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This summer is feeling more and more like the calm before the storm. Our upcoming presidential election is already absurd, with one candidate a multiple felon and the other a bumbling senior who I wouldn't trust with car keys. Predictably, mainstream media is doing everything it can to keep our attention affixed to this dumpster fire. Independent media, for its part, remains obsessed with regional military conflicts on the other side of the world.
The future being forced upon us by the powers that be fills me with dread. But although society's overall direction is unlikely to change, we can begin untangling ourselves from unsustainable systems extracting value from our lives. As far as an alternative to the legacy economy, the emerging blockchain economy is the only game in town. There's not another viable alternative out there.
Sacred Economics
I recently watched an old Charles Eisenstein video about sacred economics. Right away, the video explains how artificial scarcity is built into the process of creating dollars. It goes on to suggest that economic incentives should be re-aligned around human needs and that we should transition away from the debt-based system we have now to a gift-based system with gratitude at its center.
I've been familiar with Eisenstein for a long time and remember reading his book Sacred Economics when it came out. His ideas became popular in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, along with other community-based approaches to fixing our broken systems like Transition Towns and City Repair Project. All of this stuff is great, but it's also very niche, and I haven't seen anything even resembling a real movement coming out of these efforts.
While I agree in principle with most of what Eisenstein says, a lot of it is more theoretical than practical, with a few too many New Age platitudes thrown in for my taste. His ability to explain financial matters in a way that's easy to understand is impressive. So is his commitment to a gift-based future. His message may be laying the groundwork for such a future, but it's not actually bringing that future about.
Getting Practical
The government isn't going to fix our monetary system no matter what. Nor is big business ever going to get behind any effort that would fix this system, because big business largely consists of predators and parasites profiting from the current situation. If we want a better system, we'll have to create it ourselves. While this would have been prohibitively challenging in a technical sense even 10 years ago, emerging technology has made it a much more realistic proposition today.
The decentralized blockchain economy now taking shape could eventually replace most traditional financial services. But crypto alone won't solve the monetary problem. In the legacy system, new money is created and introduced into the economy by the choices of self-interested big banks. These choices determine how dollars are distributed in society. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin create new money by paying users for performing computing tasks. These funds are then distributed by market activity.
This arrangement does avoid the artificial scarcity plaguing dollars, but its distribution of funds isn't necessarily more equitable. In an ideal economy, money would flow through every participating community and not leave anyone out. Any crypto token that wants to live up to this ideal would have to be distributed accordingly. Some projects get closer to this than others.
Rstory
My Rstory token is conceptually a gratitude token. Each unit is called a tude, short for gratitude, and my distribution plan is to give tudes to people doing things I'm grateful for. There's no scarcity of tudes. I have billions of them. And once a person has a tude, there's no need to spend it, because merely possessing it is sufficient to access my scifi novels for free, which is the value basis of the token.
The symbolism of this arrangement is interesting. The flow of tokens through the network is going to be similar as the flow of other tokens through other networks. Yet with Rstory, there's not just flow in play, but resonance. Users can receive benefits from merely holding a tude.
My project on its own won't bring about the future envisioned by Eisenstein, but it plus a hundred other complimentary projects absolutely could bring about this future. Whether or not these projects ever materialize, Rstory is operationalizing Sacred Economics in a way that could scale massively if people end up adopting it.
Read Free Mind Gazette on Substack
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.