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When we see money as a thing with value, we often mistakenly imagine it in absolute terms, as if value resided within it like a substance. In this view, a person with a billion dollars is like Pooh Bear with a giant pot of honey.

It would follow that if everyone was a billionaire, we’d all be like Pooh Bears with giant pots of honey.

Thinking of money like this is a mistake. In fact, if everyone in the world was a billionaire we’d all have nothing. In this piece I’ll explain why.

The foundations of value

Our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors understood one thing very well. While the most basic foundations for our survival - such as sunlight, air and rainfall - come to us for free and without effort, pretty much everything else we value comes from us applying our energy to the earth.

What we call ‘the economy’ is a network of human beings who use bodily energy, and other forms of energy, to collaborate in bringing things to life. We often imagine that value resides in these products themselves, but goods and services don’t drop out of the sky: they emanate from people who transform natural resources, so in a sense all future objects, and future economic value always resides in those people and in the environment.

This formula applies regardless of the style of economy. An ancient hunter-gatherer band brings value to life at a very small scale with a small network of people who explicitly perceive themselves as collaborating. A modern market economy happens to do this at a much larger scale, with a globe-spanning network of people who are held together by monetary systems rather than by direct relationships, and who often don’t perceive themselves a collaborating. Still, if you rely on people on the other side of the world to make your breakfast cereal appear, you’re collaborating with them. It’s just that the collaboration is secured via the transfer of monetary credits.

Value never resides ‘in’ that money. It resides in the network of people, plants and sunlight that’s making the cereal you rely on. Monetary credits, though, will open access to those people. This means, when you’re accumulating money, you’re not accumulating stuff. You’re accumulating power over others who can bring stuff to life.

Being ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ refers to how much power you have to mobilise others in an interdependent economy, relative to the amount of stuff or labour you need on average. A poor person needs a certain amount, but has very little power to command other people. A rich person has large power, being able to mobilise many others through their accumulation of monetary credits, but they can also start to artificially need more stuff. There are many examples of aristocrats bankrupting themselves because their giant mansions cost an enormous amount to maintain.

Money itself doesn’t do that maintenance. People do. But if an aristocrat loses all their money, they lose their ability to make those people turn up to do that repair, and that’s how the value starts disintegrating. It superficially looks like it’s the absence of money that causes that erosion, but it’s the absence of people.

Starting on zero

An interdependent economy has to be seen, on the one hand, as a collective whole with a certain capacity for action. Let’s imagine a classic ‘desert island’ situation in which an 18th century crew gets shipwrecked on a Pacific reef. Let’s say eight survivors manage to get to an island where they must collaborate to survive. There’s a certain potential in that group, but it’s limited by how many of them there are, and how much stuff there is to extract on the island.

The eight survivors and the island will form an economy, but while they are a collective network, each crew member will still have an individual identity, and a sense of how they relate to the others. For simplicity’s sake, let’s imagine that everyone arrives in a situation of equality, with equal capacity for action, and equal status. Imagine the image below as them huddling in a circle on the beach, saying ‘we’re all in this together’.

In the diagram above there are a network of interpersonal relationships, but we’re going to assume that in this scenario everyone has a clean slate, starting from scratch. If we isolated one bilateral pair it might look like this.

Zero is a point of balance between positive and negative, like the centre of a see-saw. At the very start, everyone is balanced in this state of equality with everyone else, but they must proceed to survive on the island, individually contributing skills and energy to different tasks that the collective requires.

Insofar as everyone simultaneously contributes exactly equally all the time, they’ll remain in this state of balance, but human society doesn’t really work like this. What actually occurs between people and groups - whether those be housemates, work colleagues, band members, or shipwrecked crews - is that subtle gradations and fluctuations away from the zero line occur, as some people extract more than they’re contributing, and vice versa. As a person draws on another, they’re moving into a sense of debt to that person - going negative - while the other moves into a sense of credit - going positive.

Like a see-saw, there’s a limit to how far someone can go into the negative before the other stops them, but this will also be but one strand in that group setting.

The negative number here doesn’t represent a moral failing. ‘Going negative’ relative to others is a core element of community life. In fact, before you can engage in action for others you often need others to first support you, and communities are woven together through these shifting webs of informal reciprocity in which you move from ‘debit’ to ‘credit’ and back again. In the image above I’m representing this numerically, but these ‘balances’ are seldom explicitly measured or formally recorded. We just have an intuitive sense for them.

In a interdependent group those bilateral pairings will start to criss-cross and overlap into meshes that move beyond single pairs of people. For example, you might find two people going negative as they draw on one person, who goes positive relative to both.

The twists and turns of life on the island experienced by our crew will create a fluctuating mesh of ever-shifting balances between single people, single people and sub-groups, and sub-groups with other other sub-groups.

If you add all the network balances up they come to zero. This zero is always implied in the webs of interdependence, and represents - at some level - everything that’s produced and used by the overall network, or the baseline living standard.

Ok, I say ‘everything’, but that’s not entirely true. The anthropologist in me is obliged to note that there’s a world of activities beyond tit-for-tat reciprocity that will play out in economies, and which do not accrue these ‘balances’. We don’t have time to go into those right now, but turn to the the late David Graeber or check out my Econ Life 101 course if you want to delve deeper.

Power differentials, and market economies

With this basic picture in place, we can play with it. For example, we might ask ourselves whether it’s technically possible for everyone to collectively dip below zero as a group. Well, insofar as the zero line represents the baseline living standard, we might find situations where a group drops below their own expected standard. Picture stoner students living together in squalor, on the couch letting plates pile up, before someone says ‘hey guys, we haven’t done the washing for a week. Maybe we should’.

For now though, let’s assume that a single standard holds. In most informal situations, the sense of who is in debit and credit relative to that happens intuitively, but if you wanted to formalise this, you could imagine that those who are below the zero line have formally issued credits to those who are above it, giving those above it the right to call those in and demand stuff back. When a person says something like ‘I’ve been doing the washing for the last week while you’ve been watching TV, so now it’s your turn’, what they’re saying in formal terms is: I’ve done services for you, so I’ve accumulated positive credits from you, and now I’m cashing those in to make you do services for me.

Notice that when there’s a network imbalance, it can create a power differential. Much like air moves from a high pressure zone to a low pressure one - creating winds - goods and services can move from high debt zones to those with positive credits. Put differently, people in credit have the power to command others, especially those who might be reaching the limit of what others are prepared to give them.

I’m going to skip a few degrees of complexity here, but our modern market economies are a vastly more convoluted version of this situation. Rather than eight people on an island keeping intuitive track of informal balances between themselves, there’s eight billion people on a planet, locked together within a system of formal monetary balances. The complexity of this system is massively greater, but shares a common feature: we have interdependent people with different states of network power.

At this point I must make one thing very clear. You’ll note that in our earlier examples we assumed that those in credit have been working hard, and are thereby deserving of stuff, but there are many ways to accumulate positive credits without working, and many situations in which people go negative while trying their hardest to work.

I can’t cover all of those right now, but let’s focus on a classic one: if you own something that everyone else always needs to reach a particular living standard - such as a type of infrastructure - you can sit back and extract what’s called rent.

Let’s go back to our shipwreck example. Let’s imagine that one out of our eight survivors actually happens to be a violent and intimidating captain who holds a key to a storeroom that remains intact on the wrecked ship that’s now washed up on shore. There’s food and ale in that storeroom, and everyone is hungry and desperate, so he can use that to become a gatekeeper of sorts, extracting positive credits in exchange for allowing access to this resource he controls.

The first thing that happens here is a network inequality. He begins to accumulate credits relative to everyone else. Secondly, given that the power swings to him, he can secure favourable terms for the amount of credits he extracts. Economists might try to analyse this through the lens of ‘market forces’: given that nobody else has a key to a different ship to provide an alternative, they cannot dilute the captain’s network power. In fact, he might entrench that power by granting unequal access to allies in exchange for protection from the rest of the mob. With his bodyguards in place, a hierarchy builds.

This is actually quite similar to the situation of most billionaires in a market system. Jeff Bezos gets rewarded with positive credits every single day, regardless of whether he turns up to work or not, because he owns an infrastructure that others actually operate. Ownership is a legal concept underpinned through force, and Bezos himself doesn’t do that enforcement. That’s done by military and police.

If Amazon.com consisted solely of Bezos, it would be a tiny company with one guy trying to deliver single packages. But it’s not. Amazon.com is 1.6 million people that activate the assets that one guy happens to have a controlling ownership stake in. At a global scale, the actions of countless Amazon drivers making early morning deliveries leads to a huge influx of positive credits rolling in to Bezos as he walks around in his pyjamas drinking a smoothie. Those positive credits will enable him to call in collossal amounts of labour from billions of human beings across the world.

So, one of the main ways to get wealthy is through controlling the infrastructure and capital goods that everyone else requires. This tends to be positively reinforcing, because if you end up in a position of unequal power you can direct the productive forces of others, making them build new assets for you (alternatively, you can retroactively buy up assets that previous workers made). Over time, this leads to concentration in who owns the ‘means of production’ that are required by everyone else to access or compete on markets.

When viewed as a class of people, those like Bezos become gatekeepers to survival, positioning themselves as an oligopoly of power players at the centre of a market network.

It’s a position that allows them - or corporations run by them - to extract even more wealth, which they can then use to further solidify their political power through lobbying, marketing, or buying favour through philanthropy.

At this point I must highlight one massive elephant in the room. In our system we also have the financial sector. This is a web of institutions that weave a transnational mesh of contracts that extend positive credits in exchange for extracting a shadow future liability over and above the current capacity of the economic system. The monetary profits that will stem from decades worth of future production are already claimed within this web of financial instruments. I know that sounds complex, and we won’t delve into it in this piece, but the ability to harness this system favourably is one major way mega-capitalists secure further power.

But while it’s true that many forms of exploitative inequality can emerge in a large scale market network, the network remains subject to two principles that apply to all economies throughout history: firstly, a positive balance only has power insofar as there’s a negative counterbalance - aka. other people who can be mobilised by that balance. Secondly, there are limits to how much capacity that counterbalance carries.

Let’s return to our domineering captain who has extracted a highly unequal amount of credits. His ability to turn those into stuff is limited by the number of people he has power over. If he only has seven people to command, there’s only so much they can do in a day, and only so many resources they can do that to. Maybe the captain can make them construct a small beach shack out of driftwood for him, but if he desires a huge mansion of marble there’s no way he can convert his power into that desire. He’ll hit a network limit very quickly, exhaust his credit, and might also inspire a revolution against him.

In the case of Bezos, the network of people is much much bigger, so his ability to convert his power into goods and services is much greater, but there’s still a limit. Furthermore, the more credits he uses mobilising people towards that limit, the more his power to command runs down. He might end up with a huge mountain of goods, but as the network reaches equality of credits, he’ll find himself with very little power at all. Put differently, his power depends on a big differential in credits.

Resetting the zero line

Once you recognise this dynamic, you can start to see money as a system of credit balances that only make sense in relative terms. To illustrate the quirks of this, let’s rewrite our original shipwreck example. Picture the crew washing up on the stormy shore. They huddle together saying ‘we’re all in this together’, but then, in a strange twist, decide that everyone starts on 100, rather than zero.

Is this scenario any different to the one we began with? Well, no. We have the same eight people, with the same capacity, in the same situation. The only difference is that they chose to name their starting position 100 rather than 0, but there’s perfect equality and no power differential, which means - in reality - nobody has a positive balance that can command others. In fact, they all have nothing. They might as well just call it zero.

In reality, what’s happened is that 100 has become the new zero line, and this is where things get really trippy. It superficially looks like there are positive balances here, but there’s no money in this situation. Money is a system of unequal credit balances that generate the ability to command others, and that only exists when balances move out of alignment.

So, let’s observe the same behaviour as before. The crew start life on the island, and begin having those fluctuations away from the starting position, but if your zero line has been renamed as 100, the act of someone going to 90 is the same as them going -10. The person who has gone to 110, by contrast, actually only has 10 units of money. The rest is illusion. What we’re looking at is the same differential expressed from a different baseline.

Incidentally, the failure to understand this plagues many people in the crypto-currency community, which has a very strong tendency to view money as if it were solely a system of positive balances, like an absolute pot of honey. For example, crypto projects sometimes do ‘airdrops’ in which the same number of tokens are dropped from above onto people, which is then imagined to grant those people ‘stuff’. If we leave aside the question about what exactly those tokens are, and just assume they actually carry some kind of power (which, in the case of crypto, is a dubious assumption), we can see that dropping the same power onto people just cancels itself out. If everyone is a lion, then you’re actually all gazelle.

The only reason that Jeff Bezos can command huge amounts of stuff is that there are billions of people in his network with low or negative balances that need to grope towards the systemic zero line, and his enormous collection of positive credits will suck that labour towards himself, which can manifest as a huge yacht or mansion or whatever. The labour and resources do not emanate from his monetary tokens. They emanate from that pressure differential between him and others that emerges through unequal credit. ‘Billionaire’ then, doesn’t refer to a property residing in a single person in a vacuum. It refers to a property residing in the relations between that person and everyone else. It’s this differential that creates that ‘suction’.

If ‘billionaire’ actually means ‘person with enormous amount of credit to hoover stuff up from others’, what would the statement ‘everyone a billionaire’ mean? Well, it would mean ‘everyone with enormous amount of credit to hoover stuff from everyone’, but what does this mean? Well it could mean everyone slaving away for everyone, but that’s likely to cancel itself out, like a giant army of Bezos’ trying to make each other build skyscrapers, screaming ‘you do it!’, ‘no, you do it!’

Markets are not systems of numerical quantities of stuff. They’re systems of power. That said, power is a relationship between people, and as such has more than one face. While it’s true that the captain has the power to make the other seven rush to do stuff for him, it’s those seven who hold the labour power that he seeks. If they withhold that, the captain soon grows hungry, lonely, cold, and weak.

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Economists frequently use blood metaphors for money, seeing it as a substance of value that ‘flows’ around the economy. Financiers love this vision of money as a circulatory system, because it creates an image of their sector as the ‘beating heart’ of the global economy.

Under this metaphor, money carries a payload, as if it were plasma transporting nutrients to cells. It’s seen as a delivery system for value. This belief is reinforced by those who characterize it as a ‘store of value’, as if value resides ‘in’ the money. Many people in the finance and fintech sector talk about payments platforms as ‘value transfer systems’, as if PayPal, Stripe and the banking sector provided pathways for the ‘store of value’ to carry its payload from point A to point B.

These liquid value metaphors are deeply misleading, and obscure the true nature of finance. Money isn’t like blood pumping through veins. It’s like nerve impulses jolting muscles into movement. To delve deeper, let’s start by looking at the ‘body’ this nervous system is embedded into.

The economy as superorganism

The average person has around 30 trillion cells in their body, but while each cell might appear as a single thing, they cannot exist separately from each other. If you remove a cell from your body, it dies. Cells, then, are an interdependent mesh that are collaborating, and you are the outcome of that collaboration. There is, as it were, an inner economy in your body, where cells collectively provision themselves, but take on separate parts of that overall process. If your cells had to discuss ‘the economy’, they’d be discussing you.

Some cells might be subsumed within organs, like your lungs and heart, which can also be seen as collaborating with each other. Picture your lungs telling your heart that before it can oxygenate the blood required by the heart’s tissues, it needs energy delivered to its tissues via a pump of the heart. This is the logic of interdependence: each organ might have its own internal processes, but you cannot expect them to survive independently of the other.

Human society is like this too. Like cells, we’re always born into a pre-existing social support network, and if we aren’t, we die. You develop an independent sense-of-self and personality as you grow up, but that doesn’t mean you can survive without others. In many ways we are the ‘cells’ of a social superorganism, and the economy is all those processes whereby we collaborate to provision for ourselves. Sometimes that collaboration doesn’t look or feel like collaboration. For example, the breakfast cereal you eat might depend on people on the other side of the world you cannot see, and yet without them there is no breakfast.

Needless to say, there have been many different styles and sizes of economic ‘superorganisms’ over time. For example, an ancient hunter-gatherer band sharing food around a fire might be visualized like this:

This is a small superorganism, but this was pretty standard for over 200,000 years. Like all groups, hunter-gatherers survived because sunlight and raindrops birthed plants from soil, which gave life to countless creatures, all arranged in ecosystems that kept them alive as they raised children, built communities and produced stuff. In those times, it was clearly understood that ‘value transfer’ meant a human being handing an actual good or labour across to another human being.

It’s only in the last 6000 or so years that money systems emerged. If I was to give a high-level potted history of money, I’d say money is a politicized system of credit that dissolved our previously small-scale systems of interdependence and recombined them into the large-scale systems of interdependence we use now (where we depend on people on the other side of the planet to give us cereal). We might visualize that shift like this.

The larger scale of a monetary economy also gives more scope for specialized clusters. Much like you can imagine cells clustering into interdependent organs that collaborate, you can imagine groups of people collaborating with other groups. For example, a small cooperative farm might actually have an internal structure that resembles an old hunter-gatherer band, but nowadays is but one sub-system of interdependence within a much larger system. The farm might rely on inputs from corporations, which are different sub-systems made up of different people.

The shifting superorganism

An ancient hunter-gatherer band operates on a different scale to a market economy, and has different power relations, but ripping a person out of either is like ripping a cell out of a body. A hunter-gatherer will find it very hard to survive solely by themselves, much like a person under modern capitalism will find it incredibly difficult to survive unless they can get provisions from everyone else.

These different structures of interdependence share a common feature: every person within them is caught in webs of inputs - those they rely on - and outputs - those who rely on them. The core difference between a hunter-gatherer economy and ours is that, in the former, the webs of inputs and outputs are small, tight, visible and relatively fixed. A person can literally see who they rely upon, and the structures of reliance stay pretty constant.

The webs of inputs and outputs in a monetary economy, by contrast, are far larger, looser, less visible and less fixed. This is because money is a system of credit that binds us together at scale, but the bonds can be fairly easily broken and recombined. Value still resides in people and the earth, but value transfer - by which I mean movements of goods or labour - is triggered by shifts in that credit. This is what gives our economy its fluid feeling. It’s somewhat like a system whereby cells (or groups of cells) can temporarily detach themselves from one part of the economic superorganism to graft in somewhere else.

That’s what’s happening when someone from our aforementioned farm decides to switch suppliers, and get fertilizer from a small family-run store rather than a big retailer. They are detaching from a previous input, and docking back in somewhere else.

In the case above, the cooperative farm is changing inputs, but their outputs can also change: for example, if one of their previous customers decides to switch to a supermarket to get potatoes. In fact, to visualize a market economy you’d have to imagine all the various parts in the image above constantly recombining into new chains of interdependence, like a superorganism that’s always rearranging its cell structure. Here’s a simplified visualization…

This system of fluid interdependence works by people, and companies of people, docking into inputs by redirecting credits. As I hand over money to my barber, I’m grafting into him, but I’m also mobilizing him into producing and outputting value. Notice that the value doesn’t reside in the money. It resides in the service my barber is giving me. If me and my barber were transported to a world without money, the potential value would still remain - there he is, standing ready to cut my hair. In our world, though, he won’t activate that value unless the monetary credit passes to him.

This is where the nerve impulse metaphor starts to kick in. When we zoom out we can view money like an interconnected system of impulses crackling through the tissues of an ever-shifting superorganism, resulting in movements and pulsations. Incidentally, this is also why market economies are so full of anxiety. To ‘dock’ into your inputs, you need money credits, but if nobody is docking into you (aka. you’re unemployed), you can be cut out of the structures of interdependence very easily, like a cell cut adrift.

Our interconnected networks are hard to see, but they spread to the furthest reaches of the planet, to the tiniest town. Often the shifts in this system are micro-movements, but there’s a particular part of our system that’s able to generate bigger jolts to mobilize bigger flexes. This is the finance sector.

Big Finance as the central nervous system

Much like our own nervous system concentrates in places like the spinal cord and brain (which has the highest level of neural density), our system of money concentrates in the world of high finance. Big Finance plays a major role in pushing money into circulation, pulling it out, redirecting it at scale, and also controlling the entire digital payments infrastructure.

This central nervous system includes the actual issuers of money - which bifurcates into central banks and commercial banks - but there’s also all the players like investment banks and hedge funds who design and trade contracts that scale up, steer, and complexify monetary movements, often via corporate structures.

Our brain has a motor cortex that translates our thoughts into action, sending impulses that make our limbs move. Similarly, financial centres like London, Tokyo, New York, Shanghai, Singapore, Frankfurt, and Dubai collectively create a transnational ‘motor cortex’ that has the capacity to induce mass action in the interconnected body of workers that form the global economy. For example, a pension fund corrals together money from thousands of individuals into a huge ‘battery’ of monetary impulses, which they can release to charge up corporations seeking financing. This is what I cover in my Lego Corporate Capitalism series. Imagine them as one of the shareholders in this image…

In my 2022 book Cloudmoney, I summarise this as follows

The true lifeblood of an economy is not money but people carrying out labour. But a heart can be made to beat through an electrical shock. Once a corporation is charged up through capitalisation, it can blast that charge out through the monetary nervous system like a defibrillator kickstarting thousands of human bodies into large-scale action. This is how ten thousand labourers can be mobilised to make and assemble the components of an oil rig, and then operate it to extract the oil which their bosses can sell to customers… As the product is sold, it sends a flash of money back up the circuit. Some of that money exits in the form of bonuses to management and tax to government, while the rest gets sent to recharge the batteries by giving investors the future money promised in their financial contracts. In this way interest payments accrue to creditors, while dividend payments accrue to shareholders.

Ok, I slightly mixed metaphors here. I’m using imagery of batteries pushing out electrical charge through a nervous system, but this ‘money as charged impulse’ approach is far more accurate than a ‘money as blood’ one.

It also helps us understand various monetary phenomena like inflation, which refers to a loss of mobilizing power in the impulses. If you were to send nerve impulses into an exhausted muscle that doesn’t have the nutrients to move, the impulses lose their power (or purchase) on the muscle. Similarly, sending money into a situation where people and resources have hit a limit doesn’t mobilise action. The impulses fall flat, a process that ends up with shifts in the price level. By contrast, a group of unemployed young people standing in front of an un-farmed field is like a muscle bursting with energy but lacking directives from nerve impulses. They can be mobilized into action, and value-creation, through the issuance of new money.

So, the true ‘store of value’ in our society is human beings, everything we’ve created, and everything we can create within ecological systems. The true scarcity is never monetary impulses. It’s these real resources that reside in our bodies and the earth.

Numbness

Big Finance might operate like a motor cortex, but the financial crisis of 2008 made it very apparent just how deranged this motor cortex can sometimes be. Hundreds of thousands of workers were mobilized into constructing real estate that would stand empty, while precarious people were pushed into debt to buy it. Their desperate promises to pay back were bundled into packages and sold to mega-funds across the world. The financial sector was orchestrating a tragic dance, turning the global economy into something akin to a veering drunk losing their motor functions.

But, even when we’re not in crisis, the general direction of travel in our economy is like a dazed drift towards a cliff. We use up our planet’s resources in a short-termist drive for expansion while inequality deepens and power centralizes. I call this newsletter Altered States of Monetary Consciousness because if money is the nervous system of the global economy, it contributes to an emergent ‘consciousness’ in our superorganism that’s often both delusional and disassociated, and a core aspect of this is numbness: an inability to register or act upon pain.

For example, when you look at something bad in our economy - such as the mass dumping of plastics into our oceans - you face a question as to where that badness emerges from. Activists might imagine that the source is the corporate sector, with its corrupt or callous executives. From another angle, however, corporations are just conduits for the financial sector. After all, most corporations are owned by large investment managers like BlackRock and Fidelity that are acting on behalf of players like pension funds and insurance funds. Those players, however, will always claim they’re acting on behalf of their beneficiaries, which may be you or me. Put simply, the financial sector claims to exploit the world on behalf of us, making us the source of the problems we revile, but none of us perceives that we have the agency to change that.

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The first thing to come to terms with is the fact that the monetary nervous system might bind us together, but it also scales everything, loosens our direct connections to the outcomes of our actions, and reduces our relationships to each other (and to our ecologies) to numerical ratios. When a monetary economy is your primary means of survival, it becomes as if you’re tied into a nervous system that’s dulled out its pain receptors and can only ‘feel’ one type of thing - profit. When we’re plugged into a systemic entity that cannot sense anything except monetary gain, it steers us in a very particular direction.

Some people claim that this state of disassociation - in which we’re guided solely by monetary incentives - leads us to utopia, while others claim it leads us to destruction. Either way, the fund managers and corporates will say they have no choice: if they don’t act towards maximizing monetary profit, they’ll be outcompeted and destroyed by the market. So, if you ever hang out in mainstream finance circles, you’ll notice that most analysts suffer from a bad case of ‘capitalist realism’. This is a term, coined by the late Mark Fisher, that refers to the state of mind in which it’s literally inconceivable to imagine any mode of action that doesn’t involve optimizing for profit and growth.

This means, when faced with the myriad problems of the planet, most mainstream analysts will never allow their minds to consider a deep level recoding of our system. Rather, they’ll default to some altered variant of their existing principles. They’ll imagine that ecological degradation can be resolved with ‘sustainable growth’, and that inequality can be solved by ‘inclusive growth’. In essence, they tacitly acknowledge that we live in a system that’s numb to anything except profit, so rather than expecting our system to feel ‘pain’ at the pollution of the oceans, a sustainable growth proponent will seek to make it pleasurably profitable for our system to create a solution. Make it profitable to protect the oceans, or to fight climate change, or to combat inequality.

To people like me, that looks a helluva lot like a shallow form of wishful thinking. It might lead us to the question of whether altering the monetary system - and it’s core institutions - might be a good vector for changing society (a question I touch on here), but a more immediate problem is that the agents of corporate capitalism are trying to centralize the monetary nervous system even further. You see, Big Finance controls the digital payments infrastructure, but this coexists alongside a peripheral nervous system that detaches from the central one. It’s called physical cash.

Cash is one component of our monetary system, and it’s locked into the same vast structures of interdependence as all money is, but its movement requires no corporate intermediation. It has a kind of peer-to-peer human ‘conductivity’ to it, with the impulse passing from hand-to-hand. In the current phase of global capitalism, cash has a relative skew towards localization and decentralization, but this clashes with the inbuilt default tendency of our system to seek out and destroy ‘friction’ in its relentless and never-ending desire to scale and burst outwards into new territories. Cash jams the corporate-underpinned drive towards large-scale automation, which is why it increasingly gets culturally demonized.

Amazon.com will not allow you to mobilize its warehouse workers, or its new supermarket workers, with coins. No, you must route the impulses through a centralized conglomeration of data centres run by the likes of Mastercard and the banking sector. When you zoom out, Big Tech and Big Finance are becoming like two hemispheres of a global mind, fusing through their natural synergies. I don’t know about you, but I sense it’s not the kind of mind we need for our global body.

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I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I became a smoker, because it was a gradual slide from voluntary once-off puffs to involuntary addiction.

It began when I was working in the financial sector during the 2008 financial crisis. Many of my fellow brokers smoked, and the drags started here and there after work as a way to connect with colleagues, and as a means to get a short-term buzz. Those single hits of nicotine accumulated and set off a shift in me, a slippage that became a landslide. My resistance to dependence eroded, then collapsed. I was in. I was addicted.

I was locked into this state of capture for eight years. I’d start the morning with a cigarette and then punctuate every point of transition in the day with one - waiting for the bus, getting out the train, getting up for a coffee break, walking to lunch, walking back from lunch, having drinks - until finally ending the day with one. I could handle a smoke-free period of about 1.5 hours, but much longer than that was a struggle. Long distance flights were tough. My longest break was two days, when I found myself stranded on a US military base without cigarettes or a shop. It was hellish. I remember escaping on the third day and running in a semi-crazed state for half an hour to get to a Californian suburb where I found salvation in a gas station that sold American Spirit tobacco. I would have eaten that out the package if I had to.

Addiction inverts our concepts of agency. We like to think there’s some external purpose to stuff we do, and that we direct ourselves towards that purpose, but when we’re addicted those (already somewhat dubious) notions don’t apply. It would be ridiculous to ask why a smoker ‘chooses’ to smoke. As I ripped open that American Spirit I wasn’t choosing anything. I was trying to escape the terrible withdrawal symptoms that were wracking my body, the result of my chemistry having being altered by cigarettes. That was animal instinct, not rational choice.

So what’s this got to with monetary systems? There’s a self-perpetuating circularity at the deep core of addiction, and this is what I think about every time I see economists talking about why we use money, and it’s supposed ‘functions’. I see them presenting a state of involuntary dependence as a state of voluntary choice. Let me explain.

The problem of solutionism

Before addiction, you’re a different person with a different body. If you have a non-addicted body there’s a voluntary element to smoking, and you might even imagine the cigarette as having some external function: I smoke to do X, Y or Z in the world. You could present it as being a ‘solution’ to some problem: boredom, social anxiety, or tiredness, for example.

As the cigarettes slowly change your body, however, you’re being rebuilt, transformed into a different person. You become a creature created by the cigarette, and once this happens smoking not only ceases to be voluntary but also ceases to have an external function. Once addicted, you’re not smoking to get something good out there in the world. You’re smoking to avoid something bad inside yourself: the breakdown of your new body, with all the tremors, sweats and anxieties that it brings. In essence, you’ve created a new form of ‘hunger’ inside yourself, and it must be satisfied. In this situation, the true function of smoking is to avoid the pain of not smoking.

So, if I was tasked with creating a narrative about why smokers smoke, it would be simple: they smoke because they’re addicted. The problem the cigarette is solving is the problem of life without cigarettes in a body that’s become dependent on them.

In many other areas of life, however, we hear elaborate stories about the external functions of things we’re dependent on, which supposedly justify why we use them. Kids going to museums, for example, might get told about the purpose of agriculture, or ‘why money was invented’, or how electricity solved X or Y problem. They’re encouraged to imagine a worse-off world before these solutions, and a better-off world after.

This belief that innovations have particular positive purposes or functions that inspire their invention (and that explain their continued use) is particularly strong in entrepreneurial culture. In Silicon Valley, for example, startup founders justify everything they do with reference to some imagined problem they’re solving. This outlook is called solutionism. Through a solutionist lens, the world is a series of problems that gradually get solved, like cracking puzzles in a video game to unlock a new level where more advanced puzzles have to worked out, until you eventually win the game.

Progress as a high score

The key to understanding solutionism is to recognize that it’s built upon the assumption of a stable and absolute base against which progress is measured. In a video game you start at Level 1 with a score of 0, and then progress upwards (or forwards), accumulating a positive score against this fixed zero-point backdrop. The characters in these games often also build up an inventory of useful things that give them ever-greater powers, which expand along with points and levels. As you get to a new level, you don’t reset or ‘rebase’ to 0. You carry over the points and move onwards towards a new high score.

This is how solutionists picture society. They imagine a proverbial ‘Level 1’ world of prehistoric people who gradually solve things through acts of discovery - fire, agriculture, writing, and so on. This sets society on a path ‘upwards’ or ‘forwards’ to new levels. History is us accumulating an inventory that expands our capacities.

Crucially, we are seen to be externally augmented but internally unchanged by this growing inventory. It only adds to our lives, and never fundamentally changes us or the requirements for our survival. The solutionist mental model rejects the idea that we ‘rebase’, and this is why it’s so flawed.

Rebasing

In our interdependent economies, the expansion of capacities is mirrored by the expansion of needs, along with the altering of skills, culture and expectations through adaptation. We’re trained to notice that the proverbial caveman has less stuff and lower technological capacity, but we fail to notice that they also need less stuff, have less dependence (i.e. they have more internal resilience) and don’t care in the slightest about our judgement of their lives.

Here’s a simple example: early societies could survive without going to a supermarket, while we can’t. If a supermarket were miraculously dropped into the inventory of our prehistoric man above, it’s true that it would give him a big ‘positive score’, but - over the span of decades and centuries - that would sink back into the background as the new baseline for survival. In modern-day society, a supermarket doesn’t earn positive points. Rather, if it were suddenly removed from our inventory, we’d go negative: we’d be dying in the streets with no means to make or find our own food. We’d be flooding out into the countryside in a desperate attempt to relearn agriculture in a week.

So, having a supermarket in our inventory simply takes us to zero on Level 1, while the cataclysmic consequences of not having it are not experienced by our ancestors. That’s because they have a different zero point. The imagined stable and absolute base against which to measure progress is an illusion.

So how does this relate to monetary systems? Well, if you look at standard economics accounts of money, they inevitably start with some solutionist story about how money was invented to solve some problem that humankind experienced, and how it continues to solve this problem for us. They also imagine that if we stopped using money, we’d lose our high score, sliding backwards down the levels towards zero. This is because solutionism imagines that we retain the gains of a solution, rather than adapting and rebasing.

Note: This piece is a supplement to my Intro to Economic Life course. Do sign up for that if you’d like to go deeper.

Dissolving solutionist accounts of money

Cigarettes turn out to be very useful in illustrating the flaws of solutionism, and in providing an alternative lens through which to view history. Smoking doesn’t ‘solve’ a preexisting problem to get me to a higher level. Rather, it just changes the conditions of my Level 1. It dissolves one state of being and replaces it with a new one in which I go negative if I’m not smoking.

This is a provocative frame for thinking about monetary systems. To escape solutionist accounts, you have to accept the possibility that money was introduced into a world where there was no intrinsic or systemic ‘demand’ for it (much like my body has no demand for cigarettes in a world where I’ve never encountered them). From this perspective, the history of money is a series of political-economic events where people who didn’t rely on money slowly took little puffs on it in limited situations - the monetary equivalent of ‘social smoking’ - or were forced into it through acts of political coercion. This sets off a shift, then a slippage that becomes a landslide. Resistance to dependence on money erodes, then collapses, locking the society in.

As any economic anthropologist knows, there are many ways that pre-capitalist societies collaborated for survival, using combinations of logics and practices that ranged from informal reciprocity, gift-exchange systems, hierarchal redistribution, patronage systems, and small-scale communism alongside forms of commercial exchange. As I discuss in my video and article on Tabu ‘shell money’ in Papua New Guinea, many pre-capitalist ‘currencies’ were not commercial in nature, and were only used in ritualistic settings to mediate social relations and power.

The capitalist money that we’re used to, however, is inherently linked to the rise of states, imperialism and colonial conquest. This is not the place to recount that history, but - in highly stylized terms - political actors introduce credit systems, forms of coinage, and tribute systems that gradually snowball into larger systems. Money acts as a dissolution agent, dissolving situations of small-scale interdependence and recombining them into large-scale interdependence. It transforms smaller discrete economies into larger integrated ones.

For the groups on the left of the picture above, money might once have had some optional element to it. For example, in my homeland of South Africa in the 1800s, Zulu, Xhosa and other groups held onto traditional subsistence systems that enabled them to live outside the colonial market economy, while occasionally dabbling in those markets. This slowly changed, however, as the colonial government forced them to pay ‘hut taxes’ that required them to work in mines to get the colonial money needed to pay the tax. This is spelled out in the 1893 report about the ‘native labour question’ by the Committee of the Mine Managers Association: “It is suggested to raise the Hut Tax to such an amount that more natives will be induced to seek work, and especially by making this tax payable in coins only”.

The word ‘induced’ is telling. It suggests a process of trying to artificially stimulate demand for something that isn’t intrinsically demanded. This is the early stage of proletarianization, the process by which people are severed from a previous means of survival and integrated into a new one - wage labour.

As monetary exchange spreads, it changes the structure of our relationships and removes us from those old scenarios where it was not necessary. It changes the ‘chemistry’ of our economic body, as it were, and rebuilds our society in a new form. We become creatures of money.

This form of rebasing is particularly intense, because money in turn becomes foundational to almost every other capacity that we have, but shallower forms of rebasing can be seen everywhere in our society. For example, in my piece Tech Doesn’t Make our Lives Easier. It Makes them Faster, I illustrated a related process with cars in Los Angeles. In the pre-car era, it would be unrealistic for a person to live 30km away from their place of work, so naturally they’d live closer. It was the car that made distant suburban living viable, and thereby catalyzed urban sprawl. Bear in mind that, once they reach a certain critical mass, capitalist systems begin to generate internal pressures to expand and accelerate, so when there’s a new chance for them to burst outwards - via cars, for example - they do. Urban sprawl is the result.

If you find yourself as a person growing up in that environment, your skills, options, expectations, sense of normality and needs are transformed by it. If you don’t have a car in a situation of urban sprawl, you’ll find yourself excluded from society, which means the ‘need’ for a car is catalysed by the car itself. Getting one doesn’t ‘increase your score’. It gets you to zero. The function of a car in LA is to enable you to not fall off the bottom of a society forged by cars.

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Presentist delusions

A creature of money, like a creature of cigarettes or cars, fears the loss of the thing they’re dependent on, and imagines a growing ‘hunger’ if it were absent. This in turn generates the idea in their head that if this thing were to be removed there would be a problem. Rather than accepting that this problem only exists in their era, they project it back in time, inventing a historical story that casts their state of dependence as a ‘high score’, and one that some imagined past player must have strived to get to through acts of invention. ‘History’ becomes the act of justifying your current state, a phenomenon known as historical presentism.

A key presentist move is to project a half-formed version of your present-day world back in time in order to then fill in the missing pieces to recreate the full version. For example, the early inventors of cars never faced the problem of urban sprawl that a person who lives in a car-dominated world does, but that person might casually fantasize about those ‘terrible old days’ when people had to trundle 30km to work in an ox-cart, failing to notice that in a world of ox-carts people lived much closer to their means of subsistence.

Fantasies like these create teleological pressure: you feel a ‘problem’ in the past, a kind of vacuum, and the car steps in to fill it. The worst versions of teleological history are those that imagine that people in past had some intent to get to where we are today, but the general feature is that the past is seen as homing in on the present, rather than possessing a logic of its own (imagine people in the future thinking that things you’re doing right now are being aimed towards them, rather than being set in your own context as you look out into a vast unknown future).

The ‘inventors’ - accidental or otherwise - of money, did not stumble on a solution to some problem that already existed. No, as we glimpsed above, they had their own logic in their own time, but it’s true that money came to catalyze a situation of us becoming dependent on huge networks of strangers in vast-scale economies. If you find yourself born into that, having access to a monetary system is not some ‘positive score’ event. It’s a basic requirement to get to zero.

18th and 19th century economists like William Stanley Jevons, however, were creatures of money and wanted to cast this in ‘positive score’ terms, so fantasized a ‘history of money’ in which it was presented as an innovation that enabled people to escape the problem of barter (see How to Write a Flintstones History of Money). The ‘problem of barter’, however, like the ‘problem of trundling 30km to work in an ox-cart’ is a modern fantasy, not an ancient reality. Fine, there are historical examples of barter occurring, just like there are historical examples of people walking long distances, but the idea that it was the norm is absurd. The world of bumbling cavemen trying to exchange mammoth tusks for necklaces is a crude stone-age replica of a modern capitalist economy built in the mind of an economist. They simply take their their own situation - dependence on large-scale networks of people who trade specialized goods with strangers - and set it in world where it didn’t exist.

These presentist histories of money are also closely associated with functional descriptions of money. Functional descriptions are dodgy for a number of reasons (see How the 'Functions of Money' blind us to the Structure of Money), but one of those reasons is that they bolster the idea that money was created to solve some pre-existing problem. It treats money as if it were a tool we’ve ‘decided’ to use.

The classic ‘functions of money’ are - reputedly - medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. These are badly-worded descriptions that conceal more than than reveal, but, regardless of their accuracy, there’s just something icky about laying out a list of reasons for why we use money, because - let’s face it - nobody ‘chooses’ to use money. We use it out of an animal instinct, because everyone knows, and feels in their body, that if they don’t use it they’ll be totally and utterly fucked. Trying to describe this inescapable infrastructure with reference to rational choice is just weird. We are created by money. Of course we’re going to use it. It’s the catalyst for what we have become.

Reverse Rebasing

I smoked my final cigarette in 2019, outside Lima airport in Peru. I was in a state of terrible heartbreak, and decided to go cold turkey at the same time. I figured I might as well combine the two forms of pain into a singular mass to get it all over with at once. This certainly pushed me into the negative for a while. If an addict suddenly stops, they go through a few months of intense anguish, but slowly the body rebases and adapts to the new situation.

Coming out of addiction, I laughed at those ‘functional’ use cases for cigarettes that I used to find all around me. Some had tinges of reality: cigarettes do give a buzz (especially to the non-addicted body), and could be a great social lubricant, especially in places where you don’t speak the language. I was travelling a lot, so that function did contribute to my lock-in. Cigarettes could even be used for safety when lost in a dodgy part of a foreign city: lighting up makes it look like you have something to do, rather than standing around looking out of place.

I’m not sanctimonious about cigarettes, and don’t judge people who smoke, but I certainly recognise that all the ‘positive score’ functions are really justifications designed to invert the loss of internal agency - the hunger - that smoking brings. Once you apply this thinking to the realm of the money, you can see it everywhere. So much of our bragging about technological and economic progress is really just fear about losing stuff we’ve become dependent on, rendered as a list of justifications, functions and teleological histories.

But let’s get real. In some hypothetical scenario where cars were suddenly ripped away from society, people might experience a chaotic few months of long-distance trundling to get to work, but eventually Los Angeles would crack and fragment into hundreds of smaller villages. Similarly, if money suddenly ceased to exist, you would certainly experience a period of dislocation and chaos (and, as Ben Mahala points out in the comments, a large amount of death), and during that time you’d find random strangers trying to barter. What would eventually happen, however, is that the large-scale economy would fragment into thousands of smaller networks with closer social ties. All those alternative systems and non-monetary interactions that economic anthropologists have observed for a very long time would be recreated and foregrounded again, like diverse weeds waiting to resurge after a long period of suppression.

Of course, it’s hard to see how this scenario would come to be. While it’s possible to abruptly exit a smoking addiction, there’s no way to go ‘cold turkey’ on money, because we’re an interdependent species, and money underpins the entire system that every one of us relies upon for life-support. There are individual people - like the ‘moneyless man’ Mark Boyle - who find ways to withdraw from the social addiction, but some collective withdrawal seems highly unlikely.

I’m not a purist. I defend physical cash precisely because, in a state of addiction, we need a diverse range of suppliers of the thing we’re addicted to. The act of Uberising payments into digital oligopolies of banks and tech firms literally places control of our ultimate object of dependence - money - into a handful of corporations. That’s not progress. That’s enclosure.

I also don’t assume that a world without money is ‘better’ than one with it, but I’m not a solutionist who imagines that a world without it is ‘worse’. I think the solutionist mentality is not only deluded, but also deeply childish. When I turn up in tech, business and innovation scenes, I constantly hear versions of that mantra: We’ve escaped from our Level 1 world through our ingenuity, and now we’re on Level 7400 with a massive score and a huge inventory, and it’s only going to get bigger.

This giant inventory they imagine piled up is heavy. So heavy in fact that it sinks downwards and becomes the new ground floor of our existence. Here’s a provocation: technological and economic progress is all about us sinking deeper into a state of capture, having an ever bigger pile that all adds up to zero. The solutionist refusal to recognise that many of our gains are illusory, and that the drive towards high scores is - in the end - kinda pointless, is a refusal to recognise the contradictory, adaptable and morphing nature of reality.

Solutionism is also boring. Whenever I turn up at a fintech conference I’ll inevitably have to watch some tedious ‘history of money’ recited by a payments company exec. They’ll tell a half-assed teleological story that starts at barter and ends with Venmo, and they’ll cast this fake linear trajectory as a heroic tale of creativity, purpose, agency and problem-solving.

The actual creativity we should be striving for is to see around things, walk sideways, and hold contradiction. We should recognise the multiple levels of entrapment that we’re in, and accept that there’s no utopia waiting at the end of progress. There’s only Level 1, and in a world rife with inauthentic solutionism, simply acknowledging this is a revolutionary act.

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It’s customary for books about money to start with a discussion about how various intellectuals can’t agree on what money is. They go on to point out the different schools of thought that have developed, creating a timeline of ideas that have taken turns battling it out in some academic gladiator ring.

This approach doesn’t resonate with me. That’s because I don’t believe the world is primarily driven by ideas. I tend to see intellectual debates as being surface-level proxy battles for a much deeper clash of emotions, politics and economic situations that subconsciously call the shots. After all, before anyone is an academic, they’re a small kid being raised in (and by) a particular environment in a particular historical epoch. This is going to make an indelible print on them, making their minds receptive towards certain ideas over others, and impacting their future attempts to understand the world. Our best academics have equal abilities to build sophisticated intellectual edifices around their emotional cores, but they fight each other’s theories because their own ones are tailor-made to calm their own nervous systems.

This is not to say that people with the same background makeup will be led mechanically to the same ideas. To the contrary, a disillusioned aristocrat might become an anarchist to rebel against her conservative father, and share intellectual space with a working-class labour organizer whose brother has fallen into the same xenophobic nationalism that appeals to her dad. Each may lay out divergent theories of the economy in the academic gladiator ring, but in fixating on their differences may fail to notice that they all hold common assumptions about money.

Under large-scale capitalism, some propositions are up for debate, but others - like the idea that money ‘stores value’ - are presented as self-apparent. That’s because the capitalist system cannot operate without money, and given that we use that system to survive, money must appear much like water appears to a fish: there but not there. All important and yet ignored. If I walk down the street and ask a hundred people what money is, chances are that 99 of them will stare at me blankly before lapsing into a vague mythological description like, ‘the thing that makes the world go around’, ‘what I use to buy stuff’, or ‘value’.

If I had to ask the same question to a pre-capitalist tribe in the 1600s, witnessing the arrival of European colonial money systems, they’d probably give me a much better account. This is because they’re outside the ‘fishbowl’, as it were, and have yet to be brainwashed by monetary logic.

To ‘brainwash’ is to flood neurons and place something beyond the realm of thinking, but our most common metaphorical models about money don’t even need to be taught. They’re simply downloaded into our brain by default as we try to make sense of the environment around us (see Money Through the Eyes of Mowgli). A little toddler first experiences money like a natural phenomenon outside the realm of politics, and even if we later develop some intellectual awareness that it is (at some distant level) political, we struggle to get enough distance to ever see around it, over it or through it.

In fact, we experience a kind of disassociation from money. Disassociation is the phenomenon where, rather than face some troubling but hard-to-convey feeling, a person just numbs it out and goes blank when asked about it. Some economists try to formalize this monetary disassociation by building apolitical pseudo-scientific models that treat money as an unremarkable ‘neutral veil’ draped over the real economy, as if it has no power to warp our perceptions and actions. If monetary logic is like an invisible mycelial network embedded in our minds, the average Econ 101 textbook has no chapter on mycology.

I’m deeply interested in those invisible structures in our minds. And, rather than trying to argue for what money is, I prefer to first map out how a person, on average, is likely to view it, given our existential experience. From there we can try build guide-ropes to use as we blindly grope with our minds towards understanding something that’s already conditioned our neural pathways. This is why I create stylized, but hopefully useful, taxonomies like the Five Dualisms of Money, and the Six Tokens. Below I’m going to synthesise and summarise those, and the pieces that led up to them, so we can be on the same page.

Five Dualisms, Two Orientations, and Tarzan vs. Mowgli

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Imagine you are an inter-stellar adventurer who crash-lands on a distant planet. You are rescued from your wrecked spacecraft by members of an alien tribe, and they give you shelter in their village. You don’t speak their language, but over time seek to earn their affection by drawing sketches illustrating your existence on Earth. Their children giggle as you sketch various aspects of your life, such as your house, and the city you live in, but you eventually arrive at money. You notice they are hunter-gatherers who have never used it, so what images will you use?

I pose this as a thought experiment when I run money workshops. I give students a sheet of paper and ask them to draw out the concept of ‘money’ for a person with no experience of it. They often converge on similar scenes. The most common is to draw someone holding fruits, with arrows pointing to another person holding notes adorned with abstract symbols. Here are some examples I’ve collected.

The second most common approach is to simply draw goods adjacent to money units, as if to hint at the idea of money being a malleable substance that can stand in for things like apples or houses. Here is a collection of examples.

When you combine these two approaches together, a general impression arises. It seems that the students are trying to hint at an economy made up of individuals who come together to trade, with one handing over goods (well, mostly fruits) in response to another that hands over money, which appears to be a special class of good that can be moulded into the likeness of the others by changing its quantity.

In my last piece – Money through the eyes of Mowgli – I explored the mental scaffolding that underpins the ‘commodity orientation to money’, and we see this orientation playing out in these images.

Altered States of Monetary Consciousness

Money through the eyes of Mowgli

‘What is money?’ is a very popular question, but over the years I have realised that people will only accept answers to it that they are ready to receive. Our minds are not blank canvases. Rather, they are a complex and uneven landing zone for ideas, contoured with decades of subconsciously accumulated assumptions and pat…

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5 years ago · 13 likes · 7 comments · Brett Scott

In the article I noted that the commodity orientation is not a literal belief that money is a commodity, but rather a tendency to approach money - regardless of its form - as if it were a commodity. This tendency goes hand-in-hand with a particular viewpoint on the economy, which I referred to as the Tarzan Suite: you visualise an economy as starting with solo individuals, who use inner reserves of energy to produce stuff that they subsequently have the option, but not requirement, to trade. With this mental backdrop in place, you will imagine barter, in which one solo person approaches another, and dangles something of value in front of them in order to override the other’s desire to hold onto the thing they’ve produced. When this mentality is superimposed over money, you begin to imagine money as a universal commodity with value, which can be exchanged for more specific things with value. This culminates in substance imagery, in which money is imagined to ‘carry value’ and to ‘flow’ (as if it were like blood pumped by individuals around an economy).

I also suggested there are two versions of this substance-of-value view: in one, money is assumed to be a literal useful substance. In another, it is assumed to be a ‘fictitious substance’, created through imagination or social agreement. Regardless of what version a person uses, this phenomenon of seeing money as a substance-of-value coexists with imagery of mutual contract – the point where two solo individuals approach each other and hand over ‘value’ to each other before backing away. Notice the mutual contract imagery in the first set of drawings above. They are framed in terms of voluntary interaction between individuals, rather than non-voluntary interdependence. The pictures are not intended to represent inescapable collective entanglement, and that’s the problem.

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Would the aliens understand?

While these images seem to make sense to the people drawing them, they almost certainly would not make sense to our hunter-gatherer aliens. Why not? For a start, they would misinterpret the nature of the relationship between the pairs of people in the imagery.

In the drawing above, for example, the pair is supposed to represent solo individuals (who do not know each other very well) meeting each other in ‘the economy’, but for a hunter-gatherer the economy is a small and tightly-woven band of interdependent people who are inextricably bound to each other. In this context, any pair of people will be assumed to be close kin, locked within multi-dimensional relationships with each other and with all others around them. They certainly would not be assumed to be strangers meeting on a market (whose relationship would cease after the trade ended). In a hunter-gatherer community there is no such thing as a pure exchange stripped of other relationships, so these drawings of individuals with arrows between them would fail to convey the idea of ‘trading’. If anything, hunter-gatherers would interpret the arrows as referring to an ongoing cycle of reciprocity that preceded the two individuals, and that never ends.

It helps to have some background in anthropology to notice these kind of nuances. In my Anthropologist in an Economist World (a piece dedicated to the late David Graeber), I noted that I come from an anthropology background, and that economic anthropology has a lot of disagreements with mainstream economics. Primary among these disagreements is that anthropologists typically do not assume that trade is the default mode of economic interaction between people, whereas economists often do. This is because anthropologists historically have spent a lot of time among groups that are not completely absorbed into capitalist markets, and who maintain pre-capitalist ways of being (this includes hunter-gatherer groups, horticultural and pastoral tribes, and groups with feudal and caste structures).

It is easy, however, to make the mistake of believing that ‘pre-capitalist’ means cooperative, and that anthropologists spend their time romantically showcasing the harmonious cooperation of hunter-gatherer societies as a contrast to the capitalist competition that economics focuses on. The true distinction between economic anthropology and economics is far more subtle than that. The anthropological record is full of examples of competitive power plays between tribal people, but this competition is seen as being set within the bounds of inescapable interdependence. No Big Man in any tribal society is operating under the delusion that they can exist apart from the rest. The pre-capitalist mentality is one in which everyone is far more aware that they are social animals dependent upon others, and it is only within that field that they can then begin to wrestle with how to reconcile their individual drives with their communal reality.

Economics, by contrast, starts by downplaying the communal reality, and by imagining that the starting point of society is individuals making rational choices. Economists do not deny that cooperation exists, but they do present it as being a kind of ‘choice’ made by free-floating individuals, who could also choose to compete (the field of game theory, for example, is predicated on this idea that group cooperation is founded upon a substrate of individual choice). The key thing that distinguishes economics then, is not that it focuses on competition (indeed, the boundary between cooperation and competition in markets is actually quite thin, because any exchange is technically an act of cooperation, even when it has competitive elements). What really distinguishes economic thinking is that it operates under the assumption of separation between people, which is why it then romantically fixates upon things like mutual contract, which is that moment when the separation between individuals is imagined to be briefly bridged.

This fixation upon temporary bridges between solo people drives our standard accounts of monetary history. In my How to Write a Flintstones History of Money, for example, I showed how the economics discipline projects this assumption back in time in order to generate the mythology of barter as the origin of money. Ironically, what economists end up doing is taking a mentality that was peripheral in ancient society and imagining that it was central. Anthropologists do not argue that barter-like transactions never happened in ancient societies, but they do recognise that it mostly occurs on the outskirts of such social groups, where social ties get weaker.

For example, internal to indigenous Nepalese tribal groups there is little trade, but externally they have some forms of stylised exchange with other groups. They may leave honey on the edge of the forest, and wait to see if distant villagers will leave something in exchange for it, but these limited cases of peripheral barter were not the central driving force of pre-capitalist economies. It’s only when you are immersed in a society in which market transactions are central - which really only occurred in the last couple hundred years - that you may generate presentist fantasies about an ancient world in which a cruder version of that reality existed, and where everyone was wandering around like Tarzans bartering with each other.

The moral of the story, though, is that if you present an image of two people facing each other to hunter-gatherer aliens, they will not assume that a temporary act of trade is occuring. Their default assumption will be that the people have a permanent bridge between themselves, held in place by elaborate systems of reciprocal gift-giving that take place over time, and which entangle them in social ties. The idea that the people are free from social ties, and that they require each other to dangle a commodity in front of each other to induce the formation of a temporary barter-like bridge, would be… well… alien to our aliens.

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The substance-of-value fetish

But let’s for a moment imagine that you succeed in convincing the aliens that two individuals from two different bands have met on the boundaries between their territories, and are now trying to engage in a barter-like interaction. Even if our aliens grasp this idea, what will they make of the fact that one person is handing over goods while the other appears to hand over some small symbolic object? Living as hunter-gatherers they would understand the value of pieces of fruit, by why give up the fruit for an abstract rectangle? Is it a holy artwork, or a magical talisman?

In many of the pictures shown the money does actually appear like a magical talisman. All kids grow up seeing mummy and daddy hand over money at a store while goods come back the other direction. At a surface level there is in something quasi-magical about that, and kids will sketch monetary exchange in much the same way that adults do – as if it were somehow contained in a little bi-directional bubble, in which a magical object seems to equate to, and command, goods.

One of the most complex points to convey about this is that modern large-scale monetary systems generate this commodity mythology. This is because – regardless of what the true nature of our money actually is – our monetary systems catalyse large-scale economic networks, which get so big that we lose sight of all the people who we are dependent upon. From this point we can begin to indulge in the fantasy that we are separate from them, which leads to us imagining that exchange is the process by which solo individuals build temporary value-bridges between each other. From this vantage point, it will begin to superficially appear like the money in your hand has some kind of one-for-one relationship to goods that come back over the bridge when you hand it over. You begin to say things like ‘people hand over goods of value, because the money has value’.

This creates cognitive dissonance, because the money clearly isn’t a commodity, which is why many people have to resort to fictitious substance explanations, where they try argue that the ‘value’ money carries is created through our imagination, or through social agreement.

This will appear bizarre to our aliens, because they will have a very strong understanding of what value actually is. Hunter-gatherers survive by using their labour to get things from the land. Without land, labouring will do nothing. Without labour, nothing on the land will accrue to them. Furthermore, labour is not individual - each person who labours cannot exist apart from the others. For hunter-gatherers then, economic value is synonymous with other people and the environment. If you had to tell them that actually this value has somehow been transported into little pieces of paper (in an act of imagination), and can now be passed around by moving those, they would tell you that you are crazy. This is why those images of abstract units equating to fruits would fail to have any meaning.

For a hunter-gatherer, being able to access future value from the land and people is dependent upon all the ties of reciprocity that weave them together, which – in a sense – operate like a distributed ‘bank’ of future claims upon everyone else. They know that their survival resides in having a continual link to other people, rather than in trying to grab objects produced by other people and then backing away. Put differently, hunter-gatherer societies have far lower levels of alienation and commodity fetishism, the Marxist term referring to the quasi-mystical belief that somehow objects in an economy exist apart from those that create them.

In many ways, the commodity orientation to money is a special case of commodity fetishism, in which the value that resides in other people and the earth is imagined to magically reside in money. This obscures the location of value in an economy, because you imagine that it is has somehow been ‘captured’ in money, which ‘flows’ around the economy like a vast ‘value transfer’ system transporting a fictitious substance around. This is the same belief that goes hand-in-hand with the delusion that we have some form of solo autonomy, and that we only make temporary bilateral relationships with others, rather than being permanently locked into an interdependent network.

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How to start illustrating money for the aliens

Having laid out this critique, let’s mine it for possible clues about how we might actually illustrate money for the aliens. Warning: the content below gets a pretty mind-bending, and it probably needs more editing and clarifying, but I’ll be producing simpler versions in due course!

Consider this sentence that I wrote above:

For a hunter-gatherer, being able to access future value from the land and people is dependent upon all the ties of reciprocity that weave them together, which – in a sense – operate like a distributed ‘bank’ of future claims upon everyone else.

To illustrate money to the aliens, we will have to work with what they already know. One of the keys will be in showing them that the relationships of reciprocity that exist internally to their community would - under a monetary system - be displaced by far more distant ties to a far bigger interdependent network. We would need to show them that monetary systems alter the nature of interdependence: money is the thing that transforms your small-scale interdependence into large-scale interdependence.

The problem, as I’ve already alluded to, is that large-scale interdependence generates the illusion of independence. People are nodes in the same vast network, but are not conscious of the connections, so operate under the illusion of separation, which generates the mutual contract imagery we need to escape from. To do that we will need some form of interconnected network imagery.

But we face a contradiction. Any single person in a modern economy will not last more than a couple weeks without getting things from other people (all the stuff you get in a supermarket comes from distant people), so in principle should understand that they are totally dependent on others. And yet, when they approach another person in an economy they experience each other as separated, and independent of each other. The individual-to-individual experience does not map onto the individual-to-group reality.

This returns me to a key point from my Money through the eyes of Mowgli article. A commodity viewpoint is one in which you imagine that you have an inner ‘battery’ of energy that you use to generate commodities that you then exchange, and which in turn can be used to recharge your inner battery. The alternative (and far more accurate) mentality is to recognise that you have an external battery of energy in the form of other people that you are permanently connected to, and that you must draw upon them before you can get the energy to form part of a battery for others.

In reality, these two perspectives co-exist. Our inner energy forms part of someone else’s external energy, and likewise, someone else’s inner energy forms part of our external energy. But while hunter-gatherers can literally see that others form their external energy, we often fail to see this. And, while hunter-gatherers tie themselves to that battery through elaborate reciprocal gift systems, we rely upon monetary units that superficially resemble commodities. Much like reciprocal ties represent a claim upon future value in a small-scale network, money units act as claims upon the future value immanent in a large-scale network.

To start drawing this, we would need a few elements. Firstly we need an image of a person with a permanent umbilical connection to a much larger network. Secondly, we need some way of showing that only a small and shifting sub-set of that network will act as their external battery at any particular point (unlike hunter-gatherers, the people who we are dependent upon fluctuate from day-to-day). The actual value that flows from these people, through this umbilical connection, will be real goods and services, but monetary systems will unblock or activate that flow. Key to generating this image will be to picture the interdependent network creating a type of internal ‘gravity’ that transcends each individual member, because every member has a requirement to maintain a permanent and non-optional bridge to others, with each person’s external ‘battery’ being made up of others who themselves are dependent upon accessing an external battery.

Ok, I know that sounds heavy, but it could help to picture this in an actual commercial scenario. Imagine yourself in a small shop. We are used to perceiving the act of handing over money as a temporary barter-like act, but cast your mind beyond this. Rather than seeing a monetary transaction as being the exchange of one thing of value for another, it is far more illuminating to picture a money unit as working with the overall internal gravity of a vast interdependent network, to create something like a suction that opens up the unbilical connection between you and one part of your external battery (this person facing you in the shop), and pulls value through. Try picture that the next time you hand over money.

This is turn opens up the meta-question of what kind of unit is best suited for this ‘unblocking’. This is where the imagery can get even more trippy, and where it can intersect with chartalist theories about the role of the state. Much like our external power source consists of other people, the external power source (or battery, if you will) for a state is all the people within its boundaries. The state wires itself to that external power source via money issuance: the units we use for money nowadays are state IOUs (alongside bank IOUs that are built on top of that), issued out by state institutions to get real resources, and anchored by a universal obligation, common across all people, to return the units via taxation systems. Given that everyone forms part of the state’s external power source, the unit designed to connect us to it is perhaps the strongest unit to mediate the multiplicity of smaller-scale connections between ourselves.

There is also a strong argument for state money systems having created this situation of large-scale interdependence between ourselves. In my Subscriber series, I often talk about the horizontal vs. vertical planes of money, which is a way of talking about how powerful ‘vertical’ money issuers can catalyse ‘horizontal’ interdependent networks of ordinary people. This leads to a vision of monetary systems as having an internal gravity within the horizontal interdependent network that can be catalysed, manipulated or altered by the vertical issuers. This all gets very interesting when we start to apply this style of thinking to monetary policy. You can begin to see concepts like inflation and deflation as alterations to the internal gravity, and you can begin to glimpse how money issuance can unlock latent potential in an interdependent network, wanting to get out.

It seems likely that we might need more than one picture to illustrate this to alien hunter-gatherers. I’ll work on those. Perhaps, however, it is best to not show these beyond the boundaries of earth, lest we open the Pandora’s Box of money on a planet free from it.

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Dear Subscribers, what follows below is a BIG piece - 5000 words long - that builds on my Five Dualisms of Money essay. In the Five Dualisms video I showed a whole range of ‘Positive Objects’, but in common parlance those are often just called tokens. My I, Token essay zoomed in on the use of that term in Bitcoin circles, but in this piece I want to del…

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‘What is money?’ is a very popular question, but over the years I’ve realised that people will only accept answers to it that they’re ready to receive. Our minds are not blank canvases. Rather, they are a complex and uneven landing zone for ideas, contoured with decades of subconsciously accumulated assumptions and patterns. This can cause an incoming description of money - or anything else for that matter - to crash-land, or only partially make contact. This is why it’s useful to explore – and prepare – this ‘landing zone’.

As an alternative metaphor, consider those ‘drivers’ you need to install on a computer before some device will work: without the correct printer driver, your computer will not understand the messages being sent to it from a printer. Similarly, for our brains to accept certain statements, we need certain underlying ‘drivers’. A statement like ‘Australia is eight hours ahead of South Africa’ appears simple, but only because you already carry a particular suite of ideas about the earth being spherical. To a person carrying the flat earth suite the statement will appear mysterious, or just meaningless.

Similarly, many statements I make about money seem mysterious to people, precisely because they do not carry the same ‘drivers’ as me. The drivers I am running are a very unorthodox package called the Mowgli Suite. Those of us who use this package find that many conventional statements about money sound empty or circular, because conventional ideas about money run on the far more dominant Tarzan Suite. The Tarzan Suite is a mental model that lies behind almost all public language about money, and it has a huge (detrimental) effect on our understanding of economic systems. What distinguishes the two suites is their starting points. Let me sketch those out.

Mowgli as young Tarzan

Mowgli is the hero of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (if you don’t know the story you can find a great 2016 film version of it). Mowgli is sometimes called a ‘feral child’ – a term normally reserved for abandoned kids who grow up alone without language – but Mowgli is not a true feral child, because he is cared for by non-human creatures, including Raksha the wolf, Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther. They may not be human, but they teach him language and skills, and form his social network, without whom he would not have survived.

As a baby, Mowgli was taken in by a community of wolves and other creatures. So, the starting point of the Mowgli Suite is this: before any human is an independent being, they are a helpless baby and small child reliant on others to learn the language, skills and beliefs that enable them to navigate the world. Furthermore, all those who keep a baby alive were once babies themselves, so there’s no ‘original’ self-reliant individual. There are only people kept alive by social networks, which always precede individuals.

However, if Mowgli survives into adulthood, he may become a character like Tarzan, able to exist (quasi)independently in the wild. This position – of being a solo adult – is the starting point of the Tarzan Suite, and it fascinated 17th and 18th century political philosophers.

For example, in Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 treatise Leviathan, he presents a thought-experiment in which individual adults choose to leave a primordial ‘state of nature’ to form a society to protect their individual interests. To picture this, imagine a whole series of solo Tarzans (having somehow survived until adulthood) converging on a jungle clearing to declare a contractual peace – a social contract – and thereby ‘create a society’ under which their private pursuits can flourish.

Tarzan is actually just an older version of Mowgli – he was raised by apes, and, like Mowgli, would never have lived long enough to even get to that jungle clearing without their protection. But this is why the starting point makes a huge difference. For Enlightenment thinkers, it was appealing to start from the perspective of fully grown adults, because it enabled them to present society as being preceded by individual rational choice: from this perspective you can begin to claim that people have individual reasons to ‘create society’ or enter into market exchange, for example.

This model lives on prominently in modern economics. An economics text book never begins with children being cared for by mothers. Rather, it begins with fully-grown Tarzans swinging into forest clearings to contract and exchange with others. This starting image is then used as an explanation for why certain social forms will subsequently emerge.

Economics textbooks showcase these Tarzans bouncing around markets like independent atoms, but Mogwli is the overshadowed backstory. This is why he’s the underdog star of economic anthropology, feminist economics and left-anarchist philosophy, which take as their starting point the interdependent community rather than the autonomous individual.

The differences in these orientations can be showcased visually: Imagine the network image below as representing a group of people doing things for each other. The Tarzan Suite will analyse this as ‘a network built by the nodes’, but the Mowgli Suite will interpret each node as being built by the network. These orientations have real implications for monetary thought, so let’s delve deeper.

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The Modern Tarzan

The Tarzan Suite begins with a focus on individuals, and by doing so implicitly places them as a forerunner that leads to society (and, by extension, markets). To run the Tarzan Suite, however, does not mean you literally believe that adults spring from the earth fully-formed. It just means that you begin your analysis from the perspective of someone who is already fully formed. Importantly, though, this someone is fully formed in the context of a modern capitalist nation.

Indeed, the Tarzan Suite is what you would expect someone in such a setting to have absorbed through osmosis by interaction with the society around them. To return to our ‘driver’ metaphor, imagine the Tarzan Suite being automatically downloaded into you as you move about a large-scale capitalist nation state.

The most intuitive way to understand this is to leave your house, walk down the street and observe the random strangers that pass you by. If you find that experience normal, and believe the strangers are not connected to you, then you are probably running some of the basic components of the Tarzan Suite. This experience – of strangers drifting past you – was not normal for most of human history: for most of human history people lived in tight clans and kinship groups, and in such societies there was no such thing as ‘randomly passing a stranger on the street’. As Mowgli knows, in a true ‘state of nature’ survival would require being part of a closely-knit band.

This experience of strangers passing you is very modern. Indeed, it’s a core component of the sociological concept of modernity, in which old tribal ties have been replaced with huge institutional infrastructures run by states and companies. Rather than trying to understand this intellectually, however, you can see it showcased in The Verve’s classic music video for Bittersweet Symphony. In it, a man – disassociated from the people around him – shoulder-barges his way down a street.

The video (and its lyrics) is an almost perfect representation of the existential experience of pushing your way through the fluid networks of a large-scale capitalist society. This man wouldn’t have been able to do this in tribal Amazonia, or in a medieval village, or in a Viking settlement, or in a nomadic hunter-gatherer band. His ability to barge past people as if they don’t even exist is a phenomenon forged in the context of nation states, which have huge institutional infrastructures that make the organic ties between us fade into the background. Indeed, he is under the protection of a state as he walks, which is why he is so confident that he can break through the small-scale groups of people with their little ties of solidarity (which he does about eight times in the video). As long as he does not overtly breach the overall peace, he has zero obligation to those who pass him by.

Put simply, it’s only in the context of mega-states that you can begin to imagine yourself as a free-floating atom – or individual – bumping around and off random strangers, who you may choose to meet or ignore. Many people are unaware of this, because they have never experienced anything different, but human communities have existed for over 200,000 years, and it’s only in the last 6000 years that states have formed, and only in the last few hundred that large-scale formal nation states have formed. The latter dissolve older social ties and atomise us into a much looser collective called ‘the public’, which is the sea of strangers who you are vaguely connected to but do not know.

Crucially, it is in this context that all the foundational theorists of modern Economics emerged, which is why that discipline proceeds as if the world is driven by the market choices of floating individuals. Many basic statements that economists find obvious (such as ‘the economy consists of markets driven by individuals’), would appear meaningless to a person 10,000 years ago, but to a stranger-amongst-strangers in a modern nation state this might seem ‘close enough’.

This is where the Tarzan Suite emerges: when focusing upon the vast market networks that lie before them, a person can forget about their background kin networks who raised them, and with this orientation can imagine themselves as being an individual preceding a network. With this outlook, they can then believe theories that present human groups as being collections of individuals coming together out of individual economic rationality.

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The Tarzan Suite: Primitive Edition

The Tarzan Suite is forged in modern societies, but it pretends to be ancient. If you artificially project it back in time (using presentist history, in which the conditions of the present are used as a model for the past), it generates a mental image of a prehistoric wilderness man, an ‘individual’ wandering around using their wits to survive. To see this person, you need only look at all the ‘primitive survival expert’ channels on YouTube, which all revolve around solo men going about creating shelters, fire and tools in the wilderness.

This is curious, because actual primitive life was focused on intensely communal groups, and ‘primitive survival skills’ were acquired by little kids growing up in these tightly knit settings. This can easily be seen in photos of Amazonian tribes.

Notice that the latter are not solo adventurers, but the image of the solo wilderness man is a myth that leaps out of the modern imagination when you take the Tarzan Suite and project it back in time. It’s telling that the fetish for individual wilderness survival and ‘prepping’ is popular with US-based libertarians, because North American libertarianism is a highly amplified and ideologically-charged version of the basic principles that underlie the Tarzan Suite. Libertarian-orientated survivalists will produce thousands of videos about self-sufficiency – with how-to guides for sharpening your knife or improving your crossbow skills – but almost no videos about the complex kinship structures of ancient pastoralists.

Don’t get me wrong. It can be fun to try solo survival skills, but the image of the solo primitive individual is of ideological importance within the Tarzan Suite. This is because it provides a building block for a more complex image: that of a society formed when these solo people are imagined to come together to live in proximity to each other.

Living apart together, and the ‘make something first’ assumption

The Tarzan Suite runs on a ‘living apart together’ image, in which individuals retain self-sufficiency even when they live together. To picture someone producing something in a ‘self-sufficient’ manner, you have to start with an image of them as an adult, possessing a self-contained ‘battery’ of inner strength which they can then use to make things (this is in contrast to say, a small child, who first needs things from others before they have the strength to create anything themselves). This image of people producing things from some inner energy store leads to the ‘make something first’ assumption: in the Tarzan Suite, the first phase of an economy is assumed to be a collection of energetic autonomous individuals making things.

The optional trade assumption

Once the ‘living apart together’ and ‘make something first’ models are up and running, you can then imagine the people trying to use the things they have made to induce others around them to trade. The Tarzan Suite always assumes that trade is optional, because, if Tarzan wishes to retreat into the jungle again to become a wilderness man, he can (this principle is often overt in libertarian thought, where individuals are claimed to have a kind of self-sovereignty that cannot be assailed, as if they had a backup option to exist apart from others if necessary).

So, interaction with others is conceived of not as a mandatory means to survive, but as an optional action undertaken by rational adults, who see that they may secure advantage by convincing others to give them things for mutual benefit. This translates into a more complex vision of an economy as a vast collection of autonomous individuals trying to convince each other to trade by dangling pre-produced commodities in front of each other (but with a lingering background option to peel off from society if necessary).

Notice that there’s no notion of an interdependent network, where all the people are permanently tied together. Rather, there are solo individuals trying to make temporary contracts out of an aspirational desire to gain advantage. This in turn sets the stage for one of the deepest components of the Tarzan Suite – the barter assumption.

The barter assumption

So what happens when you set up an image of solo people trying to induce optional trade with each other? You imagine barter. You imagine people holding things they have already produced, and then trying to get other people to hand over things they have already produced. Many classical economists took turns to invent their own versions of this myth, but Adam Smith and William Stanley Jevons are perhaps the most well-known examples. Jevons, for example, said:

The earliest form of exchange must have consisted in giving what was not wanted directly for that which was wanted. This simple traffic we call barter.

Jevons then used this to imagine a problem called the ‘double-coincidence of wants’. Two autonomous people holding things they have already produced must find it difficult to exchange these things with each other, unless both wants what the other has: one Tarzan has produced cheese, but the other has produced cloth, but what if the one Tarzan desires the other’s cheese, but cannot get the other to desire his cloth?

This is turn sets up all the classical models for the origins of money. It’s imagined that these autonomous individuals are bumping around awkwardly trying to induce each other into trading, and that this creates a need for a type of intermediary commodity (or ‘universal commodity’) that can fill in the gaps created by the double-coincidence of wants. So - the story goes - in order to go about trading, everyone must seek out some widely accepted commodity that they are sure everyone will always take, and this then becomes ‘money’.

Money as value, and the commodity orientation to money

This crude theory leads to something I call the commodity orientation to money. This is where money is imagined to be some kind of object that ‘carries value’, or ‘is value’ (those are linguistically quite different, but are often collapsed into one). The Tarzan Suite requires this orientation, because – in the model – money is supposed to be used by one autonomous individual to convince or induce another autonomous individual to give them something. It’s figured that – given people have the option to be self-sufficient – they can only get things from each other by appealing to desire: they have to use one thing of value to override the other person’s desire to hold onto some other thing of value.

The value-for-value assumption, and the ‘unstable atom’ model

A core element of the commodity orientation to money, then, is the belief that monetary exchanges are ‘value for value’. One person hands over something of value to get something else of value from someone else. All economic interactions are seen as ‘value flows’ and there is no deep distinction made between money and goods: money is seen as being just a special kind of generalised good used to induce someone to release a more specific good. It’s imagined to create a temporary bridge, where two autonomous people briefly come together to ‘exchange value’, after which they retreat from each other and burn the bridge as they go. You might picture this as two atoms that form a very temporary unstable bond, before breaking again into their stable individual forms.

The fictitious commodity

At this point it is important to reiterate that the Tarzan Suite is not necessarily literally believed. It’s an abstract background model. The commodity orientation to money that accompanies it, likewise, is not a literal belief that money is a commodity like oil. It’s a mental orientation that tries to understand money – in whatever form it appears – as if it were a commodity. Thus, when faced with modern fiat money, a person running the Tarzan Suite has to invent an explanation for why it must be some kind of fictitious (or imaginary) commodity.

This is where all those ideas of money being a ‘social agreement’ come from: when someone says something like ‘money is just a collective belief’, they are (normally) using a commodity orientation to make sense of money that is not a commodity. They are claiming that we use our imagination to create a fictitious substance of value, that – in accordance with the Tarzan Suite’s value-for-value assumption – will induce someone to form a temporary bridge with you to give you something.

The fictitious commodity ‘flowing’ like a substance

There are actually many variants of the accounts given for why money ‘carries value’ (for example, many libertarians will use a coercion-based account, in which they imagine that a state forces you to imbue the money with value) but, regardless of the version used, all characterise monetary exchange as ‘value for value’. This is why you will often see payments systems being called ‘value transfer systems’: people are using a commodity orientation, and imagining that the units of money being transferred are like a substance that is ‘flowing’ through the wires of the payment system.

When faced with giving an explanation for what this ‘substance’ is, they have to revert to those fictitious commodity ideas, saying things like ‘we have all just collectively imbued it with value’, or whatever. This language is common in mainstream finance, for example, but also in a lot of new-wave crypto-currency circles, where innovators imagine that the payments systems they are trying to build will form a new ‘internet of value’.

The economy-of-things, and the ‘nobody is forcing you’ assumption

When you put all the various elements of the Tarzan Suite together, they focus your attention on the act of handing over things for things, that unstable moment when two (supposedly) autonomous individuals meet, before retreating back to their baseline individual form. As a result, the Tarzan Suite generally avoids thinking about the economy as an interdependent network of permanently connected people facing constraints created by the others they are dependent upon.

There are ideological implications to this, because it can be used to present people as having the option, but not requirement, to interact, which in turn is crucial for denying that labour exploitation exists: a desperate person who accepts a tiny wage to secure a job is just ‘entering into mutually beneficial contract’, rather than being exploited by someone in a position of power in an interdependent network. Lurking in the background is the solo wilderness man assumption: nobody is ‘forcing you’ to live in society, and if worse comes to worse you can simply break away and live off the land, like Tarzan.

This is of course a fantasy, because almost nobody truly has that option. More than this, regardless of era, humans have always been forced to be dependent on others by default, simply because they cannot survive without others (indeed, you cannot even be born unless two other beings precede you, and you certainly cannot speak unless you are immersed amongst others as a child). This takes us to the Mowgli Suite.

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The Mowgli Suite

You may be able to predict the components of the Mowgli Suite by contrast to the Tarzan Suite. It starts by assuming that people are always dependent upon a network that precedes them, and that everyone is born into that situation. This means human society is always made up of interdependent networks, within which no individual being is truly autonomous. If you project this back in time, you do not end up with a solo wilderness man. Rather you end up with something that looks much closer to the anthropological record of pre-capitalist societies: bands and clans with kinship ties and reciprocity, and so on.

The ‘get something first’ assumption

The Mowgli Suite immediately throws out the ‘make something first’ assumption. Rather, it assumes that all people come into the world is a position of dependence upon others, and that you do not start with some internal ‘battery’ of power that enables you to build things. Rather, your ‘battery’ is other people who will give you things to keep you alive. In his starting position, Mowgli does not get things from Raksha by ‘exchanging’ something he has produced: rather, Raksha and the others simply give things to Mowgli.

The mandatory interaction assumption

The Mowgli Suite locates all value in people (or wolves like Raksha) within the network. What we refer to as ‘value’ in an economic context is the efforts of other people, which manifest in the form of goods and services. More than this, given that the networks are interdependent, there is a requirement to engage with these people. There is no optionality to interaction, and there is no mythical zone to retreat into if you do not like the terms of the interaction.

Everyone relies on credit, all the time

When you assume that people are always in a position of dependence by default, it means everyone is always relying upon others to give them things, and often without those others immediately getting something back (which is a form of ‘credit’). For example, Baloo keeps Mowgli alive without getting anything back, and in so doing informally racks up a form of existential ‘credit’, which Mowgli will acknowledge in later life by slowly returning things in the other direction (albeit in a very informal and unmeasured way).

But Baloo himself was given things, and is caught within these same elaborate webs of obligation. A core feature of economic anthropology, feminist economics, and ecological economics is that they acknowledge that at this most basic level of society there are immense and unmeasured reciprocal flows between interdependent people (and ecologies). This is the substrate into which later monetary systems have to embed themselves.

The credit orientation to money

The credit orientation to money emerges from this. It is a way of seeing money – in whatever form it appears – as being modelled upon those same principles that underlie the processes of interdependent reciprocity described above. A more specific intuition found within the credit orientation, is that people or institutions – starting from a position of dependence – can get things from a ‘battery’ of other people they are connected to, by issuing promises to return things later. This immediately runs counter to the ‘value for value’ assumption in the Tarzan Suite’s commodity orientation. In the credit orientation it is assumed that monetary exchange has value going one way – in the form of actual labour from someone in the ‘battery’ – and a promise or credit for future value going the other way. It is ‘value for credit-for-value’.

The permanent connection, and ‘shifting molecule’ model

Crucially, the ‘battery’ of people who you rely upon are constantly and permanently connected to you. This does not mean you constantly interact with every single person in that battery, but it does mean that everyone experiences a permanent requirement – on average – to fire up latent connections to the battery, even if the people who make it up appear to you as strangers. Indeed, in a modern capitalist economy a large part of your ‘battery’ will be made up by strangers, and it may be impossible to tell which particular connections will be made, but they have to be made. There is no optionality.

Remember that the Tarzan Suite pictures people as independent atoms who make temporary unstable bonds with each other, after which they return to their stable individual state. The Mowgli Suite, by contrast, characterises our stable state as ‘molecular’: every atom has to constantly be part of a molecule. In a modern capitalist economy that molecule might morph around you as you move from one part of the economic network to another, but there is no option for you to ever be an independent atom. Indeed, if do find yourself temporarily as an independent atom – like an unemployed person with no money does – you will experience an immense existential dread, and an immensely strong magnetic pull to return to a molecular form (especially in the absence being able to live off the land).

Small-scale vs. large-scale latent connections

This concept of constant latent connections to a ‘battery’ of others is found at a small-scale within Mowgli’s world. On one day Baloo is helping him, and on another Bagheera is calling on Mowgli’s assistance. They do not have any monetary system that is inserted within this, but a core feature of a credit orientation to money is that you begin to view monetary systems as mimicking those processes of interdependent reciprocity at a large-scale.

Notice that this is not an account of any particular monetary system – it is a mental orientation to use when approaching any monetary system, even those that appear – on first glance – to not be based on credit.

A credit orientation often leads to the realisation that large-scale interdependence cannot exist without monetary systems, and that monetary systems have thus led to large-scale interdependence (or co-evolved with it). This is very different to the barter theories that come out of the commodity mindset: in the latter, it is imagined that a big network of people producing specialised goods exists before money, and that their subsequent awkward attempts to exchange those specialised goods creates a frustration that brings money to life as a ‘solution’. A credit orientation, by contrast, is far more likely to make you think that specialisation is induced by monetary systems (aka. before monetary systems people do not specialise very much, which means they do not end up in the ‘barter’ position to begin with).

The takeaway point, though, is that while small-scale interdependence is a basic fact of human life throughout all ages, the situation of large-scale interdependence is inextricable from monetary systems, which scale up interdependence. In this context, money units do not have to be seen as packages of ‘value’ that one solo individual uses to convince another solo individual to give them something, because – on average – there is no such thing as a solo individual with an option to not trade.

Applying the credit orientation to commodity money

Note that this is different to saying that money cannot be a commodity. What it is saying is that even if money takes the form of a commodity, it will be subject to principles that transcend commodities. Put differently, it is possible that an interdependent network of people could use a commodity form as a host for a money unit, but the commodity is not being used to create a ‘temporary bridge’ between two autonomous individuals. It is being used to fire up latent connections between de facto interdependent people, a commodity form running on credit rails, as it were.

How large-scale credit money creates the commodity mindset

A key irony is that large-scale modern monetary systems are de facto built out of vast credit circuits created by banks and states, but the huge interdependent networks of people that form around them become so distant from each other that they may begin to indulge in the fantasy that they are autonomous individuals, which is – ta da! - the core feature of the Tarzan Suite. This in turn will generate that idea of money as a ‘commodity’ with ‘value’.

This returns us to Bittersweet Symphony: many people shoulder-barging their way down city streets run a casual mental model in which they imagine the money in their wallet ‘carries value’ (and that they can use this to hustle for things from those random strangers that pass them), rather than the value residing in the very people who they are pushing past. It is only when you ignore this fantasy of autonomy, however, that you will see that it is everyone who you are pushing past that is creating much of the pull that will lock-in monetary systems like a vacuum.

Upgrading your drivers

It is important to reiterate that the Mowgli Suite, and the credit orientation to money that accompanies it, is not an attack on the possibility that commodity-like things could be used as money. Rather, its core feature is the recognition of constant interdependence, and you can use this to make interesting arguments for how examples of commodity money might actually work. Consider for example, the Bitcoin community, with its (pseudo)commodity-like unit: to make such a unit work as money (rather than remaining in its current form as a counter-tradeable collectible), that community would do well to upgrade to the Mowgli Suite. It offers a much more adaptable, flexible and realistic set of ideas than the ones found in the Tarzan Suite.

Indeed, once you start to run the Mowgli Suite as a default, you will discover that much conventional language around money – such as ‘money stores value’ – starts to sound childish. In running it, you will start to see through economies, almost like you have X-ray glasses. Where one person will see atomic individuals bumping off others on a street, you will see a dense hidden network, all around you, constantly.

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And this…

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We do not, however, live in a world of nuance. The vast majority of the public are still presented with a blunt version of the default Economics position on money, which requires a somewhat blunt counter-narrative to act as a counterweight. We’re slowly colouring in a darker and more mottled Yin to contrast the clean story of the bright economic Yang.

To illustrate this, let’s sum up the dominant ‘functions of money’ story. Economists often assert that people have:

1. A need to trade, which in turn requires…

2. A tool, that…

3. Functions as a ‘medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account’ to fulfil the aforementioned need

This is supposed to then account for both the origin and continued existence of money. At first glance this seems straightforward - even reasonable - but economics textbooks only go on to describe 1 and 3. They begin on the first by asserting that people naturally trade, an activity that brings with it certain difficulties (see my Flintstones piece for more on this setup). They then provide a list of functions that will supposedly resolve the difficulties, which in turn is supposed to imply what the tool is: 2 is simply anything that fulfils 3, which is required for 1.

If you train yourself, you will begin to realise that this standard presentation of money conceals a shadow side in that it deliberately diminishes 2. The setup leads you to see money as a kind of ‘tool’ - small and under your control - that you pick up to fulfil your needs. It draws the mind away from the idea that the so-called ‘tool’ may in fact be vast and out of your control, and not really a tool at all. Furthermore, it draws attention away from the possibility that such a vast 2 may in fact precede 1 and 3. It thus implicitly denies that structures can induce (or catalyse) needs and functions.

It takes a while to slowly see this, much like it takes a while to see your own shadow sides. But if left unacknowledged, it leads to all manner of delusions, manias and neuroses, some of which later turn up - perversely - in attempts to describe the shadow side (this latter condition is what you see when, for example, conspiracy theorists rant about how Rothschild-led Illuminati control the US Federal Reserve from dark boardrooms). To delve deeper into this, and to push the rebalancing counternarrative forward, let’s detour into the realm of Platonic Forms.

The superficial appeal of ideal forms

Whenever someone quotes the ‘functions of money’ at me, they appear to be reciting a kind of deflective mantra designed to avoid acknowledging the shadow side. It is somewhat like approaching a man and asking him what it’s like to be a man, and then listening to him reel off a series of ideal characteristics of an abstract Man (“a Man is a person who fends for his Family, fights for Freedom, and who acknowledges God as his only judge”), rather than describing who he really is (like ‘I am a tormented being who feels shattered on some days, strong on others, and constantly bound into a contradictory web of impossible ideals’). Similarly, by saying that money is something that emulates certain ideal functions, a person is refusing to speak about what they actually hold, and its contradictions.

To me, this creates a vibe similar to that of Plato’s Theory of Forms. Plato posited that there is an immaterial realm of ideals, or essences, that things in the real world strive towards mimicking. Imagine it as a perfect parallel world that everything in the imperfect actual world tries to associate itself to. It’s not just a blueprint - it’s imagined as a literal realm where pure essences live, and from where they can lead by example.

This might sound kind of spacey, but it’s extremely common to find this in language. For example, when someone says ‘I believe in Freedom’, they are speaking as if Freedom was a stand-alone essence floating in the universe. There is in fact no pure form of freedom without some kind of messy trade-off, but the world of Platonic Forms gives us an abstract language of uncontradictory ideals. Furthermore, it culminates in a ‘form of forms’, or an essence of essences, the ideal that all the other ideals are attempting to emulate. This is… voila, the concept of a monotheistic God, a singular perfect uncontradictory meta-entity that everything else references itself to.

Let’s extend this detour a little. We’ll get back to money soon.

This world-view was co-opted by medieval Christianity, providing a vision of God as a kind of invisible structure holding the universe together, and giving people a direction to emulate. Notice some features of this situation. The people cannot see this structure, and yet they believe it has some definite - if unknowable - form. They pray vertically upwards towards the invisible meta-entity, and attempt to give it a human face whilst struggling to look it in the eye.

But what if you were actually just mumbling to people horizontally around you as you said your prayers? This was the fear struck into the hearts of Christians when science began to provide competing accounts of the universe. If you stop looking upwards, and rather look around you, you face the existential void of an implosion of belief. This is the spectre of nihilism.

Monetary nihilism

Nihilism is first experienced as a type of quaking feeling, in which something that was once solid and meaningful threatens to melt into nothingness. It can either be embraced or fought off, but it’s original use is in this Christian context: upon glimpsing the possibility that the solid external structure of God may just be a flimsy story held internal to human culture, a type of moral panic emerges. We must hold onto belief!

Strangely enough, this ‘quaking’ feeling is lurking under the surface of much monetary thought. It partly emerges from the fact that people experience a monetary system in much the same way as they experience a ‘God’. Firstly, they cannot see its structure (a major theme of this newsletter more generally), but feel internal resistance in trying to pinpoint it, preferring to name an oblique and abstract set of surrounding ideals (the ‘functions of money’ paradigm). Perhaps they fear the existential dread that may emerge if they seek out its structural core, or its shadow. Let’s go deeper into this.

One of the most peculiar features of monetary thought is a type of ‘harking back’ to some imagined time when money was solid, and in which it - apparently - had some uncontroversial, and even ‘godlike’, value (the normal ideal exemplar for this is cited to be gold). The typical move is to then assert that there was some kind of fall, in which this solid structure evaporated into ‘mere belief’ in fiat currency. In conspiracy formulations this sometimes comes packaged with the idea that corrupt rulers have forced people into believing in their deceitful meaningless money, creating a Ponzi waiting to collapse. Versions of this pervade into the mainstream, where it takes on a Wizard of Oz form - the idea that ordinary mortals stand behind what is supposed to be a godlike force.

This leads to the very common idea that money is ‘mere numbers’ or ‘just paper’, which has to be ‘held up by belief’. When gazing upon a bridge, we may not understand the exact engineering that goes into keeping it up, but we can see the solid structure and would never suggest that it is ‘held up by belief’. Money, though, is often thought of as being akin to an invisible bridge which will collapse and dump you into a canyon below the moment you lose faith in it.

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The ‘leap of faith’ as a reaction

It turns out that this has a parallel in our story of Christianity and nihilism. A medieval farmer didn’t exactly have a wide range of competing theories for why the moon appeared in the sky, but if better structural theories emerge - such as scientific theories - the church is forced to compete more heavily on faith. This was articulated in more advanced terms by the Swedish Christian existentialist Soren Kiekegaard, whose work led to the popular concept of the ‘leap of faith’, a type of stepping into something despite having no good reason to.

Much modern language around money assumes that something like this is going on. Money is apparently ‘mere numbers’, but we all step into it and thereby make it real, almost like a bridge that constructs itself as we step out into the void.

It makes me think of the ‘leap of faith’ scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade…

I love this scene because it has a great twist. The bridge, which at first appears to be based on faith is actually revealed to be a pre-existing solid structure, but one that is camouflaged in a way that renders it near invisible. Indiana is held up by a real bridge that’s only invisible when viewed from a specific vantage point.

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From ‘Leap of Faith’ to Interdependent Network Structure

This situation in which something may be invisible from a specific vantage point, but visible from a wider vantage point, is a problem of partial vision. It is particularly acute in large-scale systems, where a small-scale individual struggles to see the Big Picture, and so may instead focus upon small parts of the big picture, which themselves may seem very flimsy. In the case of monetary systems, the ‘small parts of the big picture’ are the visible tokens and numbers, which people have a way of obsessing and fretting about.

The overall monetary structure may not be solid in quite the same way as Indiana’s bridge, but it is certainly not ‘gaseous’ or ephemeral. The best way to start to get a more subtle view on it, is to visualize a type of strong but flexible web held in play within a large-scale human community. There are different fields that take different approaches to articulating this - for example, the modern science of networks points to the fact that networks may seem invisible, and yet are very real structures. Sociology turns to institutional theory.

The sociological concept of ‘institutions’ is confusing, because in common parlance 'institution' tends to mean 'organisation’. In sociology, however, the term has a much broader meaning, which I’d crudely summarise as ‘something that structures our world and is resistant to change’. A good example of the sociological concept of an institution is the English language. It technically 'resides in our heads', but it is not experienced like that by those who use it. Rather it experienced as an ‘external’ system. A Chinese-speaking person in an English-speaking country will literally feel something akin to a silent forcefield that is rejecting them. Likewise, if an English-speaking person in China shouts out 'language is just a human invention that resides in our heads', it will fall on deaf ears. It seems as if they are trying to imply that it is therefore somehow 'ephemeral' and subject to change and collapse, when in reality language is flexible yet extremely entrenched and resilient, and is so deeply ingrained in people that it is far stronger than steel.

This is why the phrase ‘money is just a human invention that resides in our heads’ is complex. A person who says it may be trying to imply that it is an ephemeral belief prone to collapse, but that may be because they’re thinking of the individual conception of the term ‘belief’, rather than the collective one. In its individual version, belief refers to a personal view (‘It is my belief that X’), but in its collective version the term starts to refer to a kind of thought-form that transcends and dominates over an individual. In occult lore, this idea of a thought-form is a called an egregore, a type of ‘entity’ that is brought to life by a group of people. Anthropology deals with this in a more formal way in its studies of how groups of people generate cultural forcefields that transcend the individuals, and which each individual thus simultaneously experiences as both external to them, and internal to them.

All of these concepts are useful to getting an intuition for systems that transcend individuals, but to go even further you need to be able to see individuals as being constituents of a broader ‘super-organism’ that they cannot be separated from.

Classical liberal philosophy has a habit of considering people as if they were atoms that can exist independently, but consider a mother with a newborn baby. There are technically two individuals, but for the baby the most vital thing is the relationship between them - a literal lifeline exists between them. If the mother shuts down the lifeline, the child dies. This relationship is not ephemeral from the perspective of a child. It is a very real ‘thing’ with very real power. Given that all humans come into the world this way, and all of us have a survival instinct, those connections have the ability to form a mesh stronger and yet more flexible than any metal.

To understand how these networks are held together, we need to extend this concept of lifelines. Most adults do not think of themselves as children, but ask yourself this question: how long would you survive on your production alone? By this I mean on what you literally produce. The answer is not long. An engineer cannot eat the engineering plans they design. The only way they survive is if someone else is making the food while they draft their sketches, and that person making food relies on others who are making bricks for homes (who may in turn be relying upon engineering sketches). The webs of interdependence in our economies are extremely complex, but the result is that each person ends up in the position not that different to our newborn: we have very limited capacity to survive alone, and must rely upon a collective ‘lifeline’ provided by others.

Modern economics has an atrocious tendency to present markets as being mere collections of individuals, but markets are first and foremost collective networks - a super-organism if you will - that individuals experience as being simultaneously internal and external to themselves, and thereby always consisting of two parties: You and Everyone Else.

You might be able to choose which specific individuals amongst ‘Everyone Else’ you will interact with, but regardless of those specifics you will always in general be totally dependent on Everyone Else. Everyone Else, though, is not necessarily dependent on you, which is the core fear at the heart of any market-based economic network. You cannot survive without the collective, but the collective can probably survive without you.

Being able to see this interdependence is a prerequisite before a monetary structure can be glimpsed, but it only gets us part of the way. It still doesn’t really describe much about money itself. Even if someone knows that money facilitates, or is immanent within, some kind of web of interdependence, they are still left thinking that if everyone just simultaneously stopped believing in it, money units would be rendered useless, like pressing ‘off’ on some electro-magnetic field. One thing I’d immediately say is that getting collective consensus to simultanously do that would be extremely hard, but there is a more fundamental point to get through first, which is that monetary systems are only partly a collective endeavour. There are actual organisations that engineer whole sections of the system.

Look both around, and up

Earlier I described the angst of person who is used to looking vertically upwards and praying to a meta-entity in the sky, but who suddenly experiences the lurching doubt that maybe everyone else praying upwards around them is just a deluded horizontal network. The key to breaking past such angst in monetary systems is to realise the structure is simultaneously vertical and horizontal. In this piece I’ve been looking mostly at the horizontal component. That’s the view from the interdependent network, where you see money as the thing that gives you access to others. But there is an entirely different dimension to money that has a far more vertical orientation, which co-evolves with the horizontal. This may sounds abstract right now, but we shall build on this in the next episode. We shall soon dismantle the idea of money units being ‘mere numbers’. See you next time!

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While I’m inspired by various traditions of economic thought, I believe that most people feel deeply alienated by the cliquey language of economic debates. That’s why my ASOMC (Altered States of Monetary Consciousness) newsletter avoids using traditional economic language. I find it much more fulfilling to help people see and feel systems, so that they …

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The problem of functions without structures

Let me use a thought-experiment to illustrate what happens when functions and structures get mixed up. Imagine a box with something inside it. Your friend says ‘it’s a chair’…

Upon hearing this, your brain conjures a structural image of a chair, and that image comes along with an intuitive notion of its functions. The structural image might vary from person to person, but it’s probably going to consist of a solid horizontal square surface set upon sturdy vertical legs with a vertical backrest. The functional definitions might be ‘thing for sitting on’, and ‘thing for standing on to reach high shelf’.

Imagine, however, your friend opens the box and reveals a different structure to the one you were expecting…

Rather than a solid construction, he reveals a bouncy, soft, spherical structure made of plastic and filled with air. This is the structural image that normally goes along with the word ‘exercise ball’ (sometimes called Yoga ball, or Pilates ball), and this ball is normally used for doing ab exercises and Pilates, but it’s also a favourite for kids to bounce on whilst playing. Some people also sit on them occasionally.

A bit later you’re slouching on an actual chair in the lounge while your friend sits on his ball ‘chair’. You point to a high shelf and say…

What’s going on here? Well, almost all of our definitions for useful objects are a composite of both the structural and functional, and it’s only through viewing both simultaneously that we make sense of a word. Nevertheless, objects with entirely different structures can share a narrow zone of functional overlap. If you ignore their structures, and focus solely upon their narrow common function, whilst also ignoring all those functions they do not share, you can briefly assert that they are ‘the same thing’.

This is how the man above originally managed to call a ball ‘a chair’, but it allows his friend to get revenge by calling upon a different function normally associated with a chair, but not associated with a ball.

Most people only do this ‘function-to-multiple-structure’ blending when joking (for example, a woman sits on her lover and says, ‘what a sexy chair I have’), but if you insist on doing it seriously it causes language to degrade. If I confined the definition of ‘chair’ to the single functional description of ‘thing you can sit on’ then the term would have to be applied to thousands - even millions - of objects. I can sit on the hood of my car, the roof of my house, a rock on top of a mountain, a guitar amplifier, and even a slackline. The entire earth becomes ‘a chair’.

By giving all of these things the same noun, their separate structures and diverse capacities are invisibilised. If this happened, the term ‘chair’ would also generate no structural image in your head. Rather, you’d just see vague blank space.

The implication is this: if you can only describe something’s function without being able to describe its structure, you’re in a realm of vagueness where meaning can collapse.

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How money’s structure is invisibilized by its ‘functions’

So here’s a test to run. Ask a friend what structural image they see when they hear the noun ‘money’. Their task is to draw the structure of money, which precedes the imagined functions of money. Ask them to draw it in this box…

I predict that, nine times out of ten, the image the person will imagine consists mostly of monetary artefacts like cash tokens, numbers in bank accounts, numbers on apps, or other numbered objects, whether digital or physical. One way to check the dominant structural image of money is to type the term into a Google image search. Here it is…

Do you see a ‘structure’ here? No. What we are seeing here is best described as one part of the surface layer of a much larger structure. It’s true that there are physical money tokens that appear before us in the world, but they only work because they’re integrated into a huge system that activates them.

Showing images of cash tokens is like showing a ghostly sketch of 5% of a structure (or perhaps like decorating the border of the white rectangle where the image of money was supposed to be drawn). It’s at best a partial surface appearance, but this is where many people’s image of the ‘structure of money’ stops.

What happens if I then ask them how this imagined structure works? Well, given that their structural image consists of flimsy objects with numbers, they’re going to face an existential dilemma when trying to reconcile that with the de facto power they experience money having on a daily basis. It’s easy to see how a chair holds you up by looking at its full structure, but not very easy to see how money holds an economy up by looking at a fragment of it structure.

Here’s a very good example showing someone having this exact existential dilemma. It went viral on TikTok, and it’s worth watching because it shows them struggling to make sense of surface-level objects that make little sense unless seen within a much bigger structure. Given that they are not able to find an explanation for the power of the objects in the objects themselves, they come to the conclusion that somehow we must have ‘made up’ their power, as if money tokens were like Peter Pans held up through the power of imagination.

This idea of money being some kind of imaginary system residing in our heads - rather than being a dense network structure that literally engulfs us - is extremely common, and is found across the political spectrum. Much like I might imagine all manner of mysterious things swimming below the surface of a dark lake, the blank space where the structure of money should be is easy to fill up with emotional tumult, vagueness, and scrambled statements. It’s a world in which some people glimpse distant central banks shrouded in mist, whilst others assert that ‘money isn’t real’, and that it is ‘based on belief’.

Remember that functions without clear structures are a sure-fire way to generate a feeling of mysticism, and this abounds when it comes to money, so why is it that we struggle to see the structure? The first reason is obvious: it’s a very large structure, and its sheer size renders it invisible to a small-scale human being. We are immersed in it to the point where we cannot get enough distance from it to see it.

There is, however, a second reason, related to the first. Where does a person who is struggling to see the structure of money turn to for help? Where do people go to learn about money? Many people believe that to learn about money they should pick up an economics textbook. I often hear people saying, ‘I don’t really understand money, I’m not an economist’, as if being an economist would open their eyes to the monetary web around us. Picking up an economics textbook, however, is probably the worst thing they can do, because using standard economics for monetary understanding is like using novocaine to reach enlightenment: it might help dull the pain of reality, but leave you numb to it in the process.

Why do I say this? Well, standard economics textbooks specialise in drawing our attention away from the structure of money, by focusing it instead upon vague ‘functions of money’, to the point where many people seem to believe that the latter is the former. For example, when asked for a definition of money, it’s common for those who have studied at universities to quote the economics mantra of ‘money is a store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account’, as if these were structural descriptions of the monetary system.

But they’re not. Those are secondary properties that emerge from a primary structure, and the fixation upon them acts like a form of blindness. They’re not even very good descriptions of the secondary properties either, and some - like ‘store of value’ - are actually partly metaphoric rather than real. Economics doesn’t help us to see money. It helps us to ignore it.

When writing this piece, I went through two economics textbooks on my bookshelf to confirm this. Both followed the very common practice of describing money indirectly through a tick-box exercise: rather than saying “here is the structure of money. It does A, B, and C”, they say “anything that does A, B and C is money”. It’s a way of eluding to the structure without ever naming it, a bit like describing a chair as ‘anything that enables you to sit on it, and also to stand on it’.

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Filling in the hollow image of money

Give that mainstream economics offers at best a vague and evasive explanatory framework for money, people are either left to work out the structure through everyday experience, or they are left to search for it in places like YouTube, where various critics will offer explanations for ‘how money really works’.

Unfortunately, many of these supposed non-conformists are just as blinded by functional definitions as economists are, but, having partially glimpsed some of the more obvious parts of the structure (like central banks), they then fuse a straw man version of the latter with the former. This creates conspiratorial statements, like ‘central banks have conned us into believing in money which isn’t real!’

This is just a variation on the aforementioned ‘money is just belief’ idea, which emerges if you only look at the surface of the structure of money. The conspiracy variation just asserts that the source of the belief emerges from some act of deceit by a powerful party, rather than by some social consensus, but both versions are united in presenting money as being held up through some kind of mental trickery, rather than by an actual structure.

This doesn’t leave the public in a very good position. The chief contenders to fill in the blank space where the structure of money should be are economists with no structural images, and conspiracy theorists with straw man images. You get to pick from mainstream denialism or non-mainstream crankery.

This gives us a clear mission though.

1. Firstly, we must start to draw the structure, so that every time the word ‘money’ is uttered, a clear and full structural image appears. In this newsletter I have already begun that process, but we have a long way to go before the full structure reveals itself

2. Secondly, we need not agree exactly on what the structure looks like, but we do need to agree that it should be foregrounded. This will be a major step forward from the current status quo, which simply refuses to foreground it

3. Thirdly, we must be able to make a clear distinction between the individual experience of money - the everyday feeling of using money tokens at a street level - and the hidden structure which transcends that. Much like we experience the sun as a thing that ‘rises’ rather than something that stays fixed while the earth turns, there is a phenomenological realm of money which can differ from the reality of its structure, and - sometimes - the vague functional definitions can get by in this realm. When it comes to the politics of money, however, it is a downright deadly to stay in that realm

It is also damaging to stay in that realm when attempting to design alternative money systems. There are many pseudo-challengers to the current monetary regime, many of which exploit the vagueness of functional definitions of money to get away with presenting themselves as solutions. More on this to come.

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The most recent DFMM videos have been conceptual, because we’re building a framework to apply to any particular instance of a money system. Today’s video (or article, if you’d prefer to read it below) will consolidate the components we’ve covered so far, and introduce a new component which will add a whole new dimension to our thinking, literally. The v…

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In the last DFMM video (One-Sided Versus Two-Sided Money) we looked at the difference between the 'one-sided' commodity imagination of money, and the 'two-sided' credit imagination of money. In the credit imagination, every positive unit in the system has a negative shadow somewhere else in the system. Most people in society are not trained to see this …

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In this DFMM, I’d like to lay down the foundations of two age-old orientations to money: a commodity orientation versus a credit orientation. I say ‘orientation’, because they colour the entire way a person will subsequently approach money, and how they will react to forms of money that do not seem to fit into the assumptions that underlie their monetar…

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To do presentism, you must imagine our current values, beliefs and economic system set within an ancient world. The Flintstones does this by presenting capitalism as existing in the pre-historic era: Fred Flintstone starts the video ‘at work’ - as if he were an employed labourer - then jumps into a ‘car’, as if he were driving home from work, arrives in a ‘suburban neighborhood’ occupied by families consisting of married couples with kids, and then visits various ‘market’ attractions, like a stone cinema and prehistoric diner.

These are all present-day phenomena set on a stage decked out to look like ‘the past’. Presentism is the ‘present-expressed-in-the-past’, and this inevitably means showing the present in a half-formed way, because the stage it is set upon doesn’t have all the materials to fully capture it (because… well… it’s supposed to be in the past, which is supposed to have less stuff). So what ends up being shown is our present constrained by a lack of means to express itself.

This in turn creates a feeling of an unexpressed potential bursting to escape towards the present. Ancient people are imagined to be trying to invent things that will cause their society to unfold towards where we are today. So, the Flintstone family is there earnestly creating cars with stone wheels because they’re trying to reach towards our modern world.

If you’ve studied ancient Greek philosophy, you might notice echoes of Aristotelian teleology in this. Teleology is when you describe things as having an end purpose - or final expression - set out by some cosmic order, which then acts as an explanation for why those things develop, or do what they do. There are multiple versions of teleology, because - much like you can alter the destination of a homing pigeon - the end destination of the teleology can be changed. If you set the final goal to be ‘our modern society’, you get teleological history, in which everything in the past is seen as homing in on, or striving towards, our present.

Presentist history and teleological thinking are allies. You start in the present, then project it back in half-formed fashion into the past (presentist history), and then imagine that past trying to strive forward to get to the fully-formed present (teleological history).

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The 7 steps to building a presentist teleology

I’m going to demonstrate what it looks like when you apply a presentist teleology to money, but I first want to show what it looks like in other situations, because we often casually use it in our thinking about the emergence of things more generally. Let’s create a presentist teleology about cars. I’m going to make it deliberately extreme to illustrate the process.

Step 1: Map your present-day situation

Here is Los Angeles, a sprawling metropolis where cars are king. In fact, if you don’t have a car here, it’s pretty damn hard to get around.

Imagine a person in the city who travels by car. Here’s a journey between their house and their place of work. It takes 46 minutes to travel the 35 miles by car.

So what we have is the following four components…

Step 2: Eliminate the thing you wish to be ‘invented’…

To write a presentist, teleological ‘history of cars’ we must first eliminate cars from this present. Let’s imagine cars (and all related forms of transport, like buses etc.) just disappear overnight, evaporating away.

Step 3: But retain the basic features of the rest of the picture

This is crucial. Having eliminated one feature of the present, you need to keep imagining key elements of the rest of the picture as remaining unchanged. So, keep imagining that the person still lives and works in the same place.

Step 4: Call this altered version of the present, ‘the past’

The core presentist move is to cast that altered present as a half-formed past (or ‘present-expressed-in-the-past’). In this case, a past with no cars, but still with features we associate with our present. So, you might tell a story that begins like this:

“Once upon a time there were no cars, but people lived very far away from their place of work…”

Step 5: Note how annoying this ‘past’ is

Given that you’ve created a half-formed present-in-the-past, you must now note how annoying and inconvenient it is. So you continue your story, quoting the person saying:

“Oh dear, I seem to be living 35 miles from my place of work. It takes me 11 hours to walk there. It’s so tiring!”

Step 6: Reintroduce the removed element as an ‘invention’ whose ‘function’ is to relieve the annoyance

The basic move now is to reintroduce the missing element of the present-expressed-in-the-past as an invention intended to solve a problem (that we’d experience today if we removed cars). So you say something like:

“Cars were invented so that people didn’t have to walk 22 hours each day back and forth from work. They make everything much quicker.”

Note that the imagined invention is framed in ‘function’ terms. The invention emerges because there’s imagined to be a blockage or unexpressed potential in the past that needed to be unblocked. The reason given for the invention (which doubles as the function attributed to it) is to solve that, and keep solving that. If anyone questions the car, you can shout:

“If we didn’t have the car we’d have to walk so far. That why it was invented and that’s why it’s progress. Do you want to live in the dark ages of walking 22 hours each day?!”

Step 7: Make sure you never ask the obvious question

Some of you might have noticed the problem here. The imagined ‘function’ of the thing is - in fact - to serve the situation it has catalysed, a situation that actually never existed before the thing emerged. In this case, it is the situation of urban sprawl - in which people live 35 miles from their place of work - which did not exist before cars. Urban sprawl was, in fact, catalysed by the presence of cars.

This means, if you wish to keep believing in presentist history, it is crucial to never ask questions like “could it be that we just lived much closer to our place of work before we had cars?” Or, to put it in Flintstone terms:

“Why is Fred trying to drive to a cinema in a stone car, given that he actually comes from a small-scale, nomadic, hunter-gatherer society where his closest cinema is probably a fire that is no more than five metres away from him?”

Historical processes manifest in our present, but cannot be understood from the standpoint of our present. In the case of cars, they are introduced and then subsequently induce changes to our society, expectations, mental state and sense of normality. Sitting on the outskirts of Los Angeles, we might be able to look backwards into time, but only with minds that are calibrated according to present conditions that did not exist in the world behind us. This is why you cannot use the standpoint of the present as a justification framework for why the past happened, and this is why good historians have to train themselves to escape presentist biases.

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Now let’s do this with money

I made the car example above deliberately far-fetched to hammer home the point, but let’s see what happens when we apply that same 7-step formula to write a presentist teleology of money. You might notice something disturbing as I do this (spoiler alert: it results in the standard account of the history of money presented in economics textbooks!).

Step 1: Map your present-day situation

Walk into the street. What do you see? You see strangers (people who do not know each other) exchanging specialised goods and services for money. There are four components to that picture…

(We can also visualize this by using my more elaborate pictures of the monetary system that I’ve been using in my previous newsletters, such as those found in my piece ‘money in orbit’. Let’s use this one showing the digital money system operating between dispersed strangers on the ground.)

Step 2: Eliminate the thing you wish to be invented…

So, we’re trying to write a presentist, teleological ‘history of money’, so that means we must - in this case - eliminate money from the present. Let’s imagine the monetary system just disappeared overnight.

Step 3: But retain the basic features of the rest of the picture

So, having eliminated one feature of the present, we need to keep on imagining key elements of the rest of the picture as remaining unchanged. So, we’re going to keep imagining that, in the absence of money, the world nevertheless still consists of networks of strangers attempting to exchange specialised goods and services.

Step 4: Call this altered version of the present, ‘the past’

Again, the core presentist move is to cast this altered present as a half-formed ‘past’ (or ‘present-expressed-in-the-past’). In this case, a past with no monetary system, but still with features we associate with our present. So, you might tell a story that begins like this:

‘Once upon a time there was no money, but there were all these strangers with specialised goods and services to offer who were wondering around trying to exchange them. In the absence of money they had to akwardly exchange these directly, which is barter’.

Step 5: Note how annoying that situation is

Given that you’ve created a half-formed present-in-the-past, you must now note how annoying and inconvenient it is.

“This was very very difficult because of the ‘double-coincidence of wants’. If Bernoldus had hand-carved wheels but Alisandra had turtle-shell necklaces, they had to both want what the other wanted before they could trade. This was so complicated!”

Step 6: Reintroduce the removed element as an ‘invention’, whose ‘function’ is to relieve the annoyance

The basic move now is to reintroduce the missing element of the present-expressed-in-the-past as an invention intended to solve a problem (that we’d experience today if we removed money). So you say something like:

“We invented money so that we didn’t have to barter all the time. Money solves the ‘double-coincidence of wants’ and thereby makes specialised exchange between strangers so much more efficient!”

Again, the imagined invention is framed in ‘function’ terms. It supposedly emerges because there is some imagined blockage or unexpressed potential in the past that needs to be unblocked. Ancient people feel this pressure to invent money for us, because of the strain of existing in the half-formed state relative to our present. The reason given for money’s invention (which doubles as the function attributed to it) is to solve that situation, and to continue solving it. If anyone questions money, you can shout:

“If we didn’t use money we’d have to inefficiently barter all the time. That why money was invented and that’s why it’s progress. Do you want to live in the dark ages of having to exchange your brass cookware for herbal remedies?!”

Step 7: Make sure you never ask the obvious question

Again, the astute historian will note the same problem that occurs with my car example. The imagined ‘function’ of money is - in fact - to serve the situation it has catalysed, a situation that actually never existed before money emerged. What is this situation? Well, the situation of large networks of strangers attempting to exchange specialised goods and services, which does not naturally occur without the presence of money (much like living 35 miles from work does not naturally occur without having cars).

If you - like me - come from an economic anthropology background, you’ll know that many pre-capitalist societies are actually characterised by kinship groups that consist of networks of close associates (not strangers), and that they have low levels of specialisation, and that they used many alternative modes of distribution beyond overt measured exchange (including reciprocity, patronage systems, gift systems and self-sufficient subsistence). The historical move away from this, and towards economies of strangers exchanging specialist skills is a situation catalysed by the presence of money, rather than a situation that precedes money.

That latter idea of exchange mentalities preceding money is used in the presentist imagination to pull money into being, and this means, if you wish to keep believing in presentist history, it is crucial to never ask questions like “could it be the case that exchange between strangers was not the primary economic model before the rise of monetary systems?” Or, to put it in Flintstone terms:

“Why is Fred trying to barter his stone car for cinema tickets, given that he actually comes from a small-scale, nomadic, hunter-gatherer society where there isn’t even a concept of private property?”

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How to escape the Flintstones world

Once you see the structure of presentist history, it begins to seem absurd. Surely no self-respecting academic discipline would actually use it? Um… well mainstream Economics has long relied on a crude presentist model of the origin of money. They see it as emerging from barter in an attempt to solve the ‘double-coincidence of wants’. Adam Smith uses it, but another classic example comes from William Stanley Jevons - considered to be a founding father of mathematical economics - who wrote:

The earliest form of exchange must have consisted in giving what was not wanted directly for that which was wanted. This simple traffic we call barter… but to allow of an act of barter, there must be a double coincidence, which will rarely happen. A hunter having returned from a successful chase has plenty of game, and may want arms and ammunition to renew the chase. But those who have arms may happen to be well supplied with game, so that no direct exchange is possible.

He then uses this to explain the emergence of money, which is a pure example of a shoddy, presentist, teleological Flintstones history of money, and one that is still widely used.

To escape this is a big task. It’s a topic I touched on in my tribute to David Graeber (The Anthropologist in an Economist World), and it’s a theme I will be returning to repeatedly in this newsletter. Some initial tips, though, are:

1. We must never assume that any mentality we currently take for granted was a reality in the past. We may be used to trading in markets, but it is a grave presentist sin to assume that the trading impulse was a dominant impulse among ancient people.

2. We must never assume there was a single trajectory towards the present, or that things were overtly ‘invented’, or that their modern ‘function’ was intended, or that they were introduced with our present society in mind.

There is a whole history to how money came to be, and it is intimately connected to the projection of political power, but that’s a story for another time. For now the most important point to note is that it’s introduction catalysed changes that subsequently require its continued presence. It has come to necessitate itself, rather than being necessitated by some prior need.

We have no idea of how our current actions will manifest in a future experienced by others. Similarly, people in the past were not consciously seeking to serve us. This is why we should be suspicious of accounts that project the mentalities of modern capitalism backwards in time, and then use it to explain the origins of the foundations of capitalist systems, such as money. The real Flintstones do not resemble the caricatures of the TV series, which tells kids - wrongfully - that modern economic systems originate naturally from inherent drives within prehistoric society.

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Image credit: Rachel Megawhat

In this edition of ASOMOCO, I wish to pay tribute to the beautiful and brave voice of that most incredible anthropological oddball, David Graeber, who recently and tragically died. David for a long time was an inspiration to me, and was - in the last year - becoming a friend. One thing we shared was the difficulty of being an anthropologist in a world dominated by economists, so this is a topic I’d like to briefly touch on.

What’s different about economic anthropology?

David was an anthropologist who wrote about economies, and this was the first reason why I resonated with his work. People sometimes think I come from an economics background - because I write about finance and money - but I actually have a degree in anthropology, a discipline that often has an antagonistic relationship to economics.

Different people give different reasons for why this antagonism exists, but this is how I describe it.

Anthropology starts from the recognition that a person - in the first instance at least - cannot exist apart from a group. Put differently, anthropology assumes that a human network always precedes its individual members, and that care and reproduction precede any form of solo heroics. Human babies don’t survive long if they are left to fend for themselves, and - even if they miraculously survived without others - they would not be able to speak language, which would make all future social interaction, relationships and trade near-impossible (see, for example, feral children).

As children grow up into adults and gain in confidence, it’s true that they become aware of their marginal differences and might entertain the idea of being autonomous ‘individuals’, but for much of early human history this could never be a primary orientation. The idea that you could just walk off on your own out into the horizon was not realistic for most people, and there was no independent ‘self’ that existed out in the wilderness without close connection to a band, clan, or tribe.

Anthropologists, thus, were among the first to realise that this term - ‘individual’ - which is used extensively in our modern world, is not so much a description of reality as it is an ideological concept that emerges from within certain groups, under certain conditions, in certain times and places. More specifically, it’s a concept that flourishes in the presence of vast nation state systems that remove the need for close kinship.

Within large-scale nation states you indeed can leave your place of origin and walk around as a total stranger among other strangers, whilst all being held together under a common meta-rule system (with legal systems, monetary systems and abstract national ideologies and flags to give some loose sense of connection to these strangers). The heretical thought that emerges amongst many anthropologists is that perhaps the modern individual is a product of states. This is also why modern anthropology has connections into left-leaning anarchism: anthropologists were amongst the first to sense that capitalism is catalysed by states, rather than existing in antagonism to states.

This orientation places many anthropologists into opposition to many standard economists (I say ‘standard’, because obviously there is diversity and nuance among different economists from different branches). Standard economics grew up in the context of modern states, and focused its attention on the populations of those states. Thus, while anthropologists were shocked out of their comfort zones by immersing themselves in clan-based societies like Papua New Guinea, economists were so immersed in modern states that those states blended into the background, so omnipresent that they were near-invisible.

And, once you forget about the state, you simply see the social results of its presence. You see strangers, disassociated from each other, floating about, trading. It’s in this context that you begin to imagine that the world is one of autonomous free-floating individuals. You might even come to loosely believe that individuals precede human networks. This is because - within a state setting - they sort-of sometimes do: precarious workers from all over a country float into association with a group of managers who have raised money from scattered investors, all operating under a common state infrastructure, and voila, a corporation exists.

An economics textbook often begins with supply and demand curves, representing the terms upon which fully grown adult individuals will walk into markets to contract with each other. This mentality behind this model is often then implicitly expanded and used to describe all social relations as stemming from the rational utility calculations of individuals, and this is where it all gets circular.

It’s tendency to ignore the state underpinnings of markets means the economics discipline has long harboured an implicit belief that groups are merely ‘collections of individuals’, as if in the back of the collective mind of Economics there’s a vision of people with an option to just walk off and leave society if it no longer suits them.

And this - to the eye of various anthropologists, and also feminist economists - is a deep-level structural flaw, somewhat like having a bug in the deepest layer of your discipline’s foundational code. This imagination of the ‘self’ floating alone in a market enables the discipline to create caricatures of human behaviour like ‘self-interest’ (self focusing on itself) and ‘altruism’ (self focusing on others), whereas for many early pre-capitalist societies there was no clear distinction between those: self-interest and group interest were aspects of each other, like chicken and egg. Modern capitalist rituals, like the staged panel discussions at the World Economic Forum, where hedge fund managers discuss whether pursuing self-interest enables altruism through philanthropy, would be absurd to anyone with a basic understanding that survival is not an individual endevour.

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David versus the Econ Goliath

At its worst, then, mainstream economics has had a very bad habit of taking a historically specific economic system - based around capitalist monetary exchange and unleashed by large-scale states - and generically labelling it as ‘Economics’, and then universalising it and projecting it backwards in time into situations where it never existed. (As an analogy, imagine a music professor claiming that classical music is the only form of music, and then proceeding to use Western classical music notation and scales to transcribe Indian ragas).

This colonising tendency has generated attrocious theories like the barter theory on the origins of money, in which a post-money mentality is projected into a pre-money world and then used to argue for why money must come into origin. That’s a big topic I can cover in another piece, but David was famous for dismantling this intellectual abomination in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years. He wasn’t the first to do this - the barter theory has been attacked for over a hundred years now - but his book was much wider than this. It was Anthropology charging the gates of Economics, revealing the hidden political dynamics behind supposedly scientific principles and unassailable moral judgements like ‘debts must be paid’.

David was a master of a style of anthropology that opens your eyes to the fact that the pallette of economic options is far wider than you might think. While conservative econ departments attempt to naturalise the mentality that accompanies capitalist monetary exchange, economic anthropology - at its best - is like a rebel holdout in our collective subconscious, keeping alive knowledge of other ways of being (many of which still exist under the shadow of our dominant economic system, and which are parasited upon by it).

We find ourselves stuck in these systems, and they pose constant contradictions. I, for example, have had a long and difficult relationship with the idea of… well… monetising my work on alternative money, asking people to transfer to me digital bank deposits in exchange for my thoughts on alternative economic systems. In my first encounters with David I sensed the same struggles. He, like me, believed in solidarity networks, and wasn’t there measuring his time and putting a monetary price on it. Where some well-known writers refuse to appear at events unless they are paid five figure sums, David would appear at the most humble events staged by passionate activists with no money at all.

He was often introverted, but was committed to helping others, which meant he was constantly at risk of being drained of his energy by eager believers in his work. The first time I met him was at the 2012 Anarchist Bookfair in London, where he’d been speaking. I tried to approach as he rested in the hallway afterwards - I wanted to try impress him with some point about his talk - but he looked at me with such tiredness that I backed away.

The first time I truly spoke with him was a couple of years later, at a dinner with debt campaigners. He told me how tough it was trying to help out all the groups that needed support, but he nevertheless kept at it. This is why David was an anthropological hero to me, because he explicitly politicised and lived his anthropological knowledge. He was acutely aware of how societies bulldozed by colonialism often had - and have - entirely different customs to apportion labour and energy, and was well-versed in the ambiguities of those customs (such as the ‘shell money’ I will discuss in my next DFMM video - see below). He believed, though, in our ability to rework this knowledge to challenge the oppressive structures of finance around us.

With David and Nika at the 2019 Church of Burn

Most of all, I remember him being deeply uncomfortable about being seen as above others. Last year I was waiting in line with him alongside my friend Julio Linares, who was his student. We were trying to get into an overcrowded event where everyone knew his face, and where he would have been treated as a VIP. He could have easily walked in, but refused to skip the queue. The hall filled up, and we never got in. We sat outside the event and began discussing building a collective called SPECTRE - the Secret Political Economy Consortium.

And, during lock-down we piloted the first trial episode of SPECTRE TV. It was my first ever attempt to edit a video. It was on basic income, and it was the last time I ever spoke to David.

David was like a quirky poker hand. His political views were well known - like the upturned cards in a game of Texas Hold-em - but I feel incredibly lucky that I got a few occasions to see him show me a personal card or two, eccentric, hilarious and warm. I, and many others, will miss that deeply.

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DFMM No.2: Cere-money vs. money in Papua New Guinea

I’d like my conversations with David to metaphorically continue though, by continuing to politicise the past, present and future of money. That’s why in the forthcoming Dispatches from the Frontiers of Modern Money (DFMM) I’m going to take on the topic of the resurgence of ‘shell money’ in Papua New Guinea (long a favourite location for anthropologists) in the context of Covid-19. It’s a story I first became aware of on the 21st August, when the Guardian ran a story called “The return of shell money: PNG revives old ways after Covid's blow to economy”. To catch my in-depth take on that story, and my deconstruction of how it’s typically represented, please do subscribe.

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