Currency is the operating system of our economy and has through the years encroached on more and more of our society. At the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence, it is urgent time to rethink our concepts of currency. If we want to live in a world that is just and liveable for humans, we need to externalise social behaviour. We can no longer rely on the innate humanity of the individuals that own, lead or work in companies to enforce the principles of a just society. Neither will laws save us from inhuman practices, new edge cases of antisocial behaviour always emerge and the gap between legislation and changing practice will only widen as technology further accelerates.
Today’s currency system incentivises and selects for psychopathy. Companies have no humanity, their first imperative is to maximise the profits of their shareholders. Today’s economical agents are designed to only act in a social responsible way when the costs of asocial behaviour are greater than their potential benefits. The results are all around us: firing people for incremental gains, unethical practices, optimisation for short-term gains, destruction of the environment, all follow from the architecture of today’s economy.
That is why I believe we need to redesign currencies, so that they would by definition encourage social behaviour. If we can devise a currency system that is better aligned with the way good relationships work, I think it might become possible to externalise social capital. To make collaboration the default rather than the exception. This in turn could humanise companies and other non-human actors in society.
We need this change, not only to save us from the machines, we need it now to save us from ourselves. Even without the presence of non-human intelligence there has been an ongoing thinning of the social fabric. The interconnection of the whole world into a single society has come at the expense of our social fabric, that feels as if it has been stretched too thin. After decades of growth towards equal opportunity, society is again polarising between the hyper wealthy and the poor.
As an entrepreneur active in the Drupal software community, I refuse to think that my employees are interchangeable parts of a machine. My employees are part of my tribe, my extended family. This blogpost series was inspired by years of thinking about capital redistribution. My search to find a way to share the gains of our joint labor, that would not come with increased risk exposure for me and my family.
Another influence has been my involvement in the open source community, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we could make social capital scale, so that we may protect large scale commons like the Drupal project. The growth of the project has triggered a phase change in the community. A vulnerability has been exposed that threatens the open nature of our project and to some extend its survival.
My thoughts clicked into place after reading David Graeber’s book, “Debt – Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years”. It made me question my unconscious beliefs about value exchange in society. In his book he argues that widespread use of bartering is a fairly recent cultural development. That we originally only used bartering when dealing with strangers with whom we did not wish to maintain relationships. That any transaction between non-strangers used to be done through time separated gifts, in a form of debt exchange that relied on generosity and gratefulness. In a discussion with Laura, my wife and business partner, this got me thinking about non-zero-sum currencies, all else flowed from that idea.
I became an entrepreneur to maximise my freedom, to gain financial independence. I refuse to do so at the expense of my employees, my tribe members or anybody else. I wish to believe in a world of infinite value, where we don’t need to compete to have what we need to live a fulfilling life. I hope that this blog will inspire you to think about the nature of our economy. I hope this blog could somehow contribute to a world in which all of us can be free AND connected.
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