Hummus and Money

Pragmatist beat me too it with the historical account of Thomas Barker’s meet up on Wednesday for open finance.

I am not sure if I answered the advertised question – i.e. why is banking like the music industry of the nineties? – but we did have a thought provoking debate about the meaning of money in contemporary UK culture nevertheless – specifically around people who are (in my view) ‘living without money’ in what one recent research respondent called ‘the waiting room of life’.

Pragmatist is also right to focus on the two things which banks (and the music industry) don’t get or don’t want to get about our relationship with money. We don’t exchange (or share) money solely like rational economic beings and importantly neither do we aspire to be such. This is the disconnect of the Neo-liberal economic project (if such exists) – I don’t want to be an actor directed by my rational judgment, to paraphrase Life of Brian – I want to be an individual (or something meaningful in a cultural sense at least). Trying to convince me to act or be otherwise will generate counter intuitive and counterproductive responses which are designed to subvert the perceived lack of control over my own destiny (which this ironically liberal inspired philosophy requires). Rational decisions don’t make you free – just free to choose from what I am given. Discuss.

Secondly ‘financial services’ is a construct of the old model of consumer culture – the one based on material value of goods produced by willing consumers who seek a Whiggish form of utility, social progress and personal development. The problem with this model is its inherent contradictions (which Marx correctly identified would create its own self destructive tendency) but that is not too say that the death of the consumer means the end of consumption as we know it. Money can be created in the image of whatever normative values your wish for as a society as can the desire to consume. Money and consumpton are merely the means to an end - they are an Obama style 'blank canvas' upon which we can project our own values.

The shift I was trying to communicate was from what a product does to what it creates. Moving to this alternative value equation creates the opportunity for new business models and entrepreneurial activity which challenge the status quo with a new avant garde of money.

It is interesting that the most common google search that brings someone to a site discussing money is ‘Living without money’. There are forms of money it is possible to live without but to do away with the concept of money completely is to misunderstand its potential for the creation of new social and cultural value to fill the hole created by the financial crunch.