What should we call the planetary currency?
think local, act global?
Ciao from Turin, Italy, where I’m posting up this weekend at the Turin Book Fair. I’m here doing a couple events with the great Francesco Verso, who last night celebrated the 10 year anniversary of his Future Fiction press. Say hi if you’re around, or hit me up if you want to know where I’ll be.
What initially brought me to Italy was the Sci-Fi Economics Lab Residency in Messina, Sicily this past week. I held off a week on this newsletter because I wanted to be able to debrief the residency experience. (Also, sorry, my May Day story tradition got scrambled this year in the end-of-semester crunch.)
The residency was a generative workshop in which creatives and policy thinkers used narrative brainstorming to produce economically interesting and normatively enriching futures — very much in the style of the narrative hackathons I’ve done a lot of in the last year. By the end we had leads on a few compelling stories that hopefully will get fleshed out, as well as some actual proposals that may be taken up by our lovely hosts, the Messina Foundation.
We even came up with some snappy potential economic jargon, such as the “Quintuple Bottom Line,” expanding on the idea of Triple Bottom Line enterprises that consider not only ‘profit’ but ‘people’ and ‘planet.’ We asked, what if you added ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’ to the mix as well? What if you put aesthetics, transparency, and knowledge creation at the heart of every enterprise?
But really, the event was all about the meeting-of-the-minds of people who think speculative fiction can be useful in helping us think about our economic problems. Much wine was consumed and many of the world’s woes were discussed. I think I’ll be processing these conversations for a while.
On the plane over here I prepped a bit for the event by watching Finding the Money, a documentary recommended by my dad about Stephanie Kelton and the other economists who have been developing and pushing Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). My dad is a big MMT guy these days after reading Kelton’s book The Deficit Myth, and after watching the documentary I’m feeling convinced and eager to dig into the details.
The way I understand MMT, the core insight is that money is created by government spending and legitimized by taxes. As I first learned years ago reading the late, great David Graeber’s Debt in undergrad, the origin of currency dates back not to ‘needing a medium of exchange to make a barter economy more efficient’ (that fairy tale never happened). Rather, money emerged from the empires of the Axial Age needing a way to get occupied populations to feed and house their armies. To solve this problem, they created a tax that all subjects must pay and said that the tax must be paid in the state’s issued currency. That currency was then issued to pay their soldiers, and a market was born.
Thus if you were, say, a person living in Messina in 264 BC when the Romans rolled into town, you would need to provide the troops with goods and services in order to get your hands on the amount of Rome-stamped bronze bullion required to pay your new Roman taxes at the end of the year. Similarly, today all Americans must pay taxes in Federal Reserve Notes (or else you go to jail), and so we are all compelled to participate in the national economy.
MMT folks say that the implication of this insight is that sovereign governments don’t need to tax in order to then spend. You don’t need to stress about ‘deficits’ or the so-called “national debt.” There are no “government coffers” to worry about because the government makes the money. Instead the government just needs to worry about inflation, which it can control with taxation but also with regulations and policies that prevent wasteful economic activity from bidding up prices. I.e. if the economy is running hot, make it harder to build casinos and mansions so you can afford to build schools and hospitals.
According to this thinking, when you stop ‘deficit’ spending — meaning, the state takes more out of the economy in taxes than it puts in — you can cause a depression/recession. And it does seem like, in the US, there are correlations between periods of budget ‘surpluses’ and big downturns coming a few years later. As someone with a lot of lingering resentment over the 2008 crash, I find this very very interesting.
I will say that the heterodox economists at the residency were themselves not particularly into MMT. Sure the national debt is bullshit, they argued, but the insights/framing of MMT don’t actually solve all the underlying questions of economic system design that they were interested in. Such as: what should be distributed by liberal, competitive markets, and what should be taken out, and why? How do you think about the economics of situations that are too complex and value-laden to apply the orthodox rational choice theory? If the wheels come off the bus of the global economy, and we had to set a new one up from base principles, what should those principles be?
Also it’s tough to talk MMT in Europe, where mostly countries are on the euro, and thus can’t deploy their own sovereign currencies to spend their way into better financial or social or infrastructural shape. Here that would have to be done by the European Central Bank, the EU, and other technocratic agencies that glom together into the equivalent of continental state power. Under the Eurozone, nationstates really can owe each other money, hence the debt crises of the teens.
(This is why KSR directed much of Ministry for the Future toward getting central bankers to think of themselves as key actors in stopping climate change.)
So not all states are created equal. Some issue currency, some don’t. Some are bound up in international blocs, some aren’t. All that’s obvious, but still we have a polite fiction in international relations that there’s some essential equivalency between the USA and, say, Malta.
On the one hand, there’s evidence that small polities can use small currencies to stimulate and manage local economy. On the other hand, it seems to me the confusion about money and debt that MMT is so keen to resolve would fall away if we had a single planetary currency issued by a planetary government. Who could such an entity be in debt to?
All got me thinking about a term I’ve seen thrown around lately: planetarity. Noema Magazine has had a lot of interesting stuff on this lately. How do we think of ourselves as beings with connection and obligation to the planet? How do we build planetary institutions to deal with planetary problems like climate change and pandemics? I’ve discussed this idea before, such as the notion of the ‘Planetary Trust’ that I used in my climate book. But it feels like there’s a lot of thinking left to do here.
So I started asking the economists at the residency, as an icebreaker, how they thought a planetary currency would work.
It was a surprisingly underexplored idea, even in a room full of SF-loving heterodox economists. What would we even call it? GeoDollars? Planetary Pesos? UN-Yuan? AllCoin? Terrabucks? Unicash? ‘Credits’? Would we even need a name anymore? I’m very open to suggestions.
What would be the advantages? No changing money at the airport, no middle men extracting foreign transaction fees or engaging in dangerous currency speculation. No cognitive load of constantly calculating just how much a 120 SEK sandwich is in USD. There certainly are advantages to the euro; surely those would be magnified at a planetary scale.
Who would be left out by a planetary currency? Who would get relief? It would depend a lot on where the money went, of course. Would there be currency rebellions? Groups of locals fed up with their lots in the economic plans of the EarthBank, issuing their own mutinous notes to get their economy churning. How would those uprisings be put down or resolved?
The more you zoom out, the more all politics looks like core-versus-periphery resentment. There is an ever-demanding tension between the irreducible complexity of local conditions (needs, values, experiences, histories, relations) and the risk-spreading, economies of scale that come with being a part of a bigger polity.
You’ve got all the problems pointed out in Seeing Like a State — the way states try to measure their populations, and in doing so force them to behave and exist in legible ways; the way optimizing for one metric often means unknowingly burning out reserves you didn’t know to measure until it’s too late; the schemes for progress can result in colonial immiseration. It feels like a lot of solarpunk and adjacent movements is trying to illuminate those issues, push back on systems that fail to see people as fully and uniquely human.
On the other hand, if you have crop failure, it’s really nice to be able to get food from neighboring areas. If a superstorm blows through and washes half your town away, you want to be able to call FEMA to bring in construction equipment, cleanup supplies, drinking water, et al. We need those systems too, libraries of disaster relief that the whole world can borrow from, frictionless networks of care and support, because every week Gaia spins the globe and stabs a wrathful climate finger at a random, unassuming spot.
There’s the old activist adage “think global, act local” — that you should care about the world but put your efforts into your community. But maybe it’s time to turn it around. Maybe we should “think local, act global.” See the problems in our communities, and then work to address their planetary causes. Increasingly all the world has the same set of problems. Maybe we should spend the same kind of money to fix them.
Updates + Appearances + Miscellany
C2MTL – If you’re in Montreal in a couple weeks, catch me at this event talking with some really interesting people about solar futures.
Consent-based Nuclear Waste Siting – I’ve mentioned this workshop previously, but I think I neglected to actually post the project page set up by the good folks at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI). My contribution to this very interesting effort is now drafted, and from what I’ve read of the others (fellow solarpunk OG Sarena Ulibarri is also involved), I think it will be a cool book.
“The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy” — Be on the lookout in the coming weeks for this sequel to “The Uncool Hunters” to drop on Escape Pod. I also got a grant to work on more of these this summer (not sure I can announce what just yet), so expect to see more of Rocky and her capitalist-surrealist exploits in the future. If this story gets posted mid-month, I may break my once-a-month rule and write something about it — that’s how into this story I am!
Recommendations + Fellow Travelers
Huge shoutout to the other writers at the residency this past week (there were three of us), starting with Steven Gonzalez Monserrate a.k.a. E.G. Condé. Steven is an anthropologist that studies the (un)sustainability of cloud computing, and also a Taínofuturist SFF author. I’m very stoked to read his novella Sordidez, and you should be too!
It was also lovely to get to know Ketty Steward, a prolific Paris-based SFF author. Here’s her Linktree, and (for my non-francophone readers) one of her stories translated into English in Samovar. She’s also this month been doing daily drabbles/microfictions on Bluesky, in three languages (!!!). Check out the thread in English here.
I could do a whole newsletter on the cool projects I heard about this past week, but one last one I’ll point you to is the Plurality University Network, a France-based nonprofit whose members explore alternative futures though various imaginative modes. I got to know the director, Daniel Kaplan, and I feel confident in saying that Plurality University is doing the participatory futures thing at a compellingly large scale. Check out this project on the future of corporations that had 140 (!) participants.
Keep an eye on this wild-sounding project, Sound Systems, on the future of American orchestras! Organized by my friends at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination, and involving a bunch of very cool SFF writers. Looking forward to seeing the final book product!
Art Tour: Mer-stuff Messina Mural
I saw a lot of art in Messina, as much of our workshop time took place adjacent to a lovely, maze-like contemporary art museum. The Messina Foundation puts beauty at the center of their work to uplift the century-old slums (part of our inspiration for the aforementioned ‘quintuple bottom line).
But if I had to pick one piece to share, I’d have to choose this huge, weird mural I saw walking around looking for pizza. Messina — situated on the Straight of Messina, where the Ionian Sea mixes into the Tyrrhenian — is home to much weird marine life. It’s one of the only places in on the planet where abyssal creatures end up washing ashore on beaches. Talk about irreducible complexity.
So I liked this weird, slightly abyssal-looking mermaid, bleeding from the eyes and preening in the sun.
If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my climate fiction novel Our Shared Storm, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.”
