Back to basics: What is money? What is value? (What is critical?)

2017 has begun just as 2016 ended. More terrorist attacks, more bloodshed, more confusion, more fear & less hope about the course of future events on the global stage. We appear to be living in a time of crisis on multiple levels. How can we possibly escape such a vicious circle? What can be done?

And yet, at the same time, we are more informed & connected than ever before; we are healthier, wealthier & more aware of what is going on in the world. Surely we are intelligent enough to find a way out of this confusion. Surely we can create a better world.

I believe it is time for us to cut through the complexity of modern living, see through the "lies & bright lights" of the current system of appearances, PR, marketing, Black Friday special offers, breaking news on Facebook, false smiles & the worship of the false Money deity. At the same time, I also recognize the irony of posting such views & opinions on a social media platform. Life is full of contradictions. Humans handle contradictions better than the machines we construct. We must now embrace such contradictions, understand them & expose them for what they are, if we are to stand a chance of competing with the artificial intelligence (AI) that we are spawning to do all the work our bodies, minds & souls carried out in a previous, long-forgotten age, somewhere & somewhen back in the early 21st century.

As Karl Marx understood & tried to explain to his confused contemporaries in Volume 1, Chapter 3 of Das Kapital; as John Maynard Keynes tried to explain to his confused contemporaries throughout his General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money: money is a social construct with no intrinsic value of its own, invented again & again throughout history as a means of exchanging all those objects, ideas & visions of the world that do have real intrinsic value.

For example: I breed cows & you make shoes. I need to walk through mud & rain to the next market to sell those cows "that are surplus to my requirements" & you want to eat a Sunday roast. Then we need to find a way of exchanging pieces of meat for pairs of shoes. A very clever person - i.e. a lord, priest, banker or economist - comes along with a perfect idea: here is something I call a currency - sea-shells, pieces of gold, pieces of signed paper, 1s & 0s on a computer screen - that can represent/measure all the values you could possibly imagine that society will ever need. I open up a big, thick, heavy book & start writing down symbols in a strange, foreign language in rows & columns. I create an enormous ledger of all objects, ideas & visions of the world with real intrinsic value that a society/economy at a particular moment in history needs to exchange. I then put a number next to each object of value based on the new currency I have created. This particular currency must be a "universal equivalent" that everyone agrees has "value" or else the whole system collapses. Of course, the cows & the shoes are the objects of true value that I require to clothe, feed & protect myself and my family, but we accept the universal equivalent as a necessary evil.

[In the case of United Kingdom, it is the 60 million citizens; 300,000 emergency services personnel; the nationwide TETRA network; the nationwide public safety LTE network; the control rooms; connected cars; drones; sensors; cameras etc. etc. - i.e. an Emergency Services Network (ESN) - that is the real system I need to build/fund to protect my nation. Rather than the Treasury, Cabinet Office & their well-connected consultants ideologically beginning with the total minimum amount of money I can get away with to fund a "best-effort system" & then imposing "a budget" on the Home Office & emergency services; a successful, caring society must start with real user requirements; everything that is required to guarantee national security & public safety for the long term & then work out the best possible way of funding this collectively!]

Unfortunately, as time goes by, for obvious, well-studied, well-understood (at least by Marx, Keynes, most bankers & a few economists/historians) reasons, the relationship between the objects of true value & "money" switches. Instead of working in order to produce objects/ideas/visions of true value to exchange with each other to produce truly strong, resilient, valuable societies, most people end up working for the universal equivalent (i.e. money), carrying out tasks that are increasingly less related & more remote from the creation of true value for society, leading to the current chronic impasse in the global social/economic/financial system. Those people who are able to control "the currency" now take the rest of society hostage & are able to manipulate the money supply, favour their own supporters, decide who society's winners & losers will be & - ironically - appropriate more objects of real value for themselves in exchange for the tokens of value that the rest of us work, struggle & fight for everyday, stuck in traffic jams on polluted roads heading to offices where we send a few e-mails & answer a few phone calls, sending tokens of value from A to B & checking the balance of our bank accounts, social media accounts, work-life balance accounts & happy-sad accounts. All other species living on this planet, with much smaller brains than us, must observe us with pity & amazement & try as much as possible to keep out of our way as we go about our daily business, blindly accepting a system in which we are so deeply immersed/embedded.

Thankfully, hopefully just in time, this crazy way of living in the early 21st century is now threatened by the very historical process that created it in the first place. In a dialectical, evolutionary process working at a system level, a global network of networks (the Internet in all its diversity - for communicating; for sending information; for connecting objects; for transferring value; for exchanging beliefs; for running the world etc.) has been emerging within the bosom of the existing system; starting as a rumour, then a fad, then a curiosity, then an alternative, then rapidly becoming the centre of everyday life & moving humanity into a new social era during the 2020s.

This new network of networks - global Internet - 5G era - fourth Industrial Revolution - utopia/dystopia of utopias/dystopias - that slowly emerged from the destruction exacted by the two World Wars, out of a new, imperfect global order arbitrarily handed over to certain Western nations to control by the whims of Time & History - is now about to sweep away this old order & enable a new world order built around new platforms, new values & new currencies. This is a terrifying time for some - all those guardians & beneficiaries of the old system -, but an exciting, inspirational time for those billions of people around the world who were held hostage by a relatively small minority who controlled all the levers of power in an increasingly unjust, insane world.

In this new world, there will still be good & bad, winners & losers, wars, famine, natural disasters & terrorist attacks - such is human nature. But value will no longer be determined so much by who controls the land, the roads, the trade routes, the gold & silver, the oil; by invisible people hiding in their towers in Wall Street, City of London, Frankfurt, Tokyo or Beijing; by Central Banks, first-move software companies, megalomaniacs or psychopaths. "Ordinary people" will be able to transfer their own currencies to their families back home who will be able to use them to buy real goods & services - objects/ideas/visions of true value - without intermediaries cheating them, legally stealing their "money" & using nuclear weapons, battleships, financial systems or failed economic theories to force everyone within a specific geographical area to use a currency that reflects the corrupt whims, wishes & beliefs of "powerful people" trying to impose their will on those less fortunate than them. How liberating a time this will be for the vast majority of people living on this planet!

Governments across the world will need to react to these new trends if they wish to continue garnering the support of their increasingly angry, cynical, detached, autonomous, "unruly" populations. Instead of blaming the global economy for not being able to afford Emergency Services Networks that will keep their peoples safe; for not being able to pay public servants a decent living wage; for not being able to protect critical national infrastructure from natural disasters & terrorist attacks; for not being able to fund the next generation of health, education & well-being services; for not being able to collect taxes from powerful multinational organisations; for not being able to fund projects in rural & remote communities; Governments will have to change the way they fund projects & programmes which generate massive social value, or risk being disintermediated by new actors in a decentralised, de-centered, more democratic, equal, fair & humane world.

This new world will challenge & question all of us. There will no longer be anywhere to hide for all those who try and game the system & cheat their fellow human-beings & our AI brothers & sisters. Fortunes will be created & wiped out overnight; apparently robust systems will fail spectacularly; apparently fragile systems will rise to the challenge & become stronger & more resilient the more they are challenged. What is rapidly approaching over the coming 2 decades will turn Brexit & the election of Donald Trump into tiny footnotes in the annals of history when our AI descendants from the future scan the Yottabytes of data available in their retinal displays.

Governments will have to put true values first, above the false values of a system in decline. Governments will have to find new ways of funding public safety & national security systems by putting true value first & accepting that money/currency must always be subordinate to the true values/meanings in society. We will have to accept that certain old truths are no longer valid; we will have to accept that the current global order is no longer sustainable & embrace new technologies, new business models & new ways of seeing the world before we are replaced & become irrelevant. The economics profession will emerge from the Dark Ages once again to claim a central place in the new era we are creating.

Time to see the world differently! Time to be QUIXOTIC!

Happy New Year to everyone!