Hi Umair, how's it going?


It's not that you're being self-indulgent, it's that you suddenly sound like a cross between Bill and Ted, and the Little Book of Calm.

It's a tricky transition from pointing out what's wrong (which you have a serious talent for) and suggesting what to do about it... so it tends to go a bit Bill-and-Teddy. "Awesome" doesn't mean anything. It doesn't describe the practical mechanics of what should be done.

Which is (I suspect) why you decided to crowd-source it. It's a tough one... it's a tough one until you hit the core, sublimating catalyst that allows all of the pieces to fall into a new configuration... and it may just be that there isn't such a catalyst. If there is though, my money would be on Douglas Rushkoff's take on Fiat Currency. He's a clever guy - and sometimes he's right, and sometimes he's wrong... but the inherent architectural-flaw in the foundations of fiat currency kindof hits a nerve I think.

A value-system in which the tokens of "value" are loaned into existence (at interest) as a scarce resource, is going to have some pretty ugly characteristics - it pressures people into pretending that everything is scarce... into "making" things scarce. It doesn't reflect reality - or the laws of thermodynamics, or even simple morality. But it's a hard box to think outside of, because we've lived under it forever.

So... abundance is a threat to organisations predicated on scarcity; scarcity on the other hand is a threat to individuals.

And suddenly we've got a load more abundance - because the web has created a massive amplification of this un-monetiseable, unquantifiable value-system that operates at right-angles to "scarcity-currency"... in which people do things for fun, meaning, social-contract etc etc. I don't have a word for it. "Attention Economy" is a pathetic attempt to get outside the box concepts back into the box again.

Anyway, at the same time as that, we've got a classic fall-of-roman-empire scenario, where democracies everywhere are being englobulated by the corporate-praetorians... at the same time as we're hitting walls of genuine scarcity that negate the narratives of the corporate-praetorians. It's the textbook fall of empire blueprint.

It's complicated - until you hit the sublimating catalyst (which might not exist)

I've got this theory: "if the answer to a question is complicated, it's not the right question". My starting point for simplicity would be to question what money is actually for... a mechanism for allocating scarce resources... and you know... question that.

So... I don't think you're being self-indulgent, I think you need to go deeper (deeper than Louis XV)- to get the clarity you need to not sound like Bill and Ted.

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...but you know - that's just me indulging myself. Don't mind me, I'm as confused as anyone.
 

I suspect part of the problem is that that you (and we) don't yet know what form some of these new institution, norms and definitions will take - an "I don't know what it is, but I'll know it when I see it" sort of thing. Your other problem is that taking any individual post (or even a relatively small number of them) can leave the impression that you are a naive idealist (I was guilty of it for a while - but I AM a naive idealist, so I hung in :) ) - it's only over a longer period/more posts (here and at HBR) that the picture builds up, and some examples also become evident. Examples help, because even if we hold the same ideals/notions about what future prosperity might come from, at the moment our imaginations will hold something very different (not better or worse, just different).
Because of that difference in imaginations, I think you should remain non-prescriptive about the form "thicker value" might take, because you don't want to close down (e.g.) my imagination, or anyone else's, in the process of creating it.