This Needs Fixin'

I was discussing the coup with a neighbor this weekend, and said that I would not be surprised if in 6 months we had no functional organizations left above the state level; their response was “no, in 3 months”.

So we’re just overflowing with optimism around here.

Since it’s likely that we won’t have a functioning monetary system or currency sometime in the immediate future, then, here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

Content Warning: there will be Marxism ahead, but what’s Marxist and how is left as an exercise for the reader. If you don’t actually know what Marxism is, maybe go learn what it means before you complain about it.

So, money.

Money is a way of representing labor for the purposes of exchange. By using symbols for labor instead of trading actual work with each other, we can store and exchange it more easily.

We trade our work for money, then we trade money for stuff (and for other people’s work).

It’s surprisingly effective.

Historically, though, the connection between money and work has been hidden by our ancestors having used rare metals as money; this masks the symbolic nature of the money with the (hypothetical) intrinsic value of the stuff that the currency is made of.

It took till the latter-1800s for anyone to really figure this out, but now that all major economies have ceased using metals as currency it’s pretty easy to see.

The value of money is equal to the amount of labor it represents.

So why don’t we denote our money in units of time?

This was an idea I first encountered in high school when I read Harry Harrison’s “The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted”, which is mostly set on a planet where the currency is hours of socially-beneficial work.

To get money, you do work that benefits society; to buy stuff, you exchange money for it just as we do in the real world.

The unit of currency in that book is the ‘wirr‘, or ‘work hour’; presumably, small change is made with minutes and seconds.

The bank is a benevolent AI that can track everyone’s labor and transactions to maintain the balances of accounts.

That last bit is really what marks this as sci-fi.

“AI” here in the real world is not actually a thing.

But that only means that a system like this would take some effort to design and run, since you can’t get an AI to do the hard part for you, not that it can’t be done. You’d need bureaucracy to run it and democracy to decide what’s socially beneficial, but we do already know how to make bureaucracies and democracies.

As we say in tech: there are no unsolved problems here.

So, I’m thinking we should finally try this.

A PayPal/Venmo/whatever style payment system, coupled with a web site that lets members (at various geographic scales) propose and vote on projects that would be paid in currency-hours, is certainly doable; maybe with phone apps for IOS and Android to do mobile transactions.

It would certainly be a handy system to have available if Trump and Musk do succeed in crashing the U.S. economy.

Maybe it’s time to be the change I want to see in the world.

I can’t afford to hire someone to build this, of course; that would be well out of my price range.

But it’s within the scale that I could do on my own, and I have the server resources available to host it.

Hmmm.

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