchanging.org styles it:

[via

Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities?
by Alex Steffen]

All over the world, groups of people with graduate degrees,
affluence, decades of work experience, varieties of advanced training
and technological capacities beyond the imagining of our
great-grandparents are coming together, looking into the face of
apocalypse… and deciding to start a seed exchange or a kids clothing
swap.

Transition thinking seems obsessively focused on coordinating
individual actions (like helping people barter their free time or
connecting people who want to garden); even at its most ambitious, it
generally focuses on building alternative systems (say, starting a
local currency scheme) rather than reforming the larger systems that
shape life all around us (say, starting an actual credit union or
rewriting banking regulations).

My inquiry into the future of money was subsidized by Neo.org, a non-profit whose principals envisioned a great deal of transitional coordination: a digital alternative currency intended to act as a means of lubricating the friction involved in time barter around good works.

200 One Dollar Bills, Andy Warhol

And in a way that is strangely paralleled by Steffen’s two paragraphs, above, I become (briefly) involved in the Slow Money Association, acting as a temporary editor of their blog and helping to coordinate a social media policy. My most basic recommendation to the Slow Money founders was that they drop a variety of fragmented activities, and start a credit union. A credit union is a direct way to harness the financial power of a large group of people who share common purpose, and based on the money invested in the CU, loans can be made to members at very low interest rates. This is a lot better, in the long run, than advocating that people should visit farmer’s markets regularly, or that the soil is a resource to be husbanded, not washed in chemicals.

I had entered into this project thinking that I would find some magic wand, a spell that could revitalize local communities, increase social capital, and make communities more resilient. The answer to that is not is some alternative currency, or in small scale projects like Steffen’s clothing swaps. Instead, we need grassroots activities that can scale into national policy.

We need to scream at the local level about food policy: school lunches, public support of local agriculture, and ending food deserts. But we need to do this in a form that can scale, like credit unions, and organizations where local chapters collate their efforts with others.

So I give up on the search for an abracadabra coming from future forms of cash. It is up to us to redistribute value and exchange, to decide which parts of our world should be outside of economics and which should be in. For example, who says that health care should be dominated by market controls? Why should its dynamics be driven and shaped by making a profit? If we believe in public education, administered by the government and controlled through public means, why don’t we believe in public health?

This topic is a bit off tangent for /Message, as well. The digital aspect of new money systems made it seem like a good overlap, but if I were starting this project today, I would have run it at my Ambivalence blog, where I deal with politics, green issues, and society in the large, not just social tools.

Alt Cash isn’t a social tool, at least no money I have seen. And until it is, look to me writing about it there, and not here.

The Future Of Money series is sponsored in part by Neo.org