Genevieve Vaughan pictures the capitalist economy as a system in which nature is converted into money, and money converted into investment. She pictures this as a rocket, burning fuel and resources to leave the Earth behind. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8j6b8wb-v4) I too have a space-inspired metaphor, a more positive one. I have a vision of using money to launch gift economies into orbit. Once out of the atmosphere of capitalism, money would no longer be needed, and gift economies could float freely without additional help. But until we get there, lots of money will be needed to reach escape velocity. Universal Basic Income is the first-stage rocket that will get us off the ground. It is the most powerful systemic lever to unlock the massive reservoir of gifts that lie in billions of human beings, and that free them from artificial scarcity. Our current crisis is not the Anthropocene, but is more accurately described as the Capitalocene. The vast majority of human beings are not contributing to global warming, or deforestation, etc. It is the top 10% who are consuming beyond their means. Redistribution through Universal Basic Income is the path of justice. Money isn't the only thing that is needed. Just supplying money would be like having lots of rocket fuel, but a badly designed rocket and inadequately trained astronauts. This needs to be a carefully planned mission, just like Mariana Mazzucato describes in the Mission Economy. As individuals, we have to train ourselves by achieving higher levels of detachment from material wealth. We must learn to let go of accumulation, and release resources so that they can circulate. Successful gift communities, once launched, exist in orbit around the market economy, just as satellites orbit the earth. And just as satellites provide GPS location information, gift communities give us a reference point from which to see the distortions and perverse incentives of market economies. Gift economies open up the [[The adjacent possible is a shadow future]]. In 1969, Esquire invited celebrities to suggest what Neil Armstrong should say when he set foot on the moon. Musician Sun Ra contributed the following poem: > Reality has touched against myth > Humanity can move to achieve the impossible > Because when you’ve achieved one impossible others > Come together to be with their brother, the first impossible > Borrowed from the rim of the myth > Happy Space Age to you . . . The exchange economy is like bottled water. It's got nice packaging, and we've been hoodwinked into thinking it's better than the stuff that comes out of the taps. The gift economy is like clean spring water. It is life-giving and nourishing. And it is abundant. We have a system that has perverse incentives built into it, which distort our natural gift-giving desires. It's not about one or the other. It's about how we can make the gift economy more visible. The capitalist system tries to make it invisible. It has even co-opted it (for example, Christmas gift giving and Thanksgiving shopping.) If Genevieve Vaughan claims that language is a gift, then what is legal language? Is it a capture of the linguistic commons by a priestly elite trained in arcane legal language? Legal language is exclusionary by design. And as Katharina Pistor points out in Code of Capital, legal language is now used to code capital, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop. By removing money, we lay bare the actual relations that form life, which will continue to be messy. There is no perfect system for adjudicating conflicts. That's the problem with money. It gives the illusion of perfection, of the perfect transaction, between an idealized buyer and seller. But we can never get away from the messiness of life. At the end of the day, between the neighbor who wants to grow redwood trees, and a neighbor who objects to the trees blocking sunlight from reaching his solar panels, there is no alternative but to work it out through talking and dialogue and compromise. Inversions are important conceptual moves. Galileo helped kickstart the scientific revolution by suggesting that the sun and not the earth was the center of the solar system. Putting gifting in the center is a similar conceptual revolution. Just as Galileo wasn't denying that the Earth exists, we are not denying the existence of money and exchange. We are simply putting it in a better perspective. We can still use money, just as we can still experience the Earth as central to our experience. But we can use money with greater wisdom if we see gifting as the true source of life. When we see a child drowning, we instantly rush to save him or her. This is the gift giving instinct at work. It is innate in all of us. This is a more natural reaction than to watch passively as the child drowns. When I check my intuition on this, I do not detect any hint that I would change my actions if I knew the child would be thankless. If the child yelled at me and walked off after being saved, I would still save the child. I am responding to the child's need, not his or her ability or willingness to pay me back materially or symbolically. In a gift economy, **needs have power**. --- Related: [[Breathing was the first global gift economy]]