When I was young I had no real deep thoughts about what money was. It just was. It was there, those notes, and if you didn’t have any it was because there was something wrong with you. Money was an abstract thing, but it was a much more solid thing all those millions of years ago when I was young. It was those notes there issued by those people over there with the authoritative sounding TV ads.
These days, as everything has continued shifting from solid to smoke, it feels like it would be much more difficult to grow up thinking in that way. Money is even more abstracted now; it’s invented from thin air. And it’s not one thing ’cause now it’s cryptocurrencies too. But even though it now feels more ethereal so that maybe people have a better chance of seeing how stupid the mainstream money system is, it still feels exactly the same in its authority and in our utter lack of ownership of it. Money is not something that we play a part in shaping. It’s still something invented by them, elsewhere, and we just get to participate in it. It’s still a linear conception in the collective mind.
The idea that we ourselves could invent money still seems incongruous to a lot of people, I think.
It’s very weird to me that something so intrinsic to absolutely everything I do, to what my life can or cannot look like, to the world I get to live in – its system determining our collective energy and potential flourishing, how we live or not, the extent to which we can think and see (which is probably why collectively we apparently have dementia) – could be so opaque for so long. This system of energy that surrounds us is absolutely invisible to many people from the day they’re born till the day they die. How it's made, where it comes from, how it moves, why it moves, where it is allowed to move to.
It still feels just as opaque to me, in a way, as when I was young. Even after learning that money is created along with our ideas about it, that you can have an economy built around, say, cowrie shells, even learning about what money has historically done in its best incarnations – grease the collective wheels, flow, not be accumulated in individual storage vats, an actual common wealth – thinking about it, talking about it, writing about it feels like I’m fumbling through reams and reams of gossamer, clouding everything, making it impossible to think about. Why is money so bamboozling? Is it just too big to get our heads around? Is part of its bamboozling ability the reason why I’ve been so bad at accumulating it?
It's very creepy how many things Just Are. It makes you wonder how many things Just Are and are just fucked. It’s very dangerous to wonder about the things that Just Are and then find out, which is why there’s Married At First Sight so that you don’t have to. ’Cause when you start tugging on those kinds of threads, the next thing you know you’ve unspooled the whole world onto yourself, you’re suicidally adrift on a sea of meaninglessness, and that might be good because you’re about to die from 937 gigatons of polyester fibre asphyxiation.
There. That’s two fabric references I have woven out of my imagination so far. It’s true, I am very excited about the new season of the Great British Sewing Bee, the first ep of which is waiting for me to fleece, a visual AMSR where I watch other people sew and make beauty in a lovely caring atmosphere, while not doing any actual sewing of my own, the machine sitting silently in the other room despite years-long intention.
The good thing about finally learning that our system of doing money is a most stupid rort, a pyramid scheme, a cockwombly cobbled-together controlfest of nothing, was that though it was painful learning that this most powerful thing that caused so much misery was quite a stupid and embarrassing story to have been stymied by in the end, it meant that a bunch of things I thought we couldn’t do because the parameters of the world dictated they can’t be done were just the parameters of the stupid story. Learning about money and its history really opened my mind to future human possibilities and past enslavement.
Once I let out the seams of my thinking on money, I realised it’s not reality that’s constraining us from stopping raping the planet (and it’s not Clitus from Craigieburn not recycling his plastics properly and failing to install solar panels on his roof either, thanks very much, green capitalism’s useful idiots). It’s the shape of the money system, and the shape it’s made our own minds, which is the shape of a line. Money exchange has so often been a circle in the past, attached to the earth, for such long periods of time and in so many different cultures. It’s probably only right that the end of the kali yuga would have such thin dumb manipulative fuckfuckery for its currency.
It seems wild now, but the Christian church used to know the score on money’s dangers. There was a period of time where it spoke generally in unison when it came to the charging of interest – usury, they called it – that it was bad, mmkay. That allowing it would create a chasm through which an entire society could fall, weakened in all the ways that matter while its people were propagandised by a newly created class of propagandists into feeling strengthened from the extra consumption they could later blame us all for, though it cost us our local communities, blame us as if we made the system out of our greed, not theirs. I can't help feeling that though we sit in the stark dystopic motherfuckery of a financial system that is trying its best to put in place a system that will be able to control every speck of life out of us, that we still somehow can't see the very basics of it in the way that people outside of it could. They could see the chasm then. Now we’re in it.
The bad thing about understanding how stupid our system of doing money is is is is is is is is that you have to bring your thoughts to bear on the system you live in, and there’s too many people who are still not prepared to take even the most basic adult measurements. Perhaps the problem is that we don’t have a very good pattern of the future to show to people. It’s mainly just all Mad Max dystopia or else some continuation of the present. If we did, perhaps they would be more inclined to look at the hessian sack we’re living in now and get the scissors out and start cutting their minds up.
I’m sorry, the terrible, terrible metaphors are pouring in now, pins and needles and jersey and bobbins and 43 pattern pieces fallen on the floor and that dress Claire made that time in the design challenge that was made from, like, old bits of vacuum cleaner pipe and stuff and was like an A line 60s dress from memory, like something from The Jetsons, and was awesome.
I joined a group about five years ago, the kind of group that I hope is exploding around the world out of pure necessity alongside cryptocurrency (which gets the most traction but which you need to have money to play in in its sandbox in the first place, and which is the kind of thing you need to get in on the ground floor of, and which resembles not a circular economy but just an alternative giant big dick line economy). The group was called a local exchange trading system. Basically, it’s a spreadsheet for a group of people who trade amongst themselves, using a currency the group has invented. The currency can be anything, it doesn’t matter. What is important is the space. As it’s locally based, the money created here doesn’t leave your locality but instead gets to circulate among a place that may well have many people with many skills and talents and services to offer, but who are unable to offer them because of the lack of formal economy money circulating in the area because of the stupidity of the formal economy, which is tanking.
The problem with the group, as with all of these types of groups, which is why so many of them haven’t worked (or maybe they were just a bit before their time getting desperate enough), was one of scale. You need a lot of people to make them work, so that you've got a wide variety of talents and services available for people to make use of, and enough people who will be interested in your pomegranate crop, or your woven baskets, or whatever. There weren’t enough people offering things that I would want, and there weren’t enough people wanting things that I could offer.
My problem was that I also didn't really have a lot to offer. I feel embarrassed when I think about it now, how I felt like I didn’t really have anything sellable to offer. I mean, there are tons of things that I can do. I think I felt that even though I was offering my services pegged to a currency that doesn’t have any value anywhere else but in this group, I still felt like I was Attaching A Price to something. It was Very Serious. And I didn’t feel like I was authorised, somehow. Like, it felt like if I was going to offer my services, then they had to be really, really, really top-notch services somehow. And I had to have a certificate of authorisation from somewhere. It was so odd. It was like I felt like I was competing on one end with cheaply made shit products from China and with professionals selling those products at the other end, and sliding into the gulch in the middle. I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense, recounting it. Perhaps it was just simply that when I joined, I was quite unwell and my physical stamina was much worse than it is now. Maybe I was just too much in the weeds and the underworld to be able to join this thing, I’m not sure.
The vast majority of exchange in these kinds of groups is food exchanged between different growers. But chronic fatigue syndrome and gardening don’t mix particularly well, not when I have to climb down the hill to the veggie patch (which has now been reclaimed by weeds). But then, a few years ago it didn’t feel like the food supply could collapse in a month, whereas now it almost does. Almost.
Now we've entered the beginning of the decline, I imagine there could be a whole bunch of things I could provide if the shelves continue not being overflooded with choice and range, as multinational oil companies inflate their prices just because they can, as the system of sociopathic control turns all the screws in order to try to tank already-flaccid economies in order to offer their own digital future solution to try and shore up their dying power and we really should tell them to get fucked.
I still don’t know what I really would have to offer in a community trading economy. I love the whole idea but it scares me, too. I feel a little like the old woman in Ursula K LeGuin’s Always Coming Home, who lives 500 years in the future in what-was-California, in an anarchist society where I would like to be right now, where production is not aimed at bolstering some centralised system and money doesn’t even seem to exist at all (that’s the last thing I liked the magic trick feel of learning when exploring money – the idea that it doesn’t even need to exist at all! Boom, tish).
The old woman in Ursula’s story is feeling shame because she doesn’t know what she can offer now she’s too old to make pots anymore. But she’s not gonna starve. She just feels bad not being able to contribute. I like imagining the expansion of how it would feel to be in a society where you know you’re not going to fall through the cracks. I’m probably not going to either, but still, I can see the cracks at the end of the street. I like the idea of an old woman feeling shame for her reducing contribution, all the while not feeling shame because some nefarious group has been prodding at her for being a useless eater, prodding at the deep dark parts of herself that make her wonder if she really is a useless pointless piece of shit. That would be a bizarre thing for someone in her society to shame-prod themselves with, just because her energy’s declining. It’s not the shape of the society, it would make no sense. The fabric of their society is too intact to allow anyone to fall through the holes.
In this future world, there’s much more reduced power supply, the age of cheap fuel adolescence having been long passed. We need to consider if this is our future too, if Nikola's free energetics don’t come to light, or if we can’t create new methods of energy production, because nothing seems to be cutting it as a replacement for our current levels of power consumption. Anyway, we have too much.
I would still swap that world for this, anyday, even if I had to roll and scream in my technology consumption reduction cravings for a time.
I don’t imagine I’m going to starve in this world either, to be honest. Maybe i’m just being optimistic :) But if I don’t, what could I offer? In a globally collapsed local economy, there would be endless demand for endless things that I could probably easily learn to supply, which would possibly seem a little silly now. Local-level flaxseed gel production, I don’t know. Something 3D printed. Amateur clay sculptures. I could proofread your stuff. I could write a story or make a collage for what surely would have to eventually be a more flourishing – maybe even financially flourishing – creative system than the one we have now. I could train your dog, if I ever find myself in the position to do the training.
I could probably, if I spent enough time thinking of it, find countless things I would be capable of doing in a local economy, countless things that would weave me into the people around me, who then would become not just the person three doors down who I feel a slight resistance to but the person who supplies me with their pomegranates, or their weed, or their beautifully crafted table. And they might not take anything from me in return, it being a circular economy. But the instantly deeper connection would still be there. Just like it’s been for the vast majority of our shared histories.
After all, the original purpose of money, as Charles Eisenstein says, “is simply to connect human gifts with human needs, so that we might all live in greater abundance.”
That is indeed a more beautiful world, cut on the bias so it beautifully drapes, with gentle lighting and love of the earth, and my heart knows it is possible, beyond the wrenching of the machine’s gears. Except when it just doesn’t.
But it is.