The ASOMOCO Top 5 (2023 edition)

My five most popular pieces from 2023 in summary

I founded Altered States of Monetary Consciousness (ASOMOCO) in 2020, with the intention of creating a publication that specialised in slow-release high-quality work. Some of the essays I publish here take me weeks to complete, but when they’re done I can stand back and know they’re strong enough to stand like perennials for many years to come.

This is a controversial approach in a media-saturated environment. Many content strategists will insist that you need regular pieces to keep people’s attention, and that those pieces must be short to match the low amounts of attention people have available. My strategy is kinda the opposite of that conventional wisdom, but I believe in the ASOMOCO vision, the quality of what’s being produced here, and the ability of all of you to focus for more than five minutes. Almost five thousand of you follow ASOMOCO now, and my goal is to double that by the end of next year.

In this spirit, I’d like to say farewell to 2023 by showcasing the Top 5 pieces on the site this year. It’s been a year of slow recovery for me, after a brutal 2022 when I released my book Cloudmoney in the midst of severe burnout. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to return to writing, and I’m grateful for all the support you’ve shown this year. So, let’s review the Top 5.

This was my most popular piece this year, and it was also a piece in which I made a definitive shift towards broadening my focus beyond monetary systems. The ideas here actually emerge out of responses to my last book. In Cloudmoney I did the heretical thing of defending physical cash, which caused a lot of economists and tech bros to accuse me of being ‘anti-progress’. In their eyes, we only use digital tech because it’s convenient, and we all willingly volunteer to sign over our lives to digital platforms. In this piece I explain why that’s a shallow and illusory perspective.

This piece was only published 10 days ago, but it’s already garnered a huge amount of support. People often assume that I defend cash out of privacy concerns, but privacy is but one reason to be concerned about the spread of surveillance capitalism. One key thing that actually enables surveillance is intermediation, which is a component of the broader process of formalisation, in which bureaucratic values of hierarchal order begin to erode the peer-to-peer relationships of the ‘informal economy’. This has a big impact of the cultural vibe of our society. In this piece I take you on a personal journey through London, a city where I lived for 11 years, to show how countercultures are increasingly threatened by formalisation.

This is a slightly more technical piece, but it really struck a chord with people interested in messing with mainstream monetary systems. Many people assume that ‘alternative currency’ must mean crypto-tokens, but cryptocurrency is but one limited slice of the alternative currency universe. The objective of this piece is to take readers beyond the crypto fetish, and to showcase an often overlooked, but powerful, paradigm of alternative currency design. This involves a journey into the difference between commodity and credit orientations to money.

I published a few cash-related pieces this year, including The Luddite’s Guide to Defending Cash, but the one above was the most popular. In 10 easy steps, it summarises why you should reject cashless rhetoric. Cashless society is a virus that spreads surveillance, censorship, systems failure, exclusion, gentrification and centralization of power.

Not everyone who follows this publication cares about more technical topics like central bank digital currency (CBDC), but when I write about these things I try to be inclusive of many different skill levels, and to delve into the cultural, emotional and ideological aspects of seemingly ‘economic’ subjects. The piece above was my fifth most popular this year, and it’s framed as a series of five meditations. The first involves exploring libertarian, socialist, anarchist and centrists ‘imaginaries’, which is fun regardless of whether you have a particular interest in central banks.

Bonus: the politics of the cashless storm

Finally, I published one major long-read in Aeon Magazine this year. It’s called ‘Going Cashless’, and it’s a deep dive into how to think about cashless society systemically, rather than falling into conspiracy theories. It delves into how the populist right is becoming active in the pro-cash debate, and how the fintech industry weaponizes that to label anyone who critiques digital payments as a bigoted and paranoid nutjob. The piece features witch trials, the invisible hand, Russell Brand, Christian evangelists and even Kill Bill, and takes you on a journey through the complex political landscape of payments.

Thanks for the support, and please do drop me a line below to tell me what your favourite piece of this year was.

Much love,

Brett