The documentary The Secret of Oz  shows that the power to create money has always been an important topic in human history. It gives a clear explanation of the existing monetary system and its background. Sometimes governments had the power to create money, sometimes banks. For centuries politicians and bankers have been fighting for the right to create money. Nowadays money creation is a kind of secret topic. I think this has to change to solve the crisis. This quote of James Garfield, the 20th President of the United States (1881), shows us why:

“Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce… and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”

Nowadays 97% of the money in western countries is created by commercial banks as a debt. In other words, private banks control the money supply. Many people don’t know this. This is in itself already strange and undesirable.

I expect that in the next few years more and more people will decide that money creation by commercial banks is the root cause of the crisis. For me, it is clear that democratic governments should have the right to issue their own money. They should not have to borrow money (from investors and banks with interest), but have the right to create their own debt-free money. This is sovereignty. Money creation by private  banks makes that the we are in debt all the time.

I do recommend to investigate money creation and to join the discussion. For example first you can watch the documentary The Secret of Oz and then read the books Where does money come from? (2012) and Modernising Money (2013). You can also check the websites of Positive Money (UK), Sensible Money (Ireland), Monetative (Germany) and Ons Geld (The Netherlands). A lot of information is already available.

In short, the money system is too important to leave it to politicians and bankers only. Money expresses our social relationships, so we all have to know how the money system works and what alternatives exist!

Martijn Jeroen van der Linden studied Business Administration, was a management trainee and had different change management jobs @ ING, worked as a trader and lived in 5 European countries. Last years he realized more and more that a lot of world’s problems are interconnected and that our current (economic) systems will lead to more social injustice and environmental destruction. So, we have to change our basic assumptions and systems to keep earth liveable.

Specialties:big questions, writing, speaking, money, human problems, system change, new economy, circular economy, sustainability, the great transition, philosophy, (change) management.

A cynic is someone who has lost trust in humanity and in the world. If Wilde is right, aren’t we done being cynics? For the desire to get past the cynicism is to some extent embedded in the cynic. The characteristic of the cynic is that he has lost his faith in people, that he has been disappointed so often that he has decided to stop believe in anything. This means that at least once he must have had faith.

His cynicism is an armor that protects him from disappointments. Wilde himself also realized that not all was so black-and-white andthat the cynic has another side. He knew that we cannot live of values alone and that money itself is not without value either. This is why Cecil Gragam replies: “And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”

Money and value, it is tempting to think that these two oppose each other and say; “Away with that money! Give me value! “, but it’s not that simple. The Dutch philosopher Karim Benammar therefore edited a book with important texts about money and value, both from philosophers, such as Aristotle and Karl Marx, as well as economists like Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. In the introduction he writes that money is actually a mystery. Because how come it suddenly multiplies? And how is it possible that it evaporates in times of crisis?

The most famous cynic is the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, of whom it is said that he had no possessions, lived in a barrel and did not attach value to anything, wikimedia commons

Benammar writes that money has three important functions: it is a medium of exchange, it is a measure of value, and you can invest it in something and thus make it grow. You see that money is not just about determining the value of things related to each other, but that with money you can also make things happen.Money creates possibilities.You can create value with money. Of course there are things that we find valuable, which money cannot express – a masterpiece as Rembrandt’s “The Nightwatch” is a good example. While that painting can no doubt be sold for a lot of money and we then know “what it’s worth,” (we being: the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands) we will never do that because we consider the painting to be of priceless cultural value. Something like that you do not sell.

Rembrandt’s Nightwatch: of priceless cultural value. wikimedia commons

Unfortunately some people forget this as they are too corrupted by the urge to think that everything must and can be expressed in terms of money. I once had a student who said that if we decided to sell the Nightwatch and the purchaser then would decide to destroy it, that would be no problem, even not from a moral point of view. The problem is that this student assumes that when we buy things we own them and can whatever the hell we want with what we purchased. But there is a difference between buying a house and buying a painting (and by the way, even when you buy your own house you can’t de anything you want with it). Then of course we need to ask if the distribution of money was fair in the first place – is it fair that some people could in theory by the Nightwatch (as an investment!) and others not?.

That this is not the case, was made very clear in de Tegenlicht-documentary ‘Tax Free Tour” which was broadcasted on March 25th. In this documentary they exposed how various multinationals use apparently legal constructions to make sure they pay as little tax as possible. How is it possible that the average citizen worldwide pays about 35% income tax and that Apple only pays 1.9% tax on its profits? That may be legal, it is certainly not fair.

In England a parliamentary inquiry committee investigated the amount of tax paid by a.o. Amazon and Starbucks in England. The big bosses took great effort to condone the fact that they do their everything in their power to minimize paying taxes. The chairman of the committee asked them a most important question: ‘Don’t you have a moral obligation towards the society in which you make those wonderful profits?’

This does not only concern large companies. It concerns all of us. As a consumer we should stop bargain hunting and spend money on products that are of value to us. Products that last more than one season and which did not make people, animals or ecosystems suffer. We must become neither sentimentalists nor cynics, and learn to pay for what we find valuable.

Lisa Doeland studied literature and philosophy. She is program creator, editor of philosophical café Felix & Sofie and on a regular basis teaches bio-ethics to students of (psycho)biology at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University. This year she was in charge of the program at the Night of Philosophy, the largest Dutch philosophy event.

On the 17th of April Dadara will give a talk, we will show the “Transformoney 2.0″ documentary about money and the Transformoney Tree at Burningman, and the Exchanghibition Bank will pop up at Betahaus Berlin. More info here and Facebook event here.

On the 16th Dadara will be one of the presenters at Pecha Kucha Berlin. (link with info and Facebook event)

On the 18th we will do a money customizing event at Platoon to collect more art for the Transformoney Tree. (info and FB event)

And on the 19th the Exchanghibition Bank will pop up at Kater Holzig, and Dadara will do a live-action with Jim Avignon for the first time since 1995………

And we are planning to pop-up in public space as well!

Special credits to Alexander Koning of Perception for all the help in setting up the events!

I suspect the idea of time as money was already present in the English language by the time Franklin formalized it. In any event there is little doubt it is firmly lodged here now. We pay attention to our bosses and teachers. We look forward to spending time with friends or family on the weekend. We share accounts of the day with our spouses. We save time by taking shortcuts. Sometimes delays cost us time that we couldn’t afford to lose.

Some of those idioms also apply outside of the time domain. I’ve focused on noticing particularly when I’m “spending time” or “paying attention”. I do both those things, a lot.

The phrase “time is money” is still invoked today to spur haste in people who are deemed to be slacking. It bears the whole weight of the protestant work ethic and is used almost exclusively as a form of moralistic oppression well beyond what Franklin meant.

If time is money, then people who hinder us are thieves! Impatience is not just accepted but expected.

It may be metaphorically true that time is money, to some degree, but I’m starting to think maybe we’ve taken it a little too far. There are people like Suelo and Mark Boyle who live without money. Time is probably not money in their experience, and they demonstrate that it is possible to live as a human being on earth without using money at all.

It is also possible to live without watches or clocks or any formal timekeeping beyond the experience of the cycles of nature that proceed without our intervention*.

Time can be experienced and lived without being ‘spent’ in some reductive formula of optimized usage. I can imagine a better metaphor of the current of a river (which is probably why “current” has dual meanings). The water that flows by is gone in a moment, but there is more water like it in its place and still more to come.

At some point in my life, I won’t have more time to live the way I apparently do now. Time will go on without my experience of it. My corporeal being will persist some time longer than my consciousness, and that corpse will be further subject to the passage of time.

Maybe my point has been sufficiently beaten to death…. I find it virtually impossible to change my language and not talk about spending time and paying attention. I don’t want to oppress myself or others with an imposition of politically correct language for its own sake, but I also feel that something is fundamentally wrong with the world and suspect that the idea that “time is money” is central to the problem. I don’t know exactly how to undo it. I’m studying time to find some better metaphors. I make time lapse movies of the world around me, speeding things up to see change in a different light. I also make high speed videos to slow it down. These are just parlor tricks, but they give me a frame for thinking about time that I find useful.

I’m also working with a theory that we can either be in communion with the world, or we can commodify it, but that they are mutually exclusive. Commodification reduces the Other to base economic value. It loses any intrinsic right to exist. We’ve commodified most of the physical space on earth, along with most of the time that we experience as we live our lives. We accept this is the way the world is, and so it is.

I don’t believe that the correction we need now is to eliminate all forms of commodification, but there has to be some way we can limit its reach so that it isn’t the predominant paradigm of our relationship to reality.

I want to acknowledge George Woodcock’s 1948 essay The Tyranny of the Clock for inspiration here:

“The problem of the clock is, in general, similar to that of the machine. Mechanical time is valuable as a means of co-ordination of activities in a highly developed society, just as the machine is valuable as a means of reducing unnecessary labour to the minimum. Both are valuable for the contribution they make to the smooth running of society, and should be used insofar as they assist men to co-operate efficiently and to eliminate monotonous toil and social confusion. But neither should be allowed to dominate men’s lives as they do today.

Now the movement of the clock sets the tempo of men’s lives – they become the servant of the concept of time which they themselves have made, and are held in fear, like Frankenstein by his own monster. In a sane and free society such an arbitrary domination of man’s functions by either clock or machine would obviously be out of the question. The domination of man by the creation of man is even more ridiculous than the domination of man by man. Mechanical time would be relegated to its true function of a means of reference and co-ordination, and men would return again to a balance view of life no longer dominated by the worship of the clock. Complete liberty implies freedom from the tyranny of abstractions as well as from the rule of men.”

I also took the inspiration for my title from a segment of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl that I particularly like:

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch whose name is Mind!

Freedom from the tyranny of abstractions!

Time is not money!

To break this spell, we need to redefine both time and money. This is part of why I like Art as Money.

I consider Yap, the island of stone money. The real value of their money is held in the collective memory of the community, and not in the physical representation of that value. This is what money actually is: the value held in people’s minds. Yap money cannot be lost. It cannot be stolen. It cannot be forged. Those things would all require the destruction of the communal memory, which is the source of the value.

My proposal for Money 2.0 is simple enough: a 1-ton minimum coin weight, with the phrase “time is not money” hand-chiseled in a tombstone font. You’ll need the whole village’s consent to “move money”, but once it’s moved, it will stay put!

Mike Lewinski
April 11, 2013
Embudo, New Mexico, USA

* Postscript: This poem was on my mind when thinking about the procession of seasons apart from the measuring of time. “There is no season / That requires us”. The poem has other relevance here to Moloch too.

THE WIDOW
by W.S. Merwin

How easily the ripe grain
Leaves the husk
At the simple turning of the planet

There is no season
That requires us

Masters of forgetting
Threading the eyeless rocks with
A narrow light

In which ciphers wake and evil
Gets itself the face of the norm
And contrives cities

The Widow rises under our fingernails
In this sky we were born we are born

And you weep wishing you were numbers
You multiply you cannot be found
You grieve
Not that heaven does not exist but
That it exists without us

You confide
In images in things that can be
Represented which is their dimension you
Require them you say This
Is Real and you do not fall down and moan

Not seeing the irony in the air

Everything that does not need you is real

The Widow does not
Hear you and your cry is numberless

This is the waking landscape
Dream after dream walking away through it
Invisible invisible invisible

Slowly but surely the Exchanghibition Bank keeps infiltrating in the “real” banking world. Beginning of this year our CEO Dadara was an artist-in-residence at the ASN Bank, and last Friday the Exchanghibition Bank popped up in the ABN AMRO Dialogues House.

Dadara gave a talk about Art as Money, and there was a (first) screening of the “Transformoney 2.0″ documentary about money and the Transformoney Tree at Burning Man made by Dadara together with director Daniel Nogueira.

The public was a nice mix of bankers and burners. Since (almost) everybody on this planet uses money every single day, money indeed might be a great way to unify us and bring different groups of people together, instead of dividing us.

Everybody who attended the talk and screening received a Love banknote, which they could immediately register at our laptop, assisted by an Exchanghibition Banker.

Isn’t a bank, after all, a great place to start spreading some Love?

All photos by Arianne Notenboom

In these early times, we can imagine societies to be local communities in which the economy consisted of exchange of services and committments. The scale of the village/community was limited and thus a trusted network of users would exchange services, goods or favours, knowing that either directly or over time, the service or favour (helping in building a house) would be returned. Later on in history the concept of money took over, so that the chain of exchange would become longer. A favour or service would then be paid for with money, that could be used to buy a service or good elsewhere.

Now, what Punkmoney does, is to use Twitter to re-create the old ‘favour/gift-economy’ in which no money existed. In order to print your own banknotes on Twitter, all you need to do is use your existing account and the hashtag #punkmoney. In English you might call these: Twitnotes or in Dutch: Twitbiljet. So let’s see what a Twitnote looks like in real life:

As you can see, this is a promise from me to Occupy Amsterdam (@potbanging_NL) to deliver a brief talk on the financial history of Beursplein. As I used Twitter, it is a public statement that everyone can read. As such it is also read by the Punkmoney tracker, which makes a record of the statement. This central database registers all promises made on Twitter with the hashtag #punkmoney and thus serves as a register in which you can see which promises were made.

Now back to the Twitnote. My Tweet says NT at the end, which means that it is non-transferable. Another option might have been to state: TSA, meaning: Transfer Subject to Approval. In addition, my promise is quite exact in that it specifies specific moment in time when I will deliver a brief presentation (13 October on a global noise manifestation). Alternatively I could have left out this specific time and have noted: expires in 2 years/months/days.

Of course there’s a lot more technical details to be told on how to transfer and redeem notes. But the important thing to note here is that anyone who is seeking alternatives for money in its current form, can easily use the punkmoney concept in his/her community to start exchanging goods/services by using Twitter.

Simon Lelieveldt is an Industrial Engineer, active in the Dutch Banking sector. In his career he has worked in both the private sector (Postbank, ING, S. Lelieveldt Consultancy), the public sector (De Nederlandsche Bank), and at a representative branche-organisation (De Nederlandse Vereniging van Banken).

One Love Amsterdam performance movie in Vondelpark Amsterdam, the Netherlands on 17th of november 2012.
We started this performance in Barcelona on 11th of september 2012. When you start to use real money in your work,
the most common reaction is, that people do not believe it is real money.
It is just paper……. we are trying to show money in a different perspective.
We are just observers in this process, and by doing the performances in different countries you get different reactions…

One Love tour:
11 september 2012 in Barcelona, Spain
17 november 2012 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands
18 january 2013 in Auckland, New Zealand
Next stop, Central park New York september 2013.
One love, Time is Art!

Performance movie in Amsterdam by onedressayear.
Saskia te Dorsthorst en Jorise de Jong,

previous post in Barcelona

Here you can keep track of how our Love Banknote is finding its way into the real world!

We all have heard that: “Money is the Root of all Evil”. In fact, this phrase has its origins in the Bible, which says: “For the Love of Money is the Root of all Evil.” Somehow Love vanished with the passage of time. But what would happen if Love would return to the equation, and we would start asking ourselves: “What is the Root of All Money?” Wouldn’t Love be a great answer?!

We are involved in exchange each and every day in our society. But instead of loving our exchange and each other, we started loving the material means of exchange: Money.

And instead of using those Exchanges to make beautiful things happen around the world, we use them to earn more money. And we hoard that money, not backed by any tangible asset, created as debt by just a click of a button, on our bank accounts. Instead, we could use it to make the things we love happen, and the places and people we love thrive.

In the process of spending money, and buying things we think we need, we tend to forget that buying is actually an exchange, and not just a one-way transaction. We don’t just obtain something material, but we give something in return: money. Money does still have value as an agreement between people. Moreover it also has its energy, propelling its future use. And by giving money back with love to the people, and initiatives we love, and of whom we know that they use that same energy with love as well, we change the world.

Money can be a token of appreciation to that small corner store, which gives back so much to the neighborhood, to that cool coffee shop, where you always seem to make amazing connections, to the record store, which has those rare vinyl records and people behind the counter who love music.

So pay by adding some love to your payment. Not because of your love for money, but because of your love for the person you’re dealing with!

Some might argue that love should not be used as a currency, because Love is priceless. But shouldn’t we start appreciating more those values that can’t be quantified in our society?

That’s why the love banknote has no number: it’s not one Love, or one Hundred Love, it is just Love. Pure Love. Just as the exchange itself has no absolute value, also the value you give to this banknote is personal. And this value will be clear to all involved in the exchange, even though it is not explicitly quantified.

It might not be legal tender, but definitely is personal and loving tender for all exchanges private or public executed with love.

Dadara

CEO and Founder Exchanghibition Bank