(2010-07-20) Guy Who Worked For Money

Benjamin Rosenbaum ponders the Trade-Offs between Currency and Whuffie for human interaction. (Real World Game)

The United States of America defaulted on its Sovereign Debt in 2026 (Collapse), destroying the dollar. The EuroZone bet on propping up its banks the following year, and lost its bet. Martial Law kept the shaken house in order another year, until the Pandemics hit, and the soldiers fled the cities. Nera was ten the hungry year that super-resistant TB and goose flu kept everyone home. She was already on Tribes then. She already had people around the world and around the block who she could count on for help even if they'd never met, even though it was all guesswork and the crudest of relational metrics on Tribes, not predictive at all. Her parents, who had never made the transition from FaceBook and LinkedIn, did not understand why strangers were dropping off food. Nera's parents knew that the hollow state had betrayed them. They knew that their savings had vanished, that the promises of health care and support in old age had turned out to be lies. They never understood that the market had betrayed them as well. Even though their money had stopped being worth anything, they kept looking for a money that would be worth something: yuan, or Swiss francs, or real solid Gold, or the e-gold currencies of fantasy games which briefly, perversely, served as the world's lingua-franca Medium Of Exchange. They never understood what their grandparents had known: that the only thing you could trust was people.

"I'm not saying we should go back to just having money," Sergei said, smiling uncertainty. "Not only. But it's -- freeing. It's like -- maybe sometimes you don't need to know what something's for. You don't always need to be beholden to people, to have all these tribes and affiliations (Friction Free). All these people arguing about what to do, imposing on you. Don't you get tired of the politics? Of being second-guessed, of... positioning everything? Maybe it's just that I've travelled quite a bit, and the world beyond Frankfurt and the Free Society Zone is different. Not maybe better, but... yeah, freer, in some ways. In China and the 'Stans, you know..." (Freedom)