kashklash: exchanging the future
 

1.

 
[Please, feel free to skip any question if you are not inspired by it and focus more on those that strike you. Answers are anonymous: if you want to be recognized, please leave your name when typing one of the extended answers.]

Imagine yourself deprived of all of today’s financial resources.Yet you still have technology; your handset and laptop; Internet and a broadband cellphone connection.

All your neighbors join you, yet no one has money. You have the chance to start a new informal economy using goods and services that you rate valuable, and to have others joining you in this system.

1. Please pick the goods and services that might be valuable to manage a post-monetary scenario...

Rank them from one to five — one is useless, five is absolutely vital.

 12345Would you offer it?
IT-services
clothing
Food
Shelter
Esteem — good publicity
Weapons - protection services
Sex
Cigarettes, alcohol
Illegal narcotics
Medications
News, gossip, publishing
Bandwidth
Software Code — programming, web searching, online interfaces
Hardware and general repair services
Cooking
Nursing, healing, health inspection
Babysitting, childcare, school-teaching
Cleaning, sanitation, janitor services
Transportation of goods around area
Human trafficking — moving people in and out of the area
Music and entertainment — singing, dancing
Psychoanalysis and grief counseling
Matchmaking — finding lost mates or relatives
Blood transfusions, hair, skin, organs, the human body
Games, actual
Games, virtual or alternate-reality
Storytelling, little theater
Religious/spiritual services
Translation/interpretation services

2. How would you persuade people to join your alternative economy?
How would you publicize your system?

3. How would you explain its benefits to others and win some political loyalty? How would you deal with cheaters and defectors exploiting your system?

4. Help us list potential catastrophes for today’s conventional economy, which might cause it to be junked for radical substitutes.

Please rank these in credibility from 1 to 5 — one being very unlikely to happen, 5 being very probable.

 12345
Credit freeze
Currency hyperinflation
Stock collapse
Massive natural disaster
World war
Revolution
Environmental collapse
Major world depression
New New Economy
Peak Oil etc.
Massive financial fraud

5. How could sub-national entities like provinces, cities or ethnic minorities start their own currencies? How can large, established economic systems be successfully miniaturized for use by much smaller groups — or virtually networked groups?

6. If there were no agreed-upon global currency (such as yen-dollar-euro) how would nations trade goods and services with one another? Lacking the impersonal value of money, how can different communities/economies trade their goods and services?

7. Please help us rank the potential power-players in the scenario you created. We are trying to judge their degree of possible influence on future events. Please rate them 1 to 5.

 12345
Banks
Big technological companies/Blue chips (Google/Microsoft/Amazon/EBay)
National treasuries and finance bureaucracies
Energy networks and utilities
Transport and logistics services
Political parties and leaders
Police/law enforcement
The underclass, the impoverished
The unbanked (billions of people in developing economies who have never seen a bank or any credit services)
Media companies (television, newspaper)
Black-market drug dealers/mafia/terrorists
Refugees and the undocumented
Stock exchanges
Postal services
International/global regulators and treaty-makers

8. So, that was about power... Is power and influence in your informal economy somehow related to richness? Is richness related, as in today's economy, to accumulation?

9. Think of the future's future: how will 'growth' and 'development' apply in your new economic system?

10. What part of today’s financial systems would make your revered ancestors turn in their graves? What do you think your child will dislike most about the way you handled money?