Towards multivalent currencies, bioregional monetary stewardship and a distributed global reserve currency

In this second blog of a 4-part series we are sharing some design principles that could underpin a desirable future scenario. The blog series is centred on the following enquiries and this reflection aims to address question two.

1. What are the issues that make money (and our dominant monetary systems) so problematic? (Blog 1)
2. Can we use design principles to help us imagine desirable future scenarios?
3. What could a desirable future scenario actually look like? (Blog 3)
4. What can we start building and testing now to begin scaffolding a parallel system? (Blog 4)

Part 2 (of 4): Can we use design principles to help us imagine desirable future scenarios?

In the first blog of this series we explored a number of factors that make our current monetary system incompatible with a regenerative and equitable future. Highlighting such issues feels important but it should not be the end goal. If something is threatening our shared fates, then it is our collective responsibility to try and create an alternative. Our aim is to learn from sharing these initial thoughts by inviting comments and critiques. Ultimately we hope to convene a community who have diverse skills and experiences beyond our own; a distributed team united in designing and building the alternative monetary system that we so desperately require. A first step towards that is to think carefully about what a desirable monetary system might in fact contain.

We are approaching this challenge in two parts:

• Firstly, by sharing ten design principles that we think should underpin a regenerative monetary system.
• Secondly, we are in the process of developing aspirational future scenarios that respectfully explore the above principles.

Design principles

Copper reserves cannot be equated with a forest. Carbon sequestration is not interchangeable with soil microbes. A whale’s life is not proportional to a barrel of oil.

Credit: Dr Martin Lorenz

The following principles underpin a vision that opens up the future rather than closing it down. Whilst it is critical to understand the constraints (such as energy and carbon), we also need to seed a desire for non-competitive, infinite economies. Value flows such as solidarity, information and care can be managed in a different way to finite economies, providing a liberating release valve to our current scarcity mindset.

1. Maintain interregional stability via organised exchange: our global supply chains are complex and entangled. Currently, the major reserve currency is backed by military force rather than by the collective values of the global population. As the polycrisis² intensifies we must ensure that we have the systems in place to trade fluidly and to provide a strong incentive to maintain peaceful relations.
2. Uplift economically poor but regeneratively rich regions: in much of the world our conception of profit and wealth is perverse, but it can be reconceived in service of regenerative potential. Regions and communities that are regeneratively abundant should automatically derive transactional rights that can be used to uplift critical infrastructures.
3. Elevate decentralised, value-backed currency issuance: Bitcoin is an example of alternative currency with a link to the physical world. This is achieved by the proof of work function that rewards miners who solve a mathematical problem with newly issued bitcoin (or with transactional fees). This principle builds on the requirement for a tangible link with the biosphere to break the cycle of growth linked extraction which we explored in Blog 1. However, it seeks to achieve it by stewarding and increasing regenerative potential rather than by solving inane calculations.
4. Steward respectful interchangeability: we must clearly understand that finite elements of our world are not commensurate. Copper reserves cannot be equated with a forest. Carbon sequestration is not interchangeable with soil microbes. A whale’s life is not proportional to a barrel of oil. We must create closed loop cycles of stewardship that ensure respectful fungibility.
5. Quantify rather than price: markets provide a powerful distributed allocation mechanism for private assets, but are dangerously inadequate in relation to common elements such, soil health and air quality. Our attempts to price ‘nature’ and ‘natural assets’ have to date only yielded further extraction. We thus need to think about using measurements to account for the base reality of our systems rather than their priced abstractions.
6. Build visceral accountability: our transactional worldview allows people to separate their lived experience from their monetary choices. To maintain healthy relationships with each other and with our ecosystems, we must reconnect our animate senses to our decision making processes. Unless we can sense and feel how our actions play out, we are unlikely to tap into the wisdom required to steward a densely populated planet.
7. Commit to computational collaboration: the increasing ability to digitalise living systems can be directed to help us understand diverse perspectives, including those of the other-than-human world. What would it mean to create technologies of care? Could we use computation power to build interfaces that clearly visualise and recognise the complexity of entangled value flows?
8. Drive dynamic, iterative decision making: we must avoid the conceited falsity of being in control of living systems. Instead, the data that we collect can be used to create a dynamic understanding of complex interactions. For example, how are the different elements reacting with each other? How does the picture evolve as more data comes in? What does this mean in terms of acting as a respectful ecosystem collaborator?
9. Strengthen participatory value governance: building on principles 7 and 8, we must design governance systems capable of understanding the collective values of nested communities. This form of open society will transcend narrow voting behaviours in service of our collective thriving.
10. Interweave spiritual and political logic: we must aspire to preserve the aesthetic, intrinsic sacredness of life whilst recognising the political reality of our time. Holding both perspectives, whilst the transitional reverberations rip through the fabric of society, will be a critical aspect of this work.

Outlining a desirable scenario

Imagine a situation where currencies and capital are fundamentally linked to the objective, intersubjective and intrinsic value of interconnected relationships. Where the accounting and forecasting systems allow for multivalent factors and unforeseen possibilities. Where multi-sensor inputs are connected to a continuous participatory governance structure and trans-contextual decision making is the norm. This might sound complex and opaque, but in reality the technology either already exists or is close to reaching this level of functionality. The constraints are primarily those of path dependency² and power defending inertia.

We fully acknowledge that we cannot simply transcend the structural reality of our existing socio-economic systems. The aim is therefore to present the seeds of a cohesive alternative, because whilst we cannot possibly imagine the exact form of a future monetary system, we can think about the building blocks that it might contain. In our next blog we will share an outline for a possible scenario that we hope to use as a conceptual baseline for an initial prototype. If the above principles have sparked any ideas regarding what a desirable scenario might contain, or if you are already working in this field, we would really value your thoughts.

This blog was written by Emily Harris (emily@darkmatterlabs.org) under Dark Matter’s Next Economics LAB. In 2024, the NE Lab will partner with Radicle Civics to start working on some tangible proofs of possibility for bioregional currencies.

References:

1. We are using the term polycrisis to describe how multiple crises are interrelated and coalesce to create compounded effects.
2. Path dependency refers to processes where past events or decisions constrain later events or decisions.