The Future of Money
Blogging far and between, promise to improve, especially on what’s happening at the college. Two projects already finished (Turky, that smart little robot and The Sunlight Exchange) and somewhat waiting for proper write-ups as well as for a bit of documentation and alterations. Current one is about “The Future of Money”, a topic which I find immensely interesting (see earlier posts) but unfortunately there’s not much time. Here are a few thoughts as of Monday, will hopefully evolve significantly until next Tuesday–
“Wall Street, Half Past 2 O’Clock” by James Cafferty and Charles Rosenberg, depicting the moment when NY’s upper-class realize that they have lost everything they had deposited with their banks.
What happens to the money we have stored as information in our bank accounts–or basically all assets which virtually represent a certain value–when something really bad happens? Really bad means system-shattering, something which will potentially render what was formerly highly valued almost worthless, either through inflation or general collapse of the monetary exchange system as we know it. I am currently thinking about something that closely resembles flight data recorder (aka “black box”, even though they are usually bright red) and might be attached to a wall or hidden in a closet. In an exceptional situation like a desaster or any other kind of mishap, the owner can chose to detach it from the wall in which case it will freeze the assets and either contain them for future use or transform them into something more useful. That something might be of immediate use, for example items which are tradeable like nutritious food or cigarettes, but it might also be something that is as abstractly valuable as the original money, for example information about how to leave the city or such which might also become a commodity under such circumstances.
By the way – We have an open day on Friday the 7th, please come around the studio at the RCA if you got the time. And I live in Bethnal Green now, anyone up for a pint at one of the seedy pubs around, please come forward.
December 29th, 2007 at 21:26
This is good stuff — the idea about recording the data for your own personal backup of your financial state at particular times and of course the “crash” trope is apropos. Flight data recorders make magnetically recorded loops of the state of the aircraft on metal strips last I checked. They deliberately use “old” almost mechanical techniques — metal recording like the earliest pre-tape recorders so that they are much more durable. I could imagine that in a proper, apocalyptic crash anything that wasn’t “hard” exchange would not be of much value — like paper money which is only backed by the confidence and faith one has with the banks that are supposed to (but don’t) have something precious and more desirable than paper to “back it up.” When Nixon took the US banks off of the gold standard, economics became faith in banks as they are, rather than some material commodity — but, now we’re seeing how banks are less than sturdy entities.