The World Economy may be Undergoing a Momentous Historical Transition.
From Controlling Scarcity, to Controlling Reputation.
We appear to be moving from value based on scarcity, to value based on reputation, and that is really cool.
We may finally be seeing the maturation of our species to adulthood.
Whilst we can’t see the outcome, we might perceive current events as somewhat chaotic and unpredictable.
But it all makes sense, if we can see the outcome.
A new, networked humanity.
The Run-up
The run-up to the present is characterised by the following points:
- Spiralling debt
- Slavery
- Colonialism
- Hierarchical Organisations with Corruption at all levels
- Endless competition between all humans
- Embedded Growth Obligation
- Predatory Capitalism
- Dystopian Communism
- Racism, Nazism, Feminism, Fascism, Anti-fascism, Any-ism… Divisionism
- Wars
- Hundreds of millions of violent deaths, at the hands of other humans.
- Decimation of other species of all living things
- Catastrophic Environmental Damage to the planet
- Ever reducing quality vs ever rising costs
In short, the human species was in process of consuming itself, whilst destroying its host planet.
In hindsight, we might one day acknowledge our time on Earth until now as the real dark age.
There are some who prefer to think that this was actually a productive phase of humanity. But the majority, in my opinion, are now seeing that this was actually a very damaging phase, where we did much more damage than good.
It might have been necessary to make that mistake, in order to learn from it, who knows.
What matters now, is that we can move on from it, and do much better this time. To do that, we need to be able to make some sense of current events.
The Present
- COVID-19
- Mass shutdown and lockdown
- Mass bankruptcy
- Bulk cash bailouts to corporates
- Universal free trickle money to individuals
- Individual isolation with much increased time spent networked online by all individuals
- A brief respite in environmental damage, giving a glimpse of how the environment once was, and could be again
- Rioting and rebellion against lockdown in some places
- Universal Widespread rioting, in response to racial brutality
- Universal Widespread rioting, in response to financial inequality
Sense-making
In the points detailed in the Run-up until now, we are seeing a story of empires built on greed, emerging from the fogs of history.
Greed, to most of us we trust, is simply the instinct to wish for more back, in return for something given, if anything. In other words, our mission as individuals, has been to take our wealth from our fellow humans, for as little as possible in return, even if it leaves them with less than us.
That wish to profit, unfortunately, appears to exist in all of us, driving everything we do in modern life. We have been conditioned so deeply to do it, most of us do not realise the full extent of it within ourselves.
In the system to date, it is a necessary drive, to ensure our individual survival and prospering. We have to work to survive, unless we were lucky enough to have inherited enough to avoid that kind of National service.
But with free money, we too have had a taste of that freedom.
Freedom to stop working, to look around, and to think about some things we never thought of before, to self-reflect, and to discuss all of these things with the other humans we are networked with.
With our jobs, and in many cases our past careers gone, i.e. with nothing to lose, we now have the further freedom to think about, and talk about the things we might have avoided previously, to save our jobs and careers.
Like what money is, and how it has worked to date, to keep us brainwashed from the fact that we worked in a system built on greed, and how clearly we can now see others, still working in that system, perpetuating its ongoing spell of greed.
We see all of our politicians and leaders of industry, still working, still telling us “Everything will be back to normal soon”, each one with ambitions of personal wealth.
We see the hoards of health-workers, working on our behalf, not for profit, mostly employed on temporary contracts, paid minimal wages, with little access to adequate personal protection, dropping like flies as they bear the brunt of dealing first-hand with the sick and dying of COVID-19.
We think about things like what freedom is, and what isn’t; what justice is, and what isn’t; and like what equality is, and what isn’t.
Hive Vision
We’ve become vigilant; hyper-sensitive, to demonstrated examples of injustice, brutality, and inequality.
We’ve also become expert at sorting out what information is, and what isn’t.
So we have become experts at seeing what reality is, and what isn’t.
Now, nothing passes unnoticed. Very little can happen around the world without us seeing.
Many billions of pairs of eyes, watching every event on Earth.
Many billions of brains, evaluating what their eyes are seeing.
Where an event attracts attention, many eyes focus on it. With half as many different brains processing the information they see, some misinterpret, but the majority see the truth, quickly correcting errors. Thus the misinterpreters are corrected, learning how to avoid future misinterpretation by trial and error, perfecting the truth spotting mechanisms of the networked collective, like a finely tuned instrument.
Now, we can’t be lied to, and we can’t even lie to ourselves.
The majority of our brains, seem to be finding our place in this hive schema; to make evaluations, as unique individuals of the collective.
As such, we are becoming aware that between us, we create the very thing we understand as “Value”, i.e. what is valuable to the world, and what isn’t.
We are the market, defining its own value.
And we watch, as free cash is conjured from thin air, and distributed.
And incredibly, its value appears to be holding.
Stocks in bankrupt companies (Hertz for example) are being traded with free money, giving rise to a new concept of “Zombie” companies, whilst oil prices, and interest rates on savings go negative.
This is in contrast to multiple previous events of national bankruptcy that we’ve looked at (Weimar, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, etc), where we noted that the values of those currencies simply crashed.
What is happening?
Controlled Scarcity
To understand, we need to look first at history, then at the present, and analyse what is different.
In all cases where we’ve seen currencies crash, the countries involved were isolated, operating within their own borders on a basis of controlled scarcity. This was necessary to preserve the values of each currency as perceived by those using it within the closed economies of the respective countries.
In the absence of jobs, and in a closed economy with very little external trade, in the presence of trade restrictions such as embargo, or just neglect, the value of money as perceived by people in affected countries was just the value of the “fixed asset” of their country, divided by the amount of issued money. The more money is issued, the more the value is diluted, thus the perceived value of the money drops, if large amounts of currency are printed.
But in the case of the US, UK and the other EU countries, and most surrounding countries now, all currencies are connected. All countries have investments, debts, and banks, in pretty much all others.
Dilution of one fiat currency results effectively in a dilution of all.
But as the value of a fiat currency is normally judged against all others, it is now very difficult to see if any of the currencies are crashing, or if all of them are crashing.
In fact, printing massive amounts of free money appears to be doing little harm to fiat monetary values, despite literally trillions of dollars worth of all fiat currencies being printed and issued every month, around the world.
Evidently, something else is at work.
Reputation
When we think of what value actually is, it is a measure of how much we desire something, how good we think it is, how much good that thing can do, or already does for us, and if we are environmentally minded, how much good it might do for the world.
Per the points above, we are now more environmentally minded, as we’ve had time to notice it. We also could not miss the dramatic changes which occurred during lockdown; fish stocks, corals, plants, insects, air quality, water quality, and many other things all showed dramatic recovery, not withstanding extinct species.
For the first time in maybe thirty years, we briefly smelled fresh air.
This realisation, and change of mentality, from a simple consideration of our own wealth, to a holistic one, recognising the value of a healthy environment, is key to our maturation as a species.
This is the same new mentality that recognises the shelf life of a currency, to each individual, is far less important than what we can buy with it right now.
It is the same mentality that recognises our true value, is simply based on our reputation, rather like our credit rating, in the old system.
By this new paradigm, we are trading on reputation, a form of worldwide social credit.
By optimising our reputation as a collective, we consolidate the overall value of our currency, thus we maximise the value to the individual.
The new mentality leads us further to the conclusion that our individual value as a human is maximised, by each of us working towards maximising our value as a species, to the world.
So our ideas of value are widening, to include the concept of individual, and community-centric, endogenous generation of value. That is value that we create, as individuals, and communities.
When we get free money, we get “Ammunition”, to put our ideas into practice, however small. We have money, and time, to put to the things we think are important, to the world, however little, as well as to put food on our own table, and to keep a roof over our own head.
When we do that, we increase the value of our currency, and our free money is assured.
Unlimited Issuance
There might seem a minor problem, in that we see the amounts issued increasing to numbers which seem astronomical, and nonsensical, by conventional, value-by-controlled-scarcity thinking.
To realise why that is not so bad, we only need to consider what is the function of money; to empower.
If we look at how empowerment works in nature, physical energy comes from its only source in the solar system, the sun, and is converted in a multitude of different natural ways on our planet, before finally we get to put a little of it to use for our own human purposes.
The point to note is that the source of the energy is unlimited. We would never try to count, or expect the number of photons from the sun to be limited in any way.
So why do we think it has to be that way with money?
The answer to that question, and the reason why we have to switch directly to solar for our physical energy, are out of scope of this article, but the point of the comparison is to show that the model of unlimited, free money actually reflects nature, so is perfectly reasonable.
The effect is that fiat currency may become no longer a practical store of wealth, just as there is no energy “stored” in sunlight, it is a medium of transport, and no more.
Already we see negative interest rates on fiat money stored in a bank account.
In comparison with gold, and other scarce commodities, fiat continually loses stored value.
But with indefinite free money, we no longer need to store wealth, to ensure our future survival.
Stored wealth becomes a luxury, that we might wish to use for projects requiring large stores of wealth to undertake, or to buy luxury goods, if we choose.
The fundamental difference, now, from any time previously in the known history of money, is that rather than being rewarded for competing with one another, preying on one another, we are now being rewarded for working together, as one.
Now, we march in the street as one, although maybe a small active number of people, the hive knows nonetheless that the protestors are a representative section of the majority, of all colours, and all classes, protesting about the injustices we see to minorities.
Thus the hive sees a population of people working actively towards fixing the wrongs of the world, adding value to the world, and the value of the currencies of those good populations are assured, regardless of how much is printed.
Stored Wealth
So how does all of this fit with stored wealth, such as Gold, Bitcoin, and other Cryptocurrencies?
It fits, when we realise that a cryptocurrency is simply another community, working towards increasing its value.
Instead of the value of a country, the value of an open cryptocurrency is the value of a worldwide distributed community.
When the community is recognised as doing good things, the value of the currency increases.
However, as most cryptocurrencies that we’ve seen so far are truly fixed supply, they cannot be used for issuing free money indefinitely.
Eventually, free money from a fixed supply would have to run out.
Of course, unlimited crypto-currencies can be produced, but we have not seen any yet, as far as I am aware.
In comparison with free fiat money, a cryptocurrency is a true accumulator of wealth.
That is similar to gold.
Both Gold and Bitcoin have a fixed quantity of limited supply.
Therefore, if we obtain some, and hold on to it, whilst it is used to do good things for the world, by others if not directly by ourselves, its value will appreciate, without limit, relative to fiat currencies.
Therefore, eventually, as it will become used to fund all manner of projects, large and small, it will eventually become distributed amongst more and more users, thus further consolidating its value per the Gini Co-efficient.
The same argument applies to Bitcoin, but with network effects also at work, an extra order of magnitude applies.
This is supported by another study (see link below), carried out during the COVID events, by the current author, using some of the new time that has become available due to free money. Some of the concepts in that study are already out of date (superseded by the reasoning here, in light of further observation of events occurring daily), but the end result is the same, the divergence of the Bitcoin value from that of gold, upwards.
Please do comment on the story, critical or otherwise, and share to others who might comment too.
Write your own versions of it, twist it if you wish to, the Hive will work it out.
Let’s get the word out there, for the Hive.
