MONEY AND ABUNDANCE - EVOLVING EXCHANGE MODELS FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

Have you ever thought about what happens around the earth at any one time? All the cycles of the day happening at once. I figure it would take 25 days to see what happens in one day in each time zone, including one hour to travel to that time zone (given that, it would make more sense to travel west, then lose your full day crossing the international date line).

How many things will find to be the same, compared to those that are different?

People living, surviving, cultivating, loving.

If you really think about it, we live for loving. I do not mean just sex, I mean really connecting. Actually, I’d wager the quality of sex defines the quality of life one has.

Really good sex demands being really open, free, creative, expressive. It’s also the time we hope to aspire, reach, communicate, no fear. Being fully accepted and accepting. To express this is abundant. Limitless. Empowered.
Have you thought about how we sell empowerment to the world?

Now, in a scarce driven world, we’d want to keep our sexual expertise to ourselves or distribute at a price, but in an abundant world, this would be quite different. I can be a great lover all I want, but if I want to be really good, I want everyone not just to know, but to see what my knowledge has taught them and what I will discover though their experiences. This is never static. Being good always evolves. That’s how we got to be so good now and how we can get even better. Forever.

Sharing spreads pleasure. You get that, right? You may not agree, but hear me out, because if you do think otherwise, you are reacting on your fear, not your empowerment.

See, to be the best, you need to share. This spreads your love much more than keeping it to yourself. I know you are thinking that systemising approaches versus your intuition gets you more lovers, but actually you are limiting yourself. Because sharing authenticity empowers everyone to discover, experience, and grow. Life is an evolving spiral, not a static circle.

What has this got to do with money? Have you ever thought about how we sell empowerment? Have you ever thought how pricing empowerment incredibly reduces its capacity for diversity and expansion? Have you ever thought how, in the current money world, pricing yourself actually devalues who you are?

Because the current currency we use drives scarcity. What we create occurs despite currency, not because of it. If we valued ourselves solely as the best quality creators, producing in the most sustainable way possible, on demand, price would be meaningless. Our unit of value would be our reputation, and we would exchange by gifting.

These are all bold statements, but let me back them up, and demonstrate how we can get there, and why this is so important if we are to save humanity on earth. I’ll do my best to cover this, different sections that point to the same thing. The waterfall that starts, and ends, as one, but has limitless trajectories to get there.

A friend of mine said there is always a balance of opposing sides, the ying and yang of life. I reasoned that if people are always, and encouraged, to follow their joy, to connect with no fear, this point of view would break down. I realised however, that I would be wrong. There will always be a balance, however, the parameters around what is in balance is different. Perhaps one present way we look at this is joy versus fear, positive versus negative, good versus bad, empowerment versus disempowerment. I find looking at it in these ways empowers fear as the dominant force to work against. However, from a foundation of empowerment, the balance becomes creativity versus sustainability. We can play with what sustainability is, but the crucial point is that without environment, we have nothing, so arguments about economic, social, or political sustainability will always be servant to the environment. To say otherwise is playing with one’s ego, and wanting to earn a price for it.

What creative ideas have enough value to be made in the most sustainable way possible? How many experiences can we create that really add value to people’s lives, respecting the earth at the same time? What unit of measure would satisfy our need for status in a more sustainable world that values doing over having?
And so we begin.

MONEY
It is interesting how people equate money with abundance. I find people who believe this do not know what money is; rather, the type of money we are using and how destructive it is. So many people say money is just a tool to overcome the limitations of barter. Listen to financiers talk about money, how liberating it is. and in it’s microcosm, it is. Grameen Bank is a perfect example of this, empowering many who would not have access to credit, but is money with usury the only way to access empowerment? Who said who can create money, be its master, while making others servant to it? Or are we all servants to it in one way or another, where the real problem lays?

If money were only a unit of exchange, there would be nothing wrong with it, but its design is insidious in ways people do not perceive. For instance, we mistake that money is wealth, when it is not. It is what money buys that has true value, why the quality of what we create is so important and should not be compromised.

Money is meaningless if it is not applied to something we create. Consequently, a price for the use of money is a farce, or a trick. Charge any price you want for your product, but it’s the cost of money that maligns that price, builds scarcity, and increases inequality. As banks become the masters of the market, money circulating with a cost kills the free market. The mechanics are not free or diverse. Look at the convergence of industry in their pursuit of profit, at the expense of quality and the environment. The news on DAPL and GMOs are perfect cases in point but hardly the only ones. Even how we decide to make things cheaply for a cheap price wastes resources to sustain a monetary economy, not an experiential one. Wherever there is a conflict to a solution, it is often parameters to the conflict that drive the issue, and these are particularly important when sustainability is compromised. Such projects easily demonstrate the maligned empowerment of corporations and governments, but also the pure disempowerment money truly is.

There are many people involved in currency design, and many egos wrapped up in how to do it. Like everything else, people do purposely complicate this in the same way we complicate buying public transport tickets in different cities (it would be better to make it free), but that is how currency icons, any icon, makes a living. If you offer a complete solution, no one needs you any more. Look at how many people sell books and programs to empower you but only within a parameter that empowers you against others, not with others. Money doesn’t afford total global empowerment. Qualitative abundance will.

Parameters for currency design are very simple. Money is servant to creation, so it can’t exist unless there work has been done, or a promise to be done, to make it possible. In kind, money belongs to all people participating in creating something a community finds valuable. The basic sectors that would fulfil life as we know it are:
Food
Clothing
Shelter
Technology and Energy
Transport
Healthcare
Education

Obviously as creativity diversifies the arts, design, or science, humans need more than these basics; but let us see how the dynamic works in these sectors according to the type of money we use. When money has a cost, we must always take away from somewhere else to cover the cost especially when that cost is centralised. If money were decentralised, such that we could all create money from will alone, there would be no incentive to lend money. Of course, there is no point creating money from nothing if there is nothing to buy. The usury of currency destabilises price, wealth, abundance. So much energy is lost in this game of money, energy that could otherwise create a greater choice of diverse, sustainable, experiences. How much time is spent searching for quality at a price, when we could spend time creating, and experiencing diversity at its best, at a stable price or without a cost at all?

If we must use currency, it is only at its most effective when it is free to use. This takes the focus away from the scarcity debt money creates, and shifts status to what we create. A free currency stabilised prices, reduces the inequality gap, and allows us to focus on how sustainably an experience is created, increasing quality across demographics and cultures. Two excellent currencies that are interest-free are Sardex and Tumin. Both are free currencies, based around mutual credit, without cost. While this may sound similar to time-based currencies such as LETS, it isn’t, as pricing is based on the market. Of course, this tempers the idea of abundance, and I personally speculate that is greys the connection between collaborating and competition.

This is where qualitative exchange, gifting, really shifts the value of competition to create sustainably, not reduce quality to any price. Creating experiences sustainably defaults to producing only on demand, which is a whole different beast to current quantified value-based economics. Orders are made in advance, or automated to be made at will. This affords customisation. Resources are allocated in the most efficient way, supporting the best in that sector. It affords discovering and creating new things. Cultural diversity. As nature intended.

Like tribes were, and still are, given trinkets for valuable resources, so we have been sold the glitter of money. Surprisingly, Bitcoin inadvertently proves the irrelevance of money. I can only assume, but am quite confident that from the beginning, its designers knew about this from the beginning, as the conclusion is inescapable, but I can only assume this to be the case. To understand the effects of a currency easily, look at what happens if everyone chooses to use it.

There is an absolute limit to the amount of BTC that can be created, which is 21 million coins, that become harder and harder to create. It’s very important to keep currency flowing, and support demand to use it. The only way to do that is to take all fees out of it, which is feasible since building new infrastructure to validate transactions becomes redundant. It also keeps as much currency out there to flow, but that will still not stop inevitable price devaluations to accommodate the velocity of money as everyone uses it. Therefore, the price mechanism, — that being whatever is of higher quality costs more — breaks down, leaving quality as the only way left to differentiate between one manufactured thing and another.
Money is such a poor measure of value, or wealth. Many think it is created in balance to what is produced but there are vast multiples of money in existence over what there is to buy with it. And this is increasing as most money that exists is mainly entries of debt. It’s distribution, however, has to be scarce to have value, but it is based on a maligned sense of motivating people to work, when we would do far better not having it at all. It validates that the actual numbers mean, and value, nothing. How we even chose to believe in such a warped currency to value our lives is extraordinary.

Disempowering.

Money converges, demands quantification, and scarcity; real or contrived. Money creates scarcity, therefore war, yet we are attached to it like Stockholm Syndrome lovers. Reputation diverges, demands qualification, and inevitable, sustainable, abundance. Money has no concept of abundance in its design, even if it has no cost to use. We need a qualitative exchange measure that values sustainable abundance. That is human. And that is nature.

I know what you are saying. This is conceptual theory, or wouldn’t it be nice if only human nature had so little fear to do this. The point is we are all selling no fear in some way, so let’s build parameters that afford this to happen, not simply hope for it, to not keep it an exception to the norm. Let’s look at current sectors and apply these theories in practice to see what systems, and empowerment, they support.

HUMAN NATURE + GAME THEORY + EMPOWERMENT
I must quickly, quickly, outline the parameters of human nature to establish grounding for my arguments. I can do this.
If you think about it, we often make decisions around people based on fear. Maybe this is based on trying to be immortal as a manifestation of power, which is not very present. The principles of scarcity demands certain types of leaders, but so, too, does abundance. They are quite different.

We may think we need external motivators to actually do something, and a lot of research derives from this premise. Even though civilisations have overcome scarcity many times, as we have today, money is the water that germinates this misconception. Money makes the many servant to the few. I personally think it is the scarcity that money drives that is responsible for the destruction of civilisations that offer so much abundance. we think that politics and ethics are the engine for stability and empowerment, but it is the tools they use that are their flaw. Most governance already knows this.

The research of Richard Ryan and Self-Determination Theory, wonderfully encapsulated by the work of Dan Pink, easily demonstrates that when our creative capacity is engaged, extrinsic reward is irrelevant. It is only when we are reduced to acting obediently performing processes that we look for some kind of external give back. Look at the number of volunteers who give their time for the value not just for their themselves, but for others, simply for the love of it. They are increasingly the bedrock of the money world. It is amazing that the work of fundamental services like Life Savers and Coastguard are predominantly volunteer driven, dependent on sponsorship. Look at the incredible value of Wikipedia, GiftHub, and open source platforms, leveraging not just reparation but fostering connection just to make things better.

This is human nature in its most empowered state. From the perspective of a market economist for whom scarcity drives all, this behaviour is ludicrous.

Listen to people at work. How many are truly happy? How many are bitter over their disempowerment to flex their creative capacity? We idolise those who are the exception, those who’ve mastered a system that supports only a few masters; and yet we mostly buy what the system sells: that we each could be masterful. We objectify systems that perpetually disempower, for our measure of wealth built around scarcity. Now we see the shift to selling motivation and coaching — further connecting freedom to money. But this really only sells the support of creation –in themselves, neither coaching nor mentoring create. In the moneyed world, no matter how far down the line of empowerment one can go, the idea of systemised empowerment is based on fear and scarcity, and this is born of game theory of which economics is based.

I know an extraordinary man who gave up the logic of neuroscience to live it, experience it. He is extraordinarily happy. He plays fantastic peaceful music during his meditation classes. I asked him if he can tell me who it is and send me the links. He says these are his own compositions. Then would he give them to me? He replies he finds them very sacred and sharing it will diminish their value. It turns out that not all, if any, are composed and are really premixes off YouTube. So, they aren’t even his.

Leveraging scarcity is not uncommon. So, does love diminish in value when you share it? Only if you think it is scarce and will not come back to you. Although that is a fascinating concept to consider, in experience we may not share it openly and fully, with all, in the same way. I wonder what that would be like? Come to think of it, perhaps the most empowered people are like this, and I have met them. One is astonishingly beautiful, as close to a supernova as I have ever experienced.

There are plenty of theories with games. All games are competitive, but how competition is manifest depends on the parameters of the game. Most economic theory is defined around the Prisoners Dilemma, founded on the work of mathematician John Nash. The simple idea is if no prisoner snitches, nothing changes, but if both snitch, it is worse for both of them. Analysis shows that when the number of times the game is to be played between the prisoners is known, both betray, but when played infinitely, they don’t. The theory is very apt to describe usury on currency. When costs are planned, we play the costs of the money against what we would earn in exchange. However, if we understand that the debt never goes away, and that this game is infinite, we would probably not play. We may think it is too late once it has started, but we are already proved wrong by the changes people are already making to return to our native empowerment. Games counter to this are the Dictator, Ultimatum, and Evolutionary Game Theory. All these still leverage competition, but any outcome reflects the perception of the environment they are applied in; in essence, if self is best served by competing or collaborating. In the fundamental work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, both concurred that survival of the fittest defaulted to co-evolution (evolutionary game theory), not destruction of one over the other (prisoner’s dilemma). It is how we have shaped the idea of the best surviving, built around fear and scarcity, that has cultivated the insecure need for money.

Theories around attachment to people are continually being discussed, in how we are connected or are we truly alone. We are always connected with each other, but that we make this scarce, with conditions, drives the insecurity of attachment, being less unless we are accepted by others. I propose that it is the conditions of connecting that drive the problem of needing people. If we lived-in an inclusive, sustainably abundant world, there would be so much constructive, supportive attachment we would not fear negative attachment, therefore are detached from this need.

Money has limited us tremendously, believing that it has been create for our benefit, when it has now become a tool to disempower more. We are trusting people that value fear, and so disempower ourselves in the process, giving our power to others that put a price on our lives. On understanding we are all priceless, we all afford, and are empowered, to become creators, and all money will become meaningless.

START UPS
Long before we made it cool with the philanthropic and VC support we give start-ups that complement today’s corporations, trade was fast and furious. In any market, you can be overwhelmed at the number of people selling anything of remote value, surrounded with inventory in a 2m2 space. Thousands of traders floors high, like individual bee hives, fighting for your dollar. Sure, some stores are the same with different fronts, but this is in vast minority compared to the number of people wanting your business. Their objective is to turn over cheap stuff quickly, made to perish in a year, if not a month, to keep the people making these atrocious things that waste resources. Markets selling trinkets is more of the same deal, making so many different things that are mostly meaningless, relying dramatically on manufactured demand. Stocks work the same way, selling perception of loss rather than discovering an experience.

The idea of the startup has scaled up dramatically in its promise of diversity creation, free-market principles, and personal empowerment; and, in many ways, the form can yield some extraordinary things. However, the learning curve is full of repetitive research wasting huge amounts of energy and resources, for a sliver of a market in the right time and space. Over 90% of start-ups fail, yet we push this as a model for creative empowerment and sustainability. In the technology space, ideas that are supported are highly specific with most created for their valuation at sale, not anticipating long term use. For a brand to be competitive it is best to buy out the competition to keep some measure of profit. Multiple variations in the same niche waste time. Just look at social media platforms, with monetisation in the background built around advertising and classifieds. Everyone is all over a new armchair-tech idea, but a pitch for tagging animals — for easy tracking — eradicating the need for searching for them every morning has no support, even though this could transform free-range food production completely.

Competing to win is unsustainable. Think about how much more powerful concepts could be created, implemented, and adapted to deliver customised experiences, working together. Collaborating to win! Far more beneficial, sustainable, and self-empowering than all the tools to leverage competing will ever achieve. I could write any example here, but I can comfortably say that with whatever situation you choose to give me, I will find a better, collaborative solution to solve your problems than competing will ever achieve.

Of course, resolving a small solution is easy, but it is at scale that an idea truly shows its capacity, so I will apply these ideas to two large sectors, and the consequences of applying both: resource management analysis between ownership and the commons, and the ultimate consequence of that in city design.

Consider the difference between crowdfunding and what I call crowdfinding, which is like crowdsourcing, but focused solely on leveraging support through the quality of what one creates, producing sustainability and peacefully, on demand.
Crowdfunding is about getting support to buy people and resources. It is a derivative of and centred in profit making; it is a tool for startups. There is little focus on sustainability and even when there is, it is applied within the confines of money. Growth and valuation are still key measurements of wealth. Nothing much changes. At the same time, there are social entrepreneurs who are more for the quality or for the greater good of what they make at the expense of profit. But even finding balance between these is an oxymoron — a symptom of our current exchange model. Again, this demonstrates the flaw of money as we use it today.

Crowdsourcing has a bit more scope: leveraging support in more ways than just money: equipment donations, advertising people’s support, community awareness projects, and the like; all still within the current exchange model ’
Crowdfinding demands support solely based on creating sustainable quality and giving incentives to people to give their creative energy to a project all for nothing; at least, not in quantitative terms.

A business proposal demonstrates what one is creating, how and who it benefits, what will be taught, options for recycling and reuse, adaptions between localities, customisation possibilities, and decentralised production deployment to produce on demand. The objective is to make the producing units of what is created redundant, yet are a legacy for evolution to new ideas and systems. Without buying labour from people to obediently produce, people are invited to create and give their time and resources for free. In exchange, they receive the output for free. But not just this. On many people and projects using crowdfinding as a method for support, all participants in creating this way have access in what the whole network creates. Once scaled to cover the six minimum sectors that we all need to not just survive, but experience and evolve: food, clothing, shelter, technology, transport, healthcare, with education underpinning all of these, and the need for money, even stable free money, becomes redundant. I do not mean to say there is no space for purely artistic endeavours. I am simply focusing on necessities, and spiralling outward from there. What is most important is how one wishes to apply their creative capacities, and we all have more than one.

There is no way possible for quantified exchange models, that crowdfunding is based on, to compete with what opportunities, and security, crowdfinding offers. Crowdfinding reframes the free market for what people choose to spend their time creating, for whom, how, and why: for self, everyone, and everything.

THE YIN+YANG BETWEEN CREATION+SUSTAINABILITY
It’s quite clear that the values of collaborating are taking hold, from the advent of crowdfunding turning to full crowdfinding solutions like Hylo and Sustainable Human (many thanks to Edward West and Chris Agnos) with everything, like sharing sites, in between. As in any sector, these platforms are still looking for optimisation; finding the best possible way. Many promote and advocate for decisions relying on ethics to counteract the complete lack of ethics that money repeatedly demonstrates. I hope I do not have to labour this as all over the news and internet stories of trade agreements valuing corporations, coal and tar sands mining, oil and coal seam gas exploration, or promotion of nuclear power as a stopgap between fossil fuels and renewables, are all offered but we can see are available only at the expense of water, ecosystems, and ourselves. Should I also mention the pharmaceutical industry?

Money, as we know it, slows down innovation; it does not advance it.

The obvious situation to demonstrate this is climate change. We are arguing this as a platform for IF to change, when actually it is irrelevant. Producing sustainably benefits everyone and everything, but climate change deniers can’t validate that it’s fine to destroy fresh water access for oil and CSG that run machines to mine the same thing, when renewables offer far higher sustainable energy access. Money drives the need for jobs that would not have to exist if we had an exchange model that values creating experiences abundantly instead of slowing innovation down to stay in scarcity, for money.

I remember on my first radio show, Sustainable Synergy, nterviewing three Australian sustainability think tanks back-to-back, asking why, as one combined force, they were not building the status of being sustainable, first and foremost by talking to each other. Each said they were in different sectors and offered differing solutions. Of course, to survive in the existing economy they need this type of differentiation, but this does will not offer a full solution, until the time is right. With no change in status or exchange models, that is likely to never happen.

Probably the ideal platform to discuss the differences between resource management through money +ownership and reputation + sharing is commoning. The Commons is a vast network developing platforms for more collaboration and sustainable living and connect humanity with the more qualitative and supportive aspects of life we all desire. Legends such as David Bollier and Michel Bauwens are all looking at collaborative consensus protocols that afford the greatest support for parts of communities. Other platforms are Sociocracy and Loomio, but like most decision making protocols, they are highly based around being rational with ethics and scarcity. Resolving arguments ethically can be extraordinary difficult to do as it values levels of disempowerment, and makes management of the commons exceedingly complex; again, a symptom of the present parameters to survive against others, not with them.

We are innately status driven animals so any collaborative platform must invite setting ourselves apart and making a difference. This is how we show our distinction. This is much more about excellence than ethics. Change the parameters of the goal from quantitative scarcity to qualitative abundance, and we naturally collaborate as this is not just rational but the most empowering action to take. Collaborating makes all of us better as have access to much more information and experiences to be better at it. Pricing this is a contradiction to abundance of experiences and connections that are possible through gifting while respecting who are the best in their fields of expertise. This drives excellence as a primary driver of creating. Nothing less.

There is a scene in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where to test his theory that value is devalued by quantifying it, the author does not give his students marks for one semester. Previously students craved to have the status of the highest mark in the class, attained by rote, usually doing the bare minimum to pass, but in refusing to allocate marks the teacher empowered the students’ search for new information. Everyone’s concealed grades improved, with the brightest understanding the full ramifications of the experiment: that quantifying value devalues it.

Managing the commons would benefit greatly from this foundation of civil management. Certainly, ideas of excellence differ, but the objective of experience founded around sustainable creation offers an opportunity to collaborate and converge ideas for the greatest empowerment of many. No solution is static or lacks support if empowerment is at its core.
There are many urban projects which revolve around commons management. The case in Melbourne of an unused alleyway adapted to provide space for its community, is a simple example. Better examples are intentional communities. The documentary A New We discusses a few intentional communities around the world which do their best to be independent but are still servant to outside support. Usually the scale of these communities is quite small, they have fewer resources and innovation than needed, and they abide by spiritual or ritual dogma, putting ethical governance at the centre of management. This can and usually does lead to political power struggles, not creative ones, and so disempowerment and fear perpetuate. An important realisation of this experience is that any worthwhile management model promotes the advantage of trust as a core element of evolution, contrary to models that try to stop distrust from taking hold. Yes, there is a big difference in how this changes what are best solutions or ways for communities to manage resources.

What is most lacking in intentional communities is the scope of creative diversity. The essentials need to be covered before anything else and there may not be the expertise in communities to cultivate that sustainably. The need to do what has to be done, rather what one wishes to do makes such communities more a reaction against, not an alternative to, current social structures.

Incentives are critical to the formation of practices which value qualitative exchange in a large network. For change-over, a simple start point is to agree within networks to give freely what is normally done at a cost outside of that network. Invitation to other networks to join and complete what is lacking enable oneself and participating networks to be unchained from quantitative exchange. The opportunity to connect with like-minded empowering people in such a community has no limits and is a huge incentive to participate and build an alternative model that invites support and wellbeing to all. Frameworks like Sustainable Human, built off the Hylo platform, are cultivating exactly this type of exchange.

While we value local communities, we do not want to lose the choice of what cities offer. As we can’t really connect in a human way at a global scale, we think we need some kind of quantitative exchange to resolve the lack of trust this scale creates and evolve collectively. This, by its very nature, bases exchange to focus on, and therefore cultivate, fear.
As said before, any exchange model can only show its value at scale. So as much as qualitative exchange is easy to understand at small scale, it is at the scale of the city that it will show its true capacity to empower, and what that type of city would look like.

THE QUALITATIVE CITY
We can argue whether the city is a culmination of systems that leverage the common freedoms for all over the individual freedoms for self, but its the parameters of those systems that ideally support people to follow their creative capacity to resolve challenges, in the most constructive, peaceful, way possible. Seeing the huge turmoil we are all going through to keep the momentum of city life going easily demonstrates the current models are grossly inadequate for the creative capacity we have. We are looking for new solutions with projects as grand as Masdar City, a $20 billion project for 50,000 people promising zero-carbon output, and failing but how far do such systemic-focused projects perpetuate sustainable change?

A great example to demonstrate this is a recent New Cities initiative by startup giant Y Combinator, managed by Sam Altman and Adora Cheung. Utopian ideas first dreamed of by the likes of masters such as architects Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, the objective for New Cities is to see how far technology has taken us and how it can reshape the city as we know it, but their first goal is how to make housing affordable.

Affordable housing is a very small part of how a city functions. Sadly, and unsurprisingly, there was no basis of understanding how exchange models affect the scope of ideas, therefore more suitable solutions. It dangerously promotes further synthesising nature on foundations bearing no sustaining relationship to it. Nature perpetually diversifies creative culture to survive, connecting and empowering. Cities certainly have diversity, but for them to create and survive, how, in the language of quantitative exchange, would technology resolve and lead to empowerment fulfilling, experiential, connected, JOYFUL, lives for all?

I made a proposal to be a researcher for this project. So much stress is born from wanting to protect yet empower and expand children, so my central foundation of a city design is that it has to be safe and support valuable experiences for children. My proposal certainly did not restrict itself to urban plans at human scale, or the best toys, or the best way to design a kitchen so children do not get hurt. My foundation was what social, economic, and political structures would support the greatest access to education and experiences to empower capacity to cultivate creative lives respectful of all life.

Is this not what a city is all about? I asked what city design brief could afford flexible working hours, following creative interests, perpetuate sustainable innovation, access to new experiences, cultivate trust, and truly live in peace and abundance? And not be boring? Naturally, as these are all qualitative and priceless, there is no dollar value in this, hence the need for qualitative exchange. I suspect that this has nothing to do with the limitations of money, they missed the point, and I did not even make the first round.

It is limitations of parameters of perception and restricted conceptualisation of how cities may grow that leads to their ultimate demise; the cycle of civilisation as we accept it.

Qualitative exchange has no limits as it values what we create from scarce time and resources; not a derivative of scarcity itself. It leverages our competitive nature to create sustainably and enjoy it. It makes business a sport: play to win, then shake hands and both learn to be better from the experience the next time. It perpetuates joy over stress. It values empowerment for all over the few. It fully supports you to be responsible and gain status in applying that. It kills the need to compete against each other and builds collaboration as the best way to create. This is the foundation of excellence.
So, what would a modern, sustainable city look like?

Some useful concepts to optimise the city for creating sustainable, diverse, experience are the:
centring the city around the pinnacle of it’s fuel: food, water, and renewable energy
excellence of innovation, such as recycling and reusing, especially trash
diversity of locally-sensitive housing solutions
promotion of goal-centric, not system-centric, working hours
leverage unlimited automated public transport on a 24hr cycle
cultivation quality food accessible to all, on demand, reducing food waste
separation of quiet and noisy precincts, and making sound-proof housing mandatory
provide free healthcare with more natural solutions
make access to knowledge bases free

As stated previously, the parameters for how these are created affect how useful, efficient, and encompassing they can be. As an example, after travelling around many different cities in South America in November and December 2016, it is amazing how systems in cities are so similar. Buses and trains are different, machines and systems to pay are different, but that we need to pay is the same. I noticed that the buses in Sydney, Australia are huge square things that have a high centre of gravity making them difficult to manoeuvre, but buses in Buenos Aires taper upward and are a little smaller, which lowers the centre of gravity, allow the bus to clear obstacles when it sways; this makes them much easier to drive. It seems that what makes public transport more successful is not the type of vehicle, but how often they run, so that there are so many designs competing for market wastes resources.

Payment options are just as diverse. Seattle offers free rides on any bus within the city precinct, so if you enter within the city area and exit the bus outside of it you pay on exit. Some cities price fares by zones, or the quality of bus, and others, such as Brazilia, have turnstiles in the bus after paying the driver or conductor who has his own throne, taking up a huge amount of space. The movement to more electronic payments offers challenges for passengers wanting access to public transport regardless of wherever they might be, but with the globalisation of the market, why have any payment at all? Would it not be far more welcoming for locals and foreigners to come to a city and access what experiences it offers, and not make transport the first obstacle to master?

While we say such a change is difficult to fund compared to the cost of ticketing systems, we could make transport free, promote its use and reduce traffic which would save other costs (such as cleaning up pollution) allowing the addition of more services. The point then becomes what type of service to make if everyone has flexible working hours, which takes out peak-time loads … and so it goes.

The object of a city, any community, is not to make things to sell, it is to create experiences that afford us to love life for as long as we are alive: far better to take out the need for traffic than to resolve traffic in an inefficient system.
A very progressive community model is Rise, in Costa Rica, which fundamentally values and creates a connected quality of life. Although still entrenched in the money world its quality affords a model to cultivate and extend as it inspires applying our senses of creativity, without money.

Everything starts with a concept, so the transport network is my simple schema for an efficient city. The shortest distance between relevant nodes is a triangle. This affords only one change, if any, to get from one place to another. How this is applied depends on the topography of the area, affording respect for terrain, ecology, and diversity for preferences for private housing and public areas. Assuming the humility to know we can’t challenge nature, only augment it, is a great place to start from. Many people move to cities for opportunities, but a city can’t function without the support of its environment, so balance with environment and incentives that promote urban and rural places is crucial for any design, however schematic, to work effectively. Leveraging low maintenance and less work permits more efficient use of resources and time. This is possible by the introduction of parameters that can deliver innovation. These concepts can be applied to any sector. To own a resource is meaningless, but what does have true value is what we do with the resource. This means money is an insecure measure of safety. It promotes none of these values, and we are better to do see this and move on.

EVOLUTION THROUGH QUALITATIVE EXCHANGE
There will be many more effects than just on what, how, and why we produce what we want to make living life so valuable.
We spend a huge amount of resources on security, against one another, of which money plays a huge part facilitating. We live with so much more tension, fear, wariness, than we did 50 years ago, and we have become accustomed to this as being normal. I was recently told of how the city of Paris has mobilised since the terrorist attack at the newspaper offices of Charlie Hebdo in 7 January 2015. Police with automatic weapons have become so common in public areas with screen checks while entering buildings that people are now accepting this as part of everyday life. This is a small example in comparison to the perpetual state of war and corruption so many countries are in, this more by political choice than anything else. I could say acts of fear are perpetrated for this very purpose, like the act Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, created with debutants smoking at a glam event implying that women were cooler if they did the same: we are sold the necessity of extrinsic protection to be safe. We are further led to question human nature, not the environment that drives scarcity and disempowers, so much such that some think that this type of activism brings attention to their grievances.

Qualitative exchange driving sustainable abundance makes any kind of violent or disempowering act unsustainable, therefore this would not be good for one’s reputation nor would it be unsupported. Resources used for acts of war becomes redundant. Anything used against the ideas of sustainability and peace will simply not be possible as the need or desire for war would be lost. Trying to pursue it will achieve nothing except lower your reputation. People would do better accessing resources to be educated and create. ‘War’ would become a game of being the best sustainable creator.
No one is disempowered in the qualitative world, unless they want to be. To choose not to be in a world where every opportunity to reach your capacity is free for you to apply your creativity is incessantly stupid, and everyone would know about it. No creator is obliged to give such people, anyone, anything, so at least trying to do something has its benefits. However, one does not choose to enter the gifting world unless they se the advantage of doing so, so it is highly unlikely people will be dormant in this space. More power to it.

Many books and theses have been written about understanding and possibly resolving issues within the immediate paradigms around debt-driven money. I believe we are all searching for unlimited empowerment, but stifle it within this system that drives scarcity. We want people to live to their full potential, but limit resources to make this possible. This is why the exchange system we choose to use is so important. Our capacity to create is not scarce, so why base sharing this on an exchange model that limits this?

A friend told me that we, nature, evolve towards efficiency. It is quite apparent that quantitative exchange is exceedingly inefficient.

So why do we default to using quantitative exchange when it promotes fear, scarcity, and destruction? Because selling negativity is easy. There is a maligned sense of power in it as it promotes people working for you, not with you. It values being lazy. This is not true empowerment. Many are trying to resolve this conundrum, but while we choose to rely upon existing paradigms, nothing much will change. Since the 70s, perhaps with the debut of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, warnings have been communicated en masse. Instead of valuing peace, we have been sold the security of greed. As most follow the status quo to fit in, we accept that this is the best option. That we trust the status quo easily proves we are trusting beings, believing we want to empower each other, and we are easily taken advantage of, otherwise public relations would not exist. As mentioned before, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, capitalised on it because he firmly believed people are stupid. We are as stupid as we want to be, or not.

It seems 2017 is the year for researching global system change with multiple manifests and constitutions; Marx on a collective level. We explore how to measure qualitative value through happiness indexes, social good enterprises, and collaboration networks. At global scale. There are many people looking at new options for new model societies that are more human. One with greater exposure, probably for the prize than the outcomes, is a competition by Laszlo Szombatfalvy. Described to be the Warren Buffet of Sweden, he has created A New Shape — Remodelling Global Cooperation, offering up to USD$50million in funding for solutions leading to a UN 2.0:

‘This competition is a quest to find new models of global cooperation capable of handling global risks. It will award USD$5 million in prizes for the best ideas that re-envision global governance for the 21st century. Be part of the effort to safeguard our world for future generations. Be part of the global conversation. Help to change the shape of things to come.’

Of course, this is not a new idea. David Suzuki has been capitalising on such concept proposals for decades. Still, there is an emphasis on political reform without addressing how politics is supported: selling greed. It would be fascinating if the idea of qualitative exchange is valued as high in such a contest as it would stare the need for money in the face, recognise the redundancy and inefficiency of quantitative exchange, instantly making the idea of ‘winning’ money amusingly superfluous as a measure of status. What a wonderful conundrum to reach, and the scope this would present for effective, efficient, sustainable creation.

It would be interesting to see if people propose changes to win, or indeed present ideas that have value. The value of ideas is certainly dependent on the time and situation they address, but a fundamental endgame offers a direction to work towards. Hopefully something far more valuable than profit, or money. This would begin the inflexion point where we can work to let money go, stop wasting resources on building new currencies as a way forward, and cultivate trust to build sustainable abundance as a natural governing mechanism.

This aptly brings up the experiments of George Price, the man behind the Price Equation. He tested to what level self-sacrifice is not in the interests of self. Examples of organisms that sacrifice themselves for the community are bees, in the interests of extending their gene pool to survive. The more closely a gene pool resembles self, the more likely one is to sacrifice oneself for it to survive. Price was not happy to discover this and so in the interests in pushing altruism to its limits, he decided to live with nothing and see what came back. He gave away everything, squatted, helped the homeless, did anything he could to prove that altruism exists beyond this inherent limitation of genetic survival. Sadly, he discovered he was wrong, with fellow homeless and destitute equally stealing from him as much as supporting him. Depressed at not discovering the empowerment of giving life to one’s fellow man equally and without compromise, he committed suicide.
Why this is important is people can make a choice, but the environment we live in is an immense factor in deciding what choice we will make, and how it supports us. We are not selfless.

Like any belief pattern, those valuing supporting others do this to propagate the idea of collaborating, helping, assisting, within parameters perceived to survive, and master. Doing this through ethics is like bringing the gene pool together, but whose genes, or rather perceptions, will you follow to survive? There are two common baselines to this argument: that all perceptions are based on scarcity, and that the gene pool across race and cultures is incredibly similar. As mentioned before, people are selling abundance attached to scarcely distributed money, which is like setting off a time bomb. Attach abundance to quality creation, excellence in the most sustainable way possible, valuing what we do, not what we have, and we open a whole new concept of being, embracing selfishness by collaborating, discovering, sharing, experiencing. There are no limits to knowledge, innovation, creation, and how we use it. On realising this do I believe that Price’s concept of altruism will be true, just not the language he described it.

THE REAL ENDGAME
Maybe it’s here that I lay my cards on the table, and iterate the endgame a qualitative exchange model can, and I think will, create.

We have been building models that hope for more trust inside a model that works against this, but would we be inspired to work in a model that makes fear diminutive? Can we believe connecting with no fear is possible, or is just something we can hope for but think is impossible; therefore reinforcing it will never be? While lots of icons sell no fear, this makes our achieving this servant to the host that offered the information, and the environment we have created does not support this perpetual evolution. I think we are subconsciously afraid of this, and think that there would be nothing to work towards if we all achieved this state of being, so we idolise the exception of this, not evolve it as a mainstream premise of being. Like money, we cultivate the scarcity of being free. This is a complete misconception of existence. It is in leveraging self-love in its fullest form that we accept not just who we are but what we can and would become. That is true sustainability.

To speak of this sense of positivity and empowerment in a world of artificial battles, like vehicle registration, good schooling, taxes is odd. Is information truly constructive or is it only to sell a perception? There will always be challenges, but the idea is to overcome them, not empower them. No exchange model can do this better than qualitative exchange.
Self-empowerment is a personal journey that we cannot own, hold back, for a price. Quality has no limits, so communicating empowerment through a quantified way disempowers it. We create fear when our creative capacity is constrained. While we believe things or people are icons over oneself, we devalue who we are.
I feel I need to give an illuminating example of how all this works, as we are the system, not just a part of one.
The automotive industry is going to through some intense changes with the introduction of Tesla. It is not the only innovation in the transport industry, but it is the most well-known at this time. It took Elon Musk his personal fortune, and more, to make Tesla happen. It almost failed, but today it’s sales figures are enviable. I see them everywhere and have had the pleasure to drive them since the Roadster. Build quality was hard in coming but conquered. Projects are scaling to incorporate electric power across energy demands, particularly for the home.

Competition demands alternatives and so, even though Tesla information is available open source, industry is instead looking at using hydrogen to create electricity to power a motor. That means transforming energy twice. Like nuclear energy, the energy of hydrogen is as volatile, difficult to extract, requires specialised equipment to contain, and a huge amount of infrastructure to deploy, in the same way petrol does. However more efficient and more abundant hydrogen may be, depending on where you source your information, it is still scarce, and the infrastructure alone to make it efficient is incredibly immense. This will take a huge amount of time and money. Like nuclear does. And to create energy for what? Our current, inefficient, largely disempowering, happiness in a bubble, lifestyles.

The first steps in using electricity to power transport has been made, thanks to Elon and all those who share a vision for quiet, efficient, energy. Logic demands that solutions that require as few transfers of energy as possible from abundant sources: wind, sun, ocean. These are safe and low maintenance, almost set and forget. We also already have the electrical grid infrastructure to push this and will improve through further urban and rural development. Infrastructure is set and forget, and be deployed easily at multiple areas, to be replaced as demand increases and technology and design improves. Output can be licensed for a return of investment. Everyone is happy and energy accessible.

But this is not happening. Instead of reducing work and enjoying more experiences, we create work for its own sake. Follow the connections back to why we are stalling on sustainable innovation and it leads to money. Further, we are sold the idea that hydrogen is good because it offers more jobs. It will over a longer period because the deployment of renewable energy will follow the same path as Bitcoin: charging licensing for unlimited energy becomes redundant as the need for infrastructure decreases. It runs itself, so better to let it go. Money slows efficiency down; it does not encourage it.
The same analysis can be made for food production. It has been proven that permaculture practices will yield more nutrition and values soil more than monoculture practices. Less work demanded to care for the crop, although more is likely to be required at harvest. If we are to value a qualitative return of investment, then we would value the time to build a permaculture food forest. Money, however demands yield in as short a time as possible, compromising quality for volume, and eve then so much of it is wasted due to market demand. We increase the amount of time to create yield, and make a very difficult industry artificially harder by taking the fun out of it.

Farming would be even more enjoyable if we introduced practices that really reconnected farmers to the creativity if magnifying diversity, not just maintaining it, but making its evolution an event! Depending on scale, each farmer or group of farmers would have access to a chef, either living on the land or in the area, for weekly, even daily, feasts at different farms, always something different, for people in the region or even further. Bring your own plate and glass, and discover new gastronomy and people that come with it. These could be low cost or even free, valuing the quality and diversity of what is advertised on the day. Waste, and scarcity, are resolved. It becomes cooler to be a farmer as it is not so time dependent and such hard work. This is not just a sales pitch to make a hard industry look easy, but leverages creative input for the great quality with minimal resources in the shortest time.

It would be incredibly wrong to think no one would be interested in doing this. There is an abundance of permaculture design graduates, just no platform on which to practice their chosen interest. Again, we see doing this as the exception, but would be the norm.

An exchange model must facilitate this type of creative capacity. While currency has a cost, this is extremely difficult to do as the top tier becomes the bank, which creates nothing except given the authority to create and distribute money. A debt-free, therefore stable, currency would go forward a long way to shift pressure from production volume to what is best to produce in that locality, and have access to the smarts to do it. Giving what is created freely takes this to a whole new level. Just as easily as we have been sold fear to be wary of connecting, we can show the incredible benefits and security a gifting model can create, but this also demands trusting others as much as yourself, the latter usually being the bigger problem than the trusting others.

Our current economic model has been built around the weakest link: people that want to create nothing, and so we venerate them. Instead, a model that values the strongest in creating excellence is the key. They are al priceless. Their reputation is beyond a quantity. We always value the intrinsic in people, with unquantifiable capacity to create joy, so why make this so difficult for so many people?

Politics has a lot to answer for in perpetuating this, and so it’s flaws are finally becoming glaringly clear. Fighting politics with politics, ethically-based proposals, achieves nothing. Make the beast redundant, and it goes away.
So does entertainment. In watching almost 50 years of TV and film, it is amazing how the story doesn’t change, only the way it is told. The acting is the same, except that they become more violently intense. Always the good overpowering the bad, in parameters that always invite compromise, not resolution. Peace is always wrapped up in some idea of some external artefact that powers the universe, either kept safe in peace, or lost, or to be possessed by some nemesis that thinks there is more power in dominion. Of course, there isn’t.

You are the artefact. We all are. We do not have to be this weakened, this disconnected from self. You are an icon. This is not something to actively step up to, you are already. Do what you want with it. It’s up to you.

WHERE TO GO FROM HERE
This has been a very encompassing construct of many facets of life that many people look at separately to resolve, but the parameters to resolve them in is just as important, and like any good idea, these are very simple.

Understanding money is a good step forward. If it was as simple as simple a measure of energy exchanged, it would not be much of a problem, but it isn’t. It takes more energy to create it than what it produces, hence why all its debt can never be paid off, and so is not economical.

For people that feel human nature and its greed is the problem, look at the environment it is cultivated in. Dr Bruce Lipton pants out all cells are the same, but the environment triggers what genes become active. we learn to adapt to the environment we are in to survive. Quickly. Watch a child’s incredible joy of life at birth when all they want to express is love in the total abundance they are given, and then learn that not all live in a world where love, and resources, are not abundant. This is why foundations that offer security of children without sacrificing creative empowerment is so important to cultivate. When we can actively engage our creative capacities, we will stop at nothing to apply them and give the result.

Look to your networks and each of you offer what you want to create most for free. See in what sever it its in: food, clothing, shelter, tech, transport, healthcare. Connect your network, and find others with similar mindsets, on platforms like Sustainable Human, not so much as to track what you have done, but more to advertise what you really want to do, and to see who offers what you need. If there are sectors missing for which you need money for, find them in your area and invite them into your network, offering them the network’s capacity for free in exchange for what they offer in return. Look at models that reduce their need for debt to survive, and offer expertise to shift their production line from units of lowest quality at a designated price to a highest quality production on demand line. Leverage this to all sectors to obviate the need for debt. Thinking that the powers that be will not allow this to happen, like in Wörgl in 1932, is a misconception. They are all disempowered by debt, and even if they think they are not, the infrastructure that supports that is falling down around them and there will be no place to turn but to be able to do what they really wanted, and be supported to do that. Without compromise.

If you think this is not feasible, that it is a nice idea but practically impossible, ask yourself where does your fear that it not work come from? Look for ideas for what can work instead of judging such a proposal as viable or not. Unless you do not want to be empowered without limits. Then it doesn’t matter. That’s OK. You will come around when you are ready.
Is this my exit for a part 2? To explain, to implement, how this works in detail on a case by case basis, at any scale? I am happy to do that.

I’ve realised this is my Everest for fundamental change, as much for everyone as for myself.

I look forward to hearing from you.

I love you.