My recent research into societal collapse (watch this space) lead me to John Michael Greer, who offered an uncommonly wise perspective, so I purchased this book to update myself on his post-peak oil thinking.
It describes progress as a 'civil religion' and examines how deeply ideas and more importantly assumptions about progress lie in our civilisation's narrative compared, say to other civilisations which reified the past or the unchanging nature of things.
I was privileged to attend the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) 2019 Congress just now where I drew attention to the role of complementary currencies and attempted to dispel any fantasies about the role of blockchain in transferring wealth.
I’ve always supported Basic Income (BI) in principle. It is probably the most direct possible strategy to address the perennial problems of poverty and inequality.
At the Basic Income Earth Network 2019 Congress I had a chat with Kang Nam Hoon, designer of the Young Person's Basic Income in Geonggi, in the Suwon province of South Korea. This Basic Income is not paid in the national currency, won, but in a token issued by the regional government and 100% backed by won. Each young person is given a plastic card, and their balance is topped up every month.
Last month I expressed personal alarm at the weather and the unexpected speed of change. Since then the global weather continues to break records, and I've thought of something slightly more constructive to say.
The cryptocurrency world is reeling this week from the white paper of Libra, a coming cryptocurrency with so much corporate buy in, it threatens to change the payments industry.
I suspected for a long time that our civilisation wasn't viable. When the banks crashed in 2008 I paid attention to a lot of apocalyptic reporting that said we came this close to economic Armageddon - whatever that meant.
As climate change inevitably rises up the political agenda, the shame of being seen not to act on it increases. Climate concerns everyone, even the rich, even the unborn, and everyone is invited to participate. Unlike with race, gender and class struggles, no one group can claim to own it. But what about those non-human persons, corporations? A few days ago, an initiative for businesses to join the rebellion started, but after objections from within the movement, it has been dropped - for now.
The usual mechanism of exchange in daily life and in cryptocurrency markets is using an intermediate commodity called money. If you want to swap the goods and services (G&S) you produce for other G&S you put your G&S on a bilateral market and swap it for money with whoever wants to pay the most for it. Then you take your money into another market and swap your money for the G&S that you want. Since money is a commodity like any other, you don't have to swap G&S for G&S but can move money in and out of the exchange.
The Credit Commons is my design for a financial exchange based on the principles of mutual credit, and autonomous communities voluntarily and trustfully collaborating. As such it differs from the more common exchange architectures in fundamental ways.
It is easy to do mutual credit or any accounting inside one organisation running one software instance on one server. Accounting between organisations on different software on different servers is much harder though.
