Patterns
Lifestyle Currencies
41 week ago
Life Design
Lately I’ve been getting excited about this the notion of deliberately crafting the form and flow of your life to most effortlessly and joyfully achieve your goals. We focus a lot on what we want in life, but there is not enough emphasis on how we can create it on a day-to-day basis. We are focused on the future– yearning toward the moment when the to-do list is cleared instead of being present and attending to the activity of our work or play. After a particularly unproductive day and a strong feeling of frustration, it became acutely apparent to me that I have all the resources, allies and opportunities I need to live my (our?) dream. The only thing standing in my way is myself and my own habits and assumptions.
So I decided to shift my priorities. Instead of focusing on slaying my to-do list by any means necessary, my new number one priority in life is to craft an elegant lifestyle for myself. My big project is to create a daily rhythm filled with just enough structure to support me, and custom-tailored to my own unique quirks and tendencies. It will be designed to maximize my effectiveness in doing work, and also support my physical and spiritual health, create space for social and romantic connection, artistic pursuits, etc. The design will also be programmed with my major, long-term goals and visions such that I can build toward success on a daily basis. The content of my days are simply opportunities to practice and iterate my life design.
I have no clue how to do this, so I’m just taking the first step. What feels right now is tracking and measuring what I’m currently doing so I can make my own patterns and inefficiencies visible. I’ve started by tracking every dollar I spend, and also logging anticipated expenses so that I have a sense of my working cash balance at all times. The next step is to begin tracking every hour of the day, writing down what I did. I already do this for clients, tracking my billable hours- so why not be as accountable to myself as I am to a client? After all, I am the biggest stakeholder in my own life.
When Lifestyles Collide
Once we’ve crafted a Rolls-Royce of life structures and support systems for ourselves as individuals, the next hurdle becomes learning how to interact and collaborate gracefully with others. Realistically, we’ll probably be working on this in parallel as we hash out own own life design. Regardless, this seems like a ripe opportunity to use new currencies.
I like Metacurrency’s definition of a currency: anything that shapes, enables or measures a flow- a flow of time, effort, information, or life-force energy.
So a lifestyle currency might be a tool that helps us measure our own lifestyle variables and relate it to others. As we become clear about how we want to live, we might declare receptor sites for collaboration and contribution- places where you invite help, support or connection. Lifestyle currencies might be the pheromones that help receptor cites communicate about what is needed and where it is available. My dashboard might indicate that I’m meditating far less than I’d prefer. And yours might show that you’re strong on meditation and have a similar attitude toward contemplative practices. So we might connect and you can tell me how you were able to work meditation into your life on a consistent basis.
Or perhaps a lifestyle currency might be even more interactive. It might show that I’m an ENFP on the Myers-Briggs, and you’re and INTP, and that brings up a red flag when we indicate that we’d like to collaborate on an art project together. We notice that warning, and then move forward, taking care to create a solution that addresses the issue, which we can then contribute back to the dashboard as a possible best practice for enhancing collaboration in the context of this specific personality pairing.
Lifestyle currencies might be a lot simpler. We might use them as realtime guides, perhaps an app on your phone that dings every 45 minutes to remind you to take a stretch break, and then offers the opportunity to log your actions for the past 45min. and rate how motivated or connected to your purpose or awake you feel in that moment. Your coworkers might see that Jay is feeling angry and sad at the moment, which might be a really helpful tool for someone who has a tough time being frank about their emotions.
A Post-Mechanical Operations Plan
After studying operations in business school, I find the whole discipline rather mechanical. My friend Stacy Flynn said it well- one of the big problems with the corporate economy is that it tries to model businesses after machines. The problem is, people run businesses, and people are not machines. So a living systems approach might be more appropriate. Would it be possible for a group or organization to shift its focus toward nurturing the optimal life-flows of its members and designing in-situ currencies to facilitate the organic cross-pollination of skills, effort energy and expertise? Might such an organization drastically outperform the standard and highly wasteful corporate approach to working together? I don’t know, but it sounds like a worthy experiment!
Some iPad thought-art to spice things up:
Social Media + New Currencies + Collaborative Consumption
32 weeks ago
The trend known as Collaborative Consumption is a wave of businesses, apps and projects that use community as a foundation for the creation of shared value. Many of these businesses are only made possible by the use of modern social media– AirBnB would not be possible without the web, and actually uses the Facebook API to show you if you might be connected to your host through a mutual friend. So the sharing economy uses social media natively. Check.
Woah! What is contextual dimensionality??!! Pardon my buzzword. By this I mean the information being shared via social media has more meaning because it has context. Information on the social web also has personality, and over time we are building rich avatars of ourselves online. Social media, as Dan Robles reminded me, will be the medium of exchange for the next currency systems. Although its far from a perfect system, social media gives us a much more personable, moldable set of tools than one-dimensional money.
Social media is the design space that will allow us to co-design and prototype the next currency system. Businesses built around the collaborative consumption framework will likely be the early adopters of new currencies because they need better tools for facilitating trust, measuring relational value and documenting non quid-pro-quo interactions.
But what’s the point of all this if its not moving the ball forward for humanity? The task at hand is to see the world through new eyes, to be more awake and to embrace the beauty on this planet and work to increase it. So if we don’t keep that ultimate purpose in our hearts while we design these new systems, I’m afraid we might just create Money 2.0.
Beyond Steady State Economics: Toward a Multivariable Capitalism
63 weeks ago
Do the Ends Justify the Means?
First off, I’d like to say that I’m actually not sold on the idea of a steady-state economy- I don’t think its a panacea for economic reform; I do find it to be a valuable discussion that brings up a lot of important questions.
Put in currency terms, a steady-state economy would have zero growth in the money supply. In a previous post, I established that this is impossible with the current design of money: for debts to be repaid and cleared, new money needs to enter the economy through still more loans. Even if the design was tweaked a little bit so that there were a constant supply of money, this would still be a scarcity-based currency that would severely limit our ability to make the critical evolutionary leaps required of us.
Let’s suspend that frustrating fact for a moment and vision into a hypothetical economy that would have a currency system that could support a steady state economy.
Why Steady-State?
Among both Democrats and Republicans, economic growth is the one thing everyone can agree is good. For years, growth has been championed as The Solution to just about every problem- from Third World Poverty to the financial crisis. However, the dark side of growth is the fact that we churn and burn natural ecosystems and human communities in the quest for dark black bottom lines. So when economic growth comes with increased destruction, it makes sense to look at creating an economy that doesn’t require growth. Recently, and MIT study found that the year 2030 is likely to be the moment at which we run out of Earth- when we will have consumed too many of our natural resources to feed our population, and population will begin to decline.
Limits to Growth. Chart Sources: Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W.W. (1972)
Shifting Growth to Real Forms of Capital.
Conventional economics outlines a few different forms of capital, mainly Financial, Built, Natural and Human. Ecological economics expands on this a bit to include Cultural capital. The predominant pattern of our current economy has been to consume natural and human capital through the use of built capital for the purpose of growing financial capital. (Fun fact- Even mainstream economists admit that money isn’t a true form of capital, but rather a proxy representation of actual value.) So we can still have growth, we just need to flip the equation a bit, and re-consider the variable we’re trying to grow. Instead of growing money, perhaps it would be more strategic to grow the maturity of human, or the resilience of an ecosystem. Those are two pretty huge needs in the world right now. Perhaps it looks more like using financial capital as a tool to organize and allocate built capital for the purpose of growing natural, human and cultural capital. We want to follow the rules of the universe and grow a quantity that is capable of infinity. Perhaps love fits those specifications. Lets try! I’d be part of a story of a planet of people trying to grow infinite love than a story of people trying to be clever and grow infinite abstract representations of scarcity.
Check out Herman Daly’s Ends-Means Spectrum for some insight on getting our various forms of capital into better alignment:
Image by Jon Erickson (2005) via Jim Pittman
How Might Multi-Currencies Help us Flip the Equation?
My first guess is in the power of new currencies to enable new business models. New business models will help us create value in ways that support life rather than extract it.
Another guess might be that currencies can help us have a conversation about values, sovereignty and the path of the collective. We all want freedom and we all need community. Currencies might help us prototype and model new ways of working and living together and capture data and patterns in the process that we might not otherwise be able to observe.
Another guess is that new currencies can begin to look at not only tangible, objective stuff but subjective reality and emotions. How do we express invaluable things like love in a way such that they show up closer to infinity than to zero? Recent revelations in fields like behavioral economics expose the fallacy of purely rational decision-making and beg us to pay more attention to emotion, compassion and identity. What would a currency of emotion look like? How might a feminine, relationship-driven currency work? Some scholars suggest that goddess-worshipping cultures in the Gothic era had different currency designs that encouraged them to invest their surplus back into the community, allowing them to build the cathedrals over hundreds and hundreds of years.
As we move into an era when we can quickly be overwhelmed by the number of options available to us in life, perhaps new currencies will be less tools for allowcating scarce resources, and more for managing abundance.
Beyond Metrics, or “Its the Paradigm, Stupid!”
With all this geeky talk about currency, I’d like to just make a reminder that this conversation is not actually about numbers or economics. Its about the assumptions that create structures like money. So we can use currencies as a powerful example, but ultimately the task at hand is not to invent a new way of counting. Its about asking ourselves what we’re counting, and why. How might art be expressed in currency? Do we even need currencies? Perhaps the ultimate goal of new currencies is so help humanity mature to the point where they don’t need the crutch of an external tool to enable them to trust each other and work together.
Props to the Art as Money Project
This is the second in a series on new currencies. View the first post here.
Quadruple Bottom Line Accounting, New Currencies, and post-Newtonian Finance
131 month ago
How might new currencies help us not only measure the full spectrum of our impact, but actually transform our financial paradigm?
What follows is a crash introduction to the world of new currency thinking, the first in a ten-post series. It is intended to leave you with more questions than answers, since that is how all of us currency geeks feel. Its a wicked problem through and through, so let’s dive right into the mess!
Where are we now?
The Growth Imperative.
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” – Albert Bartlett, PhD
Growth of the money supply is mathematically required by its design. When a bank issues a loan, it hands out the principal, but not the interest. Since all money is debt-backed, all the other dollars you earn are also only the principal from their originating loan. So where does the extra money come from so that there is enough money in the system for people to pay back their loans with interest? It comes from new loans! So the debt treadmill of loans to pay off loans is essentially hard-coded into money itself.
All the conversations about post-growth economies are great. And there is no way to have a post-growth economy with our existing currency design.
Systemic Risk
Banks issue loans at their own discretion, and yet we are all affected by their decisions because the concomitant growth in the money supply has implications for the economic system as a whole. When banks issue a bunch of loans all at once, and there is no corresponding rise in real economic activity, this exacerbates the exponential curve, causing the system to hunger for new loans to pay off the old. In this case, you could say the banks have externalized their risk onto the system as a whole.
Money is Designed for Double-Entry Accounting.
Double-entry accounting was invented during the Renaissance in Venice when it was the trading capital of the world. The double-entry method requires every economic transaction to debit one account and credit the other with an equal and opposite quantity. This dualistic bias means that some transactions might not be possible to measure with a currency that can only track symmetrical, two-directional changes. Money is only one measurement tool in a world that requires us to solve for multiple variables at the same time. If we created a true triple- or quadruple-bottom-line accounting system that integrated social, financial, ecological and spiritual progress, how would we weave each of these aspects together into a single picture of the health of a system, business or person? Would we want to? Is it possible? Who knows, but let’s dare to explore.
Financial Monoculture.
It is a bit crazy that we use one master quantitative measure to govern stunningly vast portions of our lives. Just like hundreds of acres of a single crop leads to a poor ecosystem, we live in a world of financial monoculture that leads the business world to make decisions that undermine the healthy of the economy, people and our planet. What would a financial polyculture look like where we might have different currencies for different forms of value? A trust currency might take a long time to grow but then accrue significant benefits once past a certain threshold. A food currency might lose its value in the average time it takes for food to spoil. You might earn health currency by volunteering at a retirement home or giving your friend a massage.
Where might we be going?
Currencies are Inherently Virtual.
Money today has no inherent value; they are symbols of value – representatives, placeholders, derivatives. I’m fine with this- I think its appropriate for money to be pure data in the Information Age. I do think that we could design some better software, though. In fact, one of my favorite ideas is that of an open-source currency system, in which people have full agency and liberty over the design and adoption of the currencies they use. The Metacurrency Project is working on what amounts to a platform upon which people can operate and interoperate currencies that act essentially as apps which people can develop, adopt, use and ditch as needed.
The Network Effect.
So why is money so ubiquitous? It is ubiquitous because it is ubiquitous! “Network effects” are a trait of any social technology such as telephones or networking websites– the more people on the network, the more useful it is, and in turn, the next round of people join the network. So our current form of money is valuable because of its universal acceptance. It is perhaps the most widely accepted myth the world has ever seen. Many attempts at alternative currencies fail simply because they are like a little startup social network with a better design trying to compete with Facebook. My guess is that new currencies will gain traction by identifying the unique way in which they do a better job than money, and then taking advantage of their own network effects.
The Network Effect
Values Embedded into the Currency.
Many times I hear people bemoan, “My heart isn’t in my job, I just do it to pay the bills.” If money makes it difficult to live in integrity with our values, how might we design currencies that actually make it easier to be our highest selves? How might we embed our values into personalized currencies that attract stuff we care about. In a relativistic world, are absolute values a thing of the past? For example, if you value local agriculture, you might choose to impose a personal tax or subsidy on yourself such that a locally-produced kombucha might be cheaper than a can of coke. If you buy the coke, at the end of the month your accrued tax might be automatically donated to a local farm.
Evolving Currencies.
The source code of biology – DNA – evolves to create the beautiful and miraculous diversity we call life. If we were to take a biomimetic approach to currency design, we might create an adaptable system in which currencies have the ability to change on the fly to reflect our changing priorities, knowledge and mental models. In many ways, this is the key specification for an improved currency system.
Particle and Wave.
In addition to its dualistic nature, today’s money is also based on Newtonian physics in the sense that it is modeled after a physical particle. However, the most important thing about money is how it moves and changes- essentially its more wave-like dynamics. How might we create currency systems that look at value and transaction as a series of fluid relationships that don’t always have discreet, linear transfers?
Social Media and The Internet of Things.
The currency paradigm I’m hinting at was not possible even 10 years ago. The medium of exchange of new currencies is, and will be social media. Facebook is already releasing their own credits. The beautiful thing about the internet is that activity is automatically tracked and recorded- the map is updated in real time as the territory is traversed.
The Internet of Things is the vision of everyday physical objects that have constant data streams onto the internet so that very granular movements can effortlessly be tracked, measured and paid for via the internet. This technology has very interesting implications for a currency system in which value can be measured in a form most closely resembling its native form rather than some abstract universal reference point like money. Although this brings us important ethical concerns, new currencies might be the very tools we need to scale democracy to meet our technology.
Impending Wisdom.
What is real?
In Buddhism, Samadhi means “insight,” an intellectual understanding. In our Information Age, we consume novel information and convert it into knowledge and new insight and thereby strengthen in Samadhi. However, we can only go so far with this, and must go a layer deeper into embodied, experiential wisdom. This deep embodied wisdom is called prajñā, and is the real deal Holyfield. As we move beyond the Information Age into what some call the Consciousness Age, the importance of understanding and shifting our own mental models becomes increasingly important. We need currencies that allow us to see things as they are, not how we would like them to be.
New Currencies Enable New Business Models.
Beyond gaining a more accurate picture of the world around and within us, new currencies unlock new ways of being, doing and relating. Projects that sound like great ideas but don’t pencil out financially in the current system may just be possible on a more nuanced currency platform. In fact, the early adopters of new currency systems are likely to be people with new business models that require ways of relating that transcend the limitations of quid-pro-quo transactions. Open source software has managed to flourish despite the fact that its business model does not fit well with the current financial template. This is in part due to the fact that open source developers have created robust governance and accountability systems that provide some of the functionality of new currencies; they support trust-building and facilitate collaboration. Money was good at managing scarcity, but today, abundance is the new scarcity. In modern societies there are so many options, opportunities, career tracks, entertainment options and lifestyles that we all have information overload and are overwhelmed by the abundance of paths in front of us. My guess is that new currencies could be a valuable tool to help us navigate this vast abundance to live a more meaningful life.
