Having spent yesterday talking about a new form of money that seems to chime with peoples’ needs and ideals, plus trying to get a research study of the ground, it is becoming clear that conventional mechanisms of money innovation and production are becoming increasingly irrelevant. By ‘conventional mechanisms’ I mean banks and related financial institutions which have dominated the production of modern money. The problem is not down to a lack of effort or creativity on the part of such institutions, it seems that the problem is a cultural one in which banks in particular have found it very difficult to adjust to a post modern or "liquid modern" world.
In the industrial / modern era, money sought to commoditize things, every "thing" had its price, even intangible things like culture. Money could reduce something subjective and relative such as "meaning" and convert it into an object of exchange and a store of value in its own right (such as a brand). Beginning with art, money became the means by which ideals and values could be authentically accounted for, owned, rationalized and objectively valued – ultimately as the new sources of power and status in the modern individualized capitalist world. The epitome of this development of modern money, was the use of this liberated money to create and value itself (rather than gold or some concept of state edict); all in the name of the modern ideals of freedom, efficiency, rationalism and maximizing returns on investment. The paradox of this achievement was that it required money to acquire social and perhaps irrational attributes of power, authority and trust – the basis of ‘confidence’ – to assert its status as both the right and natural for money to ‘be’ and ‘do’–ultimately despite its pretentions to independent creation and ontology (through central ‘banks’) this money was implicitly being underwritten and created by a state which was all too glad of it leveragability as a source of finance for its own goals and ends.
Modern Money inhabits a ‘macro’, largely abstracted, world where local or individual concerns were subsumed or flattened within a legal and rational framework of capitalist realism. In this world, profit is the only real measure of success – anything else was merely a by-product of or in service of profit. Profit was real because it could be objectively accounted for in terms of money. The desire for money, so long seen as ethically and morally empty (or even illegal if you consider the crime of usury) became the ‘demand’ for money. Demand became a function of ‘need’ not greed.
It is ironic that this rationality is often contrasted with the motivations of individual ‘consumers’ when demand for money becomes overheated. We are seen as somehow ‘addicted’ to credit, "crazy" for our obsession with the value of our homes, or irrationally exuberant in our belief in risk free returns.
Even the internet, or at least much of its content, has been subsumed and commoditized (and now largely controlled and administered) within this framework, contrary to the values and aims of its largely academic/scientific inception. In fact, money has exploited the global reach and borderless communication channels of the digital space to increase its own power and reach. However, it is in the digital space where the confidence which is the basis of power and control of the means of production of modern money has come under its most sustained and effective attack. Imagine if the endowment miss-selling scandal in the UK had happened in the Noughties, rather than the relatively disconnected 80’s and early 90’s or if the Equitable pensioners were a bit more savvy ‘silver surfers’?
Liquid money is not being created in the factories of the City or Wall Street but in the Sunday Supplements and journalistic websites of opinion formers, campaigners and even those paragons of "consumer choice"- price comparison engines. We have new ‘authorities’ whose critical judgment can make or break a financial innovation. Likewise in business the concept of the ‘social enterprise’ is slowly breaking away from its charitable roots and challenging the judgments of the ‘Masters of the Universe’ who can only view their ‘value’ in terms of profit (or social worth) but not both. Having a ‘mission’ and a ‘profit motive’ in the liquid modern era is no longer a contradiction. Liquid Money is now in service of culture and the creation of meaning not just economic value.
Perhaps these new authorities represent something of a false dawn, merely being extensions of our current fetishisation of celebrity or popular ‘knowledge’ over scientific or common sense. An attempt at a new power structure rather than the populist equality of their brand and personal ‘positioning’. Does Peston prick the conscience of the city for fame and fortune or out of altruistic journalistic zeal? Certainly much of this ‘discourse’ on money remains outside of the day to day dealings with money of many people.
Which brings me to things like Barcamp or my own efforts (watch this space) to create new forms of money which are in the service of wider social, environmental and cultural goals. Forms of money which relegate profit from being solely an end to being a means. Forms of money which will produce new forms of collaboration which represent a shift away from the concept of profit being the only ‘real’ return (or measure of collective value), and from the narrow rationalism of comparing outcomes via ‘basis points’ over the less black and white qualitative judgment of ethical and moral outcomes. In this world view, money has the potential to re-acquire a solidity and reality which is socially and ethically based.
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