Currency Through The Cultural Phases
Indigenous -> Gift Economy via Barter, direct-trade Agricultural -> Barter, direct-trade, currency of gold & silver Industrial -> Paper money, fiat currency, debt currency, divested from gold standard Cultural Creative -> Local currencies, Alternative currencies, Time-banking Digital Native -> Glocal currencies, Complementary Currencies, Open Source Currencies, Digital currencies, Promotional Currencies Let’s skip to Cultural Creatives: These folks re-invented the concept of Local Currencies with the intention of keeping capital circulating within their small-town economies, an Alternative route for money to flow. When folks use American Dollars, they can shop anywhere, including national and trans-national chain stores. Whenever local money is spent in one of these chains, some local money goes to the national or transnational corporate headquarters to pay for administrative costs and to buy goods produced elsewhere. The use of Local Currencies, since they can only be spent at local establishments that accept them, keep this capital circulating within the town, creating 7-times more exchanges in town. Local currencies are a huge success, though sometimes difficult to get established, as enough local businesses need to accept them to make them particularly useful for daily goods. A grocery store or farmer’s market is usually one of the first key anchor stores to get on-board to start a local currency. However, they largely fail at becoming truly “Alternative Currencies” in that one often needs to pay some bills in Federal Reserve Notes: gas at the pump, electricity, utilities in general. Cultural Creatives have succeeding in developing other exchanges as well, including Time-Banking. Time-Banking is usually done online and is for services. One hour of any user’s labor is considered to be equal in value to an hour of any other user’s labor. In this way, Time Banking includes a very particular ethics system that might not please all users. Right now, Cultural Creatives are inventing the currencies of tomorrow. Largely based online, these digital currencies do not need central banking nor even local establishments to get them going. Besides keeping it local, currency for Digital Natives will be used to tackle global crises that prior worldview’s could not even acknowledge, let alone be interested in paying to fix. Since money from the Industrial Culture still largely resides in the hands of the barons from that era, Cultural Creatives have found it frustratingly difficult to fund projects that address clearly visible issues in their cultural worldview, such as climate chaos, disparities in health, environment, and education, and outright abuses from the Industrialists. Since the Industrialists won’t invest in social change that levels the playing field, the Cultural Creatives invent their own currencies. Gone is the idea of a fully “alternative” currency, one that can fully take the place of the Almighty Dollar. By aiming for Complementary Currency, we remove competition and any concomittant political threat or disrespect for the gifts the primary currencies have given the world. Complementary Currency is, indeed, intended to be an added bonus on top of whatever exchange system one might be using. Similar to the Local Currency concept, currency for the Digital Natives will be used to promote positive activity that yields specific benefits to the user community, though not necessarily resulting in direct profits for anyone, immediately. Ecological infrastructure projects, for one, are an ideal first usage for Promotional Currency, ie: watershed restoration, planting neighborhood edible parks, ending hunger, health disparity, saving endangered species around the world, etc. Different than the Local Currency platform, Promotional Currency can not have a dollar value equivalent. Promotional Currency can be given as “compliments” for volunteers already doing the on-the-ground real work of fixing our planet. Many ecological projects do not require extensive knowledge by each participant, so after a brief morning training, a volunteer could perform all day under the supervision of an expert - similar to the work-flow style of Jimmy Carter’s Habitat for Humanity, or old-fashioned barn-raisings. Additionally, there are many decentralized projects that need to happen around the world that cannot be top-down organized. These distributed projects can be posted online to “fish for compliments” where other volunteers with this currency (Joltz) can gift their compliments to other users. These points or compliments can be redeemed online for promotional offers for concert tickets, online goods, buy one get one deals - similar to those found on Groupon. Eventually, one might be able to work a part-time job, and simply volunteer to get interesting night-life perks, use of carshares and bikeshares, and free buy-one-get-one vacation nights. These Promotional Currency websites would also act as clearinghouses for interesting volunteer opportunities around the city, with follow-up news stories written by users for extra points. In some ways like The Sims, users could “unlock” new opportunities and different levels of participation through continued use and continued volunteerism. In this way, Digital Natives lives become intertwined in a big game play designed to overcome the major issues of the day, participate in unique and varied work without ever needing a boss, and get rewarded in novel ways. A big digital gift economy, with all the creativity, appreciation, and perks! This paradigm shift from the Industrial Civilization model of wealth-owners rewarding laborers for doing their institutionally-educated and therefore better-informed will (with the occasional break-out success story of rock-stars, celebs, or entrepreneurs), to a Cultural Creative/Early Digital Native model of internet-connected & continuously-self-educating individuals doing varied work of their own choosing for personal & collective betterment, not for survival, but in pursuit of happiness. This social gaming model could only work in the Digital Native era, because only now do you have so many well-educated people with access to high-technology and the world’s information. more on that here: http://metacurrency.org/