Inspiration Feed 07.26


Vodka and potatoes as currency, basic income experiment, dotcommunism & more …

links selection – 26.july.15


Anger in Moscow as Russian village prints own currency
(aljazeera.com)

Locals warned to abandon ‘Kolion,’ which is used to trade goods and labour, because it ‘threatens Russia’s economy’. “We haven’t created this process, we just made it digital. In Russia, for any type of village work you used to give a bottle of vodka and it was stable currency,”


A Dutch city is giving money away to test the “basic income” theory
By Maria Sanchez Diez (qz.com)

The traditional criticism of basic income is that it does not incentivize people to work, and thereby damages the economy. In January of 2016, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands and its partner, the University of Utrecht, will create several different regimes for its welfare recipients and test them. “We will find out.”


Airbnb and Uber’s sharing economy is one route to dotcommunism
By Paul Mason (theguardian.com)

While the “old” monopoly models of the 2000s only distrupted dinosaur businesses – such as print publishers or booksellers – the new sharing businesses can actually disrupt society.
It was hard to see a route from Apple and Google to “dotcommunism”. It is quite easy to see it, though, if you began with the sharing sites, and made them cheap or free.


Why humans rule the world
By Yuval Noah Harari (ted.com)

Money is probably the most successful fiction ever invented by humans. Not all people believe in God, or in human rights, or in the United States of America. But everybody believes in money.

The very survival of trees, rivers and animals now depends on the wishes and decisions of fictional entities such as the United States and the World Bank — entities that exist only in our own imagination.


 * weekly inspiration illustration by Ilan Katin

Lenara Verle

Lenara Verle researches media art, collaboration and alternative currencies.

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