Dry Up The Supply!

We can have our own 'Shock Doctrine for good'. It's not a Black Swan if you know it's coming...!

Now, in every human question, there is something more powerful than strength, than courage, than genius itself: it is the idea whose time has come. - Émile Souvestre

I agree with Daniel Pinchbeck and others that humanity is at a bifurcation point which is going to determine how the next few decades, and indeed centuries, pan out for us. Humanity, at least in industrialised 'Western' countries, has become too comfortable, we have forgotten what it means to take responsibility. And when good people don't take responsibility, it opens the way for bad people to take over. I'm sure I don't need to mention names.

I have many draft essays which contain information and perspectives that I feel can be useful right now. Some of them are 'my ideas', as much as any idea can belong to one person, others are borrowed from other writers. I feel like I need to get them out there while we have this little window of opportunity, before the water closes over our heads (metaphorically and literally, in some cases).

This article, and ones which will follow, are therefore in fairly broad strokes. Each part could be a separate long essay, but as I say, I don't feel there's enough time for that right now. If you have any questions or doubts, feel free to leave them in the comments and I can flesh things out there. If you're reading this and you start thinking 'there's no way this could work', it's probably that I simply haven't provided enough information, and I will be able to if asked. Anyway, here goes:

I've been thinking about the tech bros; not in a "how can we give them what they want" way, but more of a "how can we massively reduce their influence" way. It’s clear that their power, all of it, comes from money. So, what if we could shift civil society to a different kind of money?

The currencies we use are debt-based and require that the economy grow infinitely. This, as has been pointed out repeatedly, is not going to work on a finite planet. 'Economic growth' broadly means 'stuff that was previously un-quantified has now been quantified', whether that is childcare, food preparation, or rare earth minerals. There is more debt than money in existence, so we need to extract more 'resources' and quantify them. It's an endless hamster wheel inside which we are all running, and while it has undeniably lifted large parts of humanity out of material poverty, it is now reaching its end game, as predicted by Dana Meadows and co in their 'Limits To Growth' report back in the 1970s.

Issue 27: Focus On Donella Meadows and Systems Thinking

So the adoption of a new form of money is now urgent, one which more or less maintains the levels of general prosperity we have achieved, but which acts as a tool for exchange rather than a mechanism of enslavement.

After the 2007-08 financial crash many alternatives were proposed, and one of the most promising seemed to be cryptocurrency. Bitcoin solved a problem which had never been solved before, that of how to keep a secure ledger of transactions without a central authority. Decentralised money, woohoo!

The FairCoop/Faircoin project I was involved in from 2014-2020-ish was an attempt to create a decentralised currency (originally forked from Bitcoin, but without the negative environmental impacts) which would require no central authority, based on a structure of 'glocal' nodes, both technologically and socially. The problem, or one of them, as we discovered, is that so many essential parts of life – particularly land, energy, and medicine – are tied to government-issued money. Untangling that web isn't going to happen easily. Yet an opportunity may be opening up to untangle large parts of the economy from it, which I go into below.

Another problem we ran into is that 'commodity money' is not a good means of exchange, at all. Why spend your crypto when you think the price may go up tomorrow? See the excellent work of

Brett Scott

if you're interested in the details.

An alternative to that, which I also have extensive experience of within local cooperatives here in Spain, is mutual credit. It's not exactly money, more 'accounting of favours', but it works exactly like money and you can use a smartphone or web app to spend it. Paradoxically, although it does work via credit, it does not require endless growth in order for it to be issued. At all times, the sum of all transactions in a mutual credit system is zero. There is no interest and therefore it also does not benefit the already rich at the expense of the already poor like government-issued money does. It is also decentralised like crypto, particularly if you use it via a crypto-ledger-like protocol like Holochain. (I highly recommend digging into Holochain if you are at all curious about any of this, it's a profound and beautiful rabbit hole).

We should be ready for the next financial crisis; it is absolutely coming. The “broligarchy” are juicing up the economy by removing all the guard rails. In addition they might try to switch the economy to crypto by crashing the stock market and then presenting crypto as the solution, in the process buying up all the distressed assets. Trump has already done his own meme-coin rug pull with no consequences, so why wouldn't they? People have been dumbed down to the extent that nobody really asks questions any more, so it's open season for grifters!

Either way, this will probably produce the biggest bubble in history. Most mainstream commentators will forget 2007 and buy right into it; people will be lauded as geniuses and so on (see the 'Celtic Tiger', the Icelandic banks, and similar shite from before 2008). Then will come the crash. If the economy has been thoroughly merged with crypto by then, it will be absolute carnage. Everything will go to zero. If it's mostly the default economy, it won't be quite as bad because there are some shock absorbers in place (although they will have removed many of these in order to create the bubble).

Their plan will then be to buy up pretty much everything at pennies on the dollar. Y’know, like last time.

But what if there was an alternate plan in place? What if, at that point, we could switch to a more sustainable currency? That might be a real leverage point to change the system. We could have our own 'Shock Doctrine for good'! As we know it's coming, we could actually get ready for it, just like the financial predators are always ready for these events. It's not a 'Black Swan', because they have placed their order and it's in the kitchen right now.

Of course, there's the danger that they could ban the new currency or just buy it all up. If people were desperate, they'd probably sell out to legacy currency just to survive.

But I have a strange feeling that whatever they do, it's all going to end up with “normal” money (and very likely Bitcoin too) being worthless. They’re actually going to break money completely in their desire to own all of it, and thus they will cut off the branch they're sitting on. 'You can never have enough of what you don't really want', so no matter what they get, they will want more. This part is all speculation at this point, I admit, but what I am convinced of is that we need to be ready.

If we go into that situation unprepared, we’re in big trouble. If we’re prepared though, it could end up being a judo move, a conversion of a weakness into a strength. It would need to be a mainstream-adjacent project, though. Get institutions which are currently powerful to see what's going to happen and how their power is going to be taken away by the crash, and help get them ready for what comes after it.

take that, ya orange mofo

This is without mentioning the even bigger threat of humans being completely replaced with AI, but I will save that one for another essay, coming soon folks.

A tiny anarchist project isn't going to work; I've been there and tried that. It needs to be branded as something that the most conventional person can easily transition into. If we could get the Catholic Church on board, for example, it would be a massive coup. Imagine the Vatican recommending an alternative way of doing business with each other, one which might actually help people avoid the old 'eye of a needle' problem, not by making everyone poor like in North Korea, but by making society as a whole richer: in time, in quality of life, in freedom, in creativity, in appreciating each other. Getting us off the hamster wheel and developing an economy which actually works for human beings.

I don't think banks or other default financial institutions would be interested before the crash, but other large privately owned companies might be, if they can see that they are on the chopping block; and they absolutely are, especially if they are providing goods and services to ordinary people (who may well soon be unemployed and unable to buy those things).

Now all this might sound like castles in the air. Who am I, after all, in relation to the tech bros? Absolutely nobody. But I think the ideas stand up on their own. The broligarchy has realised that they don't need ordinary people any more; AI will soon be able to do a better job. Elon Musk is a good bellwether for how their attitudes have changed. From his main company's mission being the sustainable energy transition to complete climate denial. Because he now thinks it's too late and there's no point in saving most of humanity. They are beginning the process of cutting us loose and will use AI and robots to do most of their work.

But this crisis is actually an opportunity. The Democrats lost the US election because they couldn't offer anything better than 'keep the status quo'. But the status quo is not working for a majority of people now, so they chose the 'fuck it' option instead. In the short term that was a massive mistake in my opinion, but now at least we can see the path clearly.

If we, as the mass of humanity, switch to a new monetary system, we will dry up the supply to the broligarchs, and massively diminish their power, even if key areas like defence, energy and medicine remain within the default government-money economy.

They're always saying how much they love competition, well let's create some real competition for the default way of transacting.

The creation of this new 'human-centric' economy will also pull people together in a common goal: making a world where we have time for each other again, where we are not enslaved by the endless need for power of the handful of narcissists who managed to hack the legacy systems. What are we waiting for?