Circles @ Money Talk #7: Circles, a Universal Basic Income

From the archeological record, we know that money historically emerges in human civilization from our social relationships of debt. The creation of credit has been a way of both enslaving and liberating human beings throughout time and space. Such is the nature of money.

Recently, post-modernism taught us to be wary of the word “nature” to the point where talking about it has become somewhat a taboo, even amongst radicals of the left. But aren’t humans part of nature?

Let us challenge the taboo. As the saying goes: “we are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself!”. If this is true, one could formulate the question as follows: What is the Money of Nature?

Inverting the question of nature allows us to conceive of money with a different epistemological sensibility, a different imagination.

This talk is the beginning of a series of exercises to deconstruct the internalized structures of morality and guilt embedded within money today in order to reconstruct them again anew. What led us here? This talk and workshop is an attempt to embody money, the promises we make to one another, in order to creatively destroy and make once again. Money is awkward. Why is that?

This talk explores the merging of technology, art and politics to transform money as a form of self-defense available to all. To create money as a commons and as a means of commoning, instead of a commodity with a work discipline embedded to it. One that values and makes visible the reproductive forces and care work that go into remaking society every day.

We shall explore these topics through Circles, a universal basic income which aims to decouple wage-dom from work, liberating money from the state and hopefully, from capitalism.

Circles uses a web of trust - which is a network of human relationships - to create and secure personal and community currencies. The network of Circles borrows from the networks of nature. It is a pluralistic economic system, that ideologically favours subjectivity and diversity over a global, centralized version of truth

Money, Patriarchy & Time

Complex natural systems are diverse as they are interconnected. Our current monetary ecosystems are that of a mono-culture, with most nation-states having one money system to arrange things as diverse as education, health and people’s pensions.

Over the last decades, there has been an increased interest and uptake of complementary currencies, with crypto-currencies as the last iteration of this unfolding history. As the multiplicity of monetary ecosystems increases, an exploration into money´s longer history, the long dureé of money, becomes imminent.

What is the relationship between money and patriarchy? For the last 5000 years, we´ve had a system that works on a ¨one coin to rule them all¨ principle. Through violence, kings and states have prolonged their illusions on power through the ritual of forcing people to pay them a tribute.

Similarly, the higher the interest, the more time it takes to repay ones’ debts. Through positive rates of interest, money makes our impermanent moments on this earth feel more or less futile and short.

The talk will explore how money´s interest affect the ways we conceive of time and proposes ways forward (and cyclical) to change its current direction.