The end of debt. The beginning of infinity.
Where capitalism begins with debt, Creditism begins with life.
A new economy for life on Earth — where credit begins with existence, flows through contribution, and builds common wealth for a regenerative world.
The world we inherited... and the one we can write.
The Story of Our World Today
Our world is run by imagined entities given legal form — states and corporations — competing and allying to control Earth's commons. Their power flows through money: numbers that don't represent wealth, but command access to it. They direct labor, claim resources, and turn the living world into assets to be owned, traded, and leveraged.
Stocks, bonds, and debts circulate at the speed of light while forests thin, communities fray, and the basics of life are made scarce by design. The system rewards those most fluent in moving the symbols, and calls the result growth. It runs on debt, coercion, and manufactured scarcity.
We inherited this story. Through our choices, our institutions, and our silence, we keep writing it.
A New Story For Humanity
Common Planet offers a different vision: an economy where credit serves life, not extraction. The rules that shape society — including how currency is created and used — should be shaped by the people living under them.
Currency itself can be democratic. Like votes, it can express preferences and direct resources toward shared needs. Unlike today's money, it doesn't have to be scarce by design, lose value through manipulation, or concentrate power in the hands of those who already have it.
A democratic credit system can make basic security universal while preserving individual autonomy. We can build wealth together because we choose to — not because debt, coercion, or survival force us.
Three reclaims.
We reclaim our Credit
We create the credit for the benefit of ourselves in communities, for our own purposes, from our own activities. We shift from debt-money to credit currency, earned based on existence, participation, and purpose, not trade and profit.
We reclaim our Commons
We begin reclaiming common capital on communal rather than private ledgers, moving from ownership to stewardship of shared resources by cooperatives, councils, communities, and commonwealth ventures. This shift allows for sustainable and efficient management of our common assets.
We reclaim our Purpose
We align our actions with shared values and long-term goals, prioritizing purpose-driven projects that uplift communities and enhance well-being. Instead of chasing profit, we invest in initiatives that build a thriving, sustainable society.
These shifts decentralize power by redistributing decision-making and resource management. Creditism restructures our economic foundation, fostering abundance while permanently eliminating debt, poverty, and the basis for war.
Creditism replaces traditional debt-based money with a Flow Credit currency, thus revolutionizing economics.
By reimagining the fundamentals of credit and capital, we establish the foundation for a civilization that guarantees life with sovereignty, opportunity, and liberty for every planetary citizen.
Unlike our current system where banks create and control credit but issue it as debt, Creditism ensures Credit currency flows directly to all individuals: debt-free, interest-free, and tax-free. Credit, the unit of exchange, is created through two flows — a universal flow that begins with existence, and an earned flow that recognizes contribution — and clears when spent. Both prevent permanent claims on the future, eliminating the need for banks, taxes, stocks, insurance, and other financial instruments that often lead to corruption or coercion.
The elegant simplicity of Creditism lies in its universal flow: all receive Credit and use it to acquire goods from the open market of shared resources or to exchange personal possessions. As a Flow currency, it bypasses the circulatory nature of debt money, negating the need for complex redistribution schemes. Instead, it offers a fair-flowing, infinitely scaleable, mutual distribution system.
Creditism advocates for an economy where we are valued inalienably in our existence first. This model envisions a future where you are free to pursue your passions and together create an open, thriving, and regenerative humanity.
Capitalism. Then Creditism.
A game of accumulation.
Capitalism drives endless asset accumulation, with states and corporations as dominant players. It began — and continues — as a fight to own common resources. States claim territories while corporations secure extraction rights and labor markets.
- Real and abstract capital both transformed into private holdings
- Natural resources and human potential become privately held assets
- Financial instruments multiply through complex mechanisms
- The privatization of commons forces individuals to sell their labor to survive
- As wealth concentrates at the top, society fractures below
A game of flow.
Creditism realigns these fundamentals. Instead of prioritizing private ownership, it emphasizes collective stewardship. Rather than accumulating assets, it focuses on creating and sharing value through participation.
- Real resources — land, labor, data — are managed cooperatively
- Credit isn't created through loans but earned through beneficial activities: work, learning, caregiving
- Credit appears through participation and disappears once spent — preventing wealth concentration
- Universal flow: everyone receives Credit; value ties to real contributions, not speculation
- People earn through participation rather than competition
From scarcity to abundance. Creditism's elegance lies in its universal flow: everyone receives Credit to acquire goods from an open marketplace of shared resources or exchange personal possessions. Value ties directly to real contributions, not speculation. People earn through participation rather than competition.
Redefining success. This system fosters equitable prosperity, measuring wealth not by ownership but by effective resource use to uplift communities. Labor is contributed, not sold. Credit flows to all, not just a few. By emphasizing cooperation, sustainability, and shared stewardship, Creditism redefines success as building thriving, inclusive societies.
Currency as democratic tool.
In Creditism, currency becomes a democratic tool — each unit of Credit represents a choice about resource management. People determine where Credit is used, while a community's values, and measures of quality determine where additional credits are earned, causing credit to serve collective well-being rather than individual profit.
This decentralized approach empowers individuals to actively shape their communities instead of passively accepting decisions made by distant entities.
What Common Planet cannot outsource.
We believe that there are 3 key determinations any conception of a Common Planet cannot outsource to The Invisible Hand of markets:
Otherwise, our activities become merely means to the ends of profit, and everything becomes a product. Hence an attention economy, and a consumption focus rather than a creative focus.
When markets determine our source of pay and our rates of pay, they constrain the efficient deployment of human creativity, and hamper the capacity of the division of labor to create and distribute wealth, and solve common challenges.
Market conditions defining what is 'cost effective' for us to make means we don't enact many excellent inventions or the best versions of them. Nor do we see the wisdom in products and practices that may be labor intensive, but that are ecologically and culturally efficient.
Once we remove market determinations of those three aspects our markets can free us to compete toward the efficient production of myriad facets of quality with sportsmanlike conduct for personal, public, and ecological benefit, instead of the efficient production of avaricious consumption with rivalrous conflict for personal gain.
A growing field of tactics in motion.
Many groups and strategies will be needed to bring us to a Common Planet, and a lot of excellent folks have been thinking about it for a long time. Acting together on a common game-board lets us leverage our powers together. This list is incomplete by design — it grows with us.
Tap any tactic to read more.
01 National creation of credit for democratically determined purposes
This would promote the conversation that our ability to exchange with one another and engage in solution-making activity should not be determined by whether or not those exchanges are abstractly and privately profitable, but instead whether they are mutually desirable, needful, and collectively beneficial — generators of collective abundance.
If nations create the mass of currency for the enaction of communal projects, then credit creation becomes an expression of the will of the people to pursue communally beneficial goals. The challenge: if the political infrastructure for determining what gets funded isn't sufficiently democratic, communities are subject to the purposes of policy makers who may not have the public's or planet's interests at heart, and cannot know unique aspects of communities and ecosystems at ground level. Crowdsourcing the crafting of solutions through several rounds of refinement can ensure communal participation suited to local contexts.
02 User-driven credit creation on a shared Holochain Network Database
Such a system would ensure the purposes for which we work are self- and communally-determined. If the activity of people from the bottom up creates the mass of currency, then we ensure agency in the production of what a community wants or needs.
The challenge: if nations don't accommodate, acquiesce, or help facilitate such a currency-generating structure, our currency regime has no ability to re-appropriate capital for the common weal — limiting its liberative power. Integration with other strategies below shows the potential power of this piece.
03 The Play For The Commons
Crowdsource populating communal and personal ledgers on The Visible Hand through gamification with a record of all global production, capital, and resources. Picture an app — both your access to and collectively the database itself — where you create a private account and receive sacred tokens for going on quests around your community to gather info about its shape, stuff, and work.
You might hike a trail to record something about trees, waterfalls, water quality. How much algae is in the water? Fill a vial to deliver to someone else on a quest of theirs that intersects yours. Are there dry gulleys that used to flow seasonally? Is there abundant rock for permaculture check dams? If so, organize a community quest to build them. Take pictures with apps that identify ground plants. It'd be like Pokémon Go but for the purpose of an excellent human and planetary future — beginning to populate The Visible Hand with the quests, ledgers, and shared ownership of a real commons.
04 One-employee-one-share-one-vote
Lifted from Yanis Varoufakis, who took it from the syndicalist movement. Change corporate law so every employee is defined as a voting partner in the firm. They receive one non-transferable share that constitutes their voting identity. Shares would no longer be sellable. This single change would reclaim an enormous portion of our commons in one fell swoop — but it wouldn't reclaim housing.
05 Buy 'Em Out — pension & endowment funds
From David Korten's The New Economy: A Living Earth System Model: as proposed by Tim McDonald and John Fullerton, pension funds, endowments of foundations, and other public-interest endowment funds — responsible for trillions of dollars of financial assets — have the means to buy large corporations, hold them accountable to the public good, and gradually convert them to cooperative forms.
This implementation could circumvent an initial need to change corporate law while providing examples of the results of such a change. In concert with The Visible Hand running Creditist economics, we could onboard those corporations to fast-track their transformations and our Common Planet with one rather satisfying "wack!"
06 Houses Are For Living
A change of law making it illegal for businesses to own housing — done carefully and with a means of exit — would establish that houses aren't for profits, they're for people to live in. Prices would fall to more natural levels.
For an exit strategy, this piece can be combined with national or decentralized credit creation (pieces 1 and 2) allowing businesses to cash out residential holdings, or with the power of endowments and foundations (piece 5) transforming real-estate businesses into co-ops that distribute housing to their members and others under Creditist principles.
07 Middle-Down Municipal Commons Reclamation
Towns, cities, and counties could reclaim aspects of their local commons by purchasing local assets — land and productive capital — with tax revenues generated from differential taxation of non-local consumers (tourism, vacation houses, non-local businesses).
If local councils catch wind of Creditist principles as a pathway to vibrant local economies, they could preferentially subsidize collective local ownership and production over private non-resident wealth extraction.
08 The Ledger of Life
Any notion of a Common Planet will need to conceptualize and encode returning ownership of the biosphere back to itself — and to all of life — while instantiating human beings as responsible stewards of that sphere. We resolve to move out of the Anthropocene and into The Ayucene (others have called it 'The Ecozoic').
The Ledger of Life would exist on The Visible Hand as a distinct ledger unto itself — descriptions of every existing waterway, species, habitat, ecosystem, and biome. Their ecosystemics, weather, climate, geosystemics. Their states of health and degradation. What needs to and can be done to improve their biodiversity, regeneration, and antifragility (further populating the quest board), and communally agreed expert assessments of what can be sustainably extracted, at what rates, with what regenerative measures of 'intraction.'
It does not put a price on nature or any part of it. Instead it tells us exactly what we can take, how, and what we need to spend in labor activity to be responsible stewards. It tells us we belong to Earth, each other, and The Tree Of Life.
09 Forcing the Eco-Social Contract
From Álvaro J. De Regil's Transitioning to "Geocratia": organize permanent consumer boycotts targeting specific products, services, and companies that exhibit the lowest regard for social and environmental sustainability. Once people are well-versed in the organisation and execution of consumer boycotts, and national assemblies have agreed a critical mass has been reached, organize a national boycott to demand a Constitutional National Assembly of the citizenry — to write a new constitution for an Eco-Social Contract between people and planet.
This involves a labour, student, and consumer strike. People do not go out to demonstrate in the streets — this cancels any possibility of repression. People stay at home, do not go to work, school, or stores, until the government agrees to celebrate the Constitutional Assembly. Roughly each week of strike equates to about 1.92% of GDP. A month at 25% participation equates to about 2.1% of GDP — enormous pressure on the system.
This fits beautifully with other pieces. Local resilience built through The Visible Hand running Creditist economics in the early stages can sustain the civil disobedience. We self-organize as citizen cells, post assemblies on the quest board leading up to the grand quests of the National and Global boycotts and the Constitutional Assemblies — coffee and sandwiches as we act en masse to reclaim our Common Planet.
10 You.
Countless numbers of groups and individuals are working to reclaim our communities, credit, commons, and purposes. What works? Would the potency of your efforts increase combined with others' strategies and tactics on a common game-board?
The Visible Hand
and its elements.
"By decentralizing the Economics, we can democratize Governance and that's about the best system possible." — Remzi Bajrami
If we want to create a Decentralized Network Database with popular and excellent interfaces to streamline, gamify, and decentralize economics and credit creation at scale from the bottom up, they're gonna have to be really dope. The creation of such a digital infrastructure and rule-set is a crucial counterpoint to the imperious control of nation states, multinationals, and international banking.
The Ledger of Life
To be populated with our ever evolving observations and assessments of the Bio and Geosphere, and our expertly crafted communal agreements of harvestables, amounts, rates, practices, and regeneration.
The Quest Board
To be populated with all the payable work and jobs we need and want to do collectively, and any that individuals, groups, communities, and councils request.
Local, Regional & Global Ledgers
To be populated with all capital and resources collectively reclaimed and owned by the respective communities. Community credit will flow to these.
Co-op Ledgers
The accounts of groups engaged in production or service. Members pool their Community Credit to fund operations, or request approval from other communities. Bonus from quality outcomes flows here, to be distributed among members however they decide.
Personal Private Ledgers
Every person has a sovereign account where Personal Credit is received, spent, and cleared — the basic interface between individual autonomy and the wider system. Accessible only to the individual or family they belong to.
Community Credit
Created and allocated per capita as community UBI on a descending scale to Locals, Regions, and Global accounts. Used by groups to purchase from The Marketplace. Never spent by individuals.
Personal Credit
An existence-based UBI flowing to every person — Credit created first through being alive, with additional Credit created at the point of payable activity. Used by individuals to purchase from the Marketplace. Never spent by groups.
Bonus
An incentive structure that rewards groups producing balanced quality outcomes — promoting friendly competition between groups in similar industry. Pools and rates are designed transparently to embed equitable communal 'imploits.'
The Marketplace
Consisting of all the awesome new or refurbished stuff we make for each other to buy, as well as the commodity and production materials used in the making of excellent things.
The Exchange
Where we list used items we own that can be sold to others in exchange for some of their PC — only at the price it was last purchased for, though usually less, because entropy's a thing.
Standard Scale of Pay Rates
Equal pay for equal skill, regardless of where you live. Communities can no longer poach each other or play people against one another by perverse market forces — but can still freely request each other's skills. The end of outsourcing as a structural incentive.
The Balance
Algorithms that keep prices in step with the volume of credit in circulation. As essentials and digital goods become cheaper, scarce luxuries adjust upward — transparently showing each individual's and community's actual buying power.
The Abodium
All the nifty houses available to take up residence in and private unrevocable stewardship of — a different class of legal relation because you don't buy them.
The Sphere
Common Planet's social media and news platform — for any who want to use it. Transparent algorithms that the user can play with, so we're not being manipulated behind the scenes. The civic layer for upgrading our understanding of one another.
The Talking Stick
Integrated voting mechanisms for local, regional, and global scale with direct ability for the crowdsourced crafting of legislative proposals.
Life. Liberty. Love.
Life
Guaranteed housing. A baseline flow that begins with existence. Direct access to what life requires — free from banks, debt, or taxes, with no master between you and survival.
- Guaranteed housing
- Universal Credit covers life's essentials
- End of poverty, theft, & war
Liberty
No debt held over your head. No job you must obey to survive. The freedom to choose your work, your place, and your path — your passions and skills setting the course, not financial pressure. Credit becomes a tool for expression, not control.
- No debt, taxes, or masters
- Live, work, & play wherever you build with others
- Start a co-op with access to communal resources
Love
When survival stops being a competition, communities become what they were always meant to be: people building, caring for, and investing in each other. Connection. Belonging. An end to needless conflict.
- Open, collaborative network
- Communities steward shared resources
- Direct, fluid democracy
- Sustainability built into the design
The Infinite Game:
A Play For Life.
Our money can't make money. It arrives like air and leaves like breath — having given what it came to give. — iLiri Ayu
Life is a game of rules. All games are games of rules. The rules by which we are allowed to make our livelihoods, and the livelihoods we are prevented from because of those rules, create the game of life we play together and determine how we treat life. That game is The Human Project writ both large and small; the overarching cultural project of human being at scale constraining every human act to the overriding purpose of the game.
The tokens we use within that game are symbols of the rules. They're made of the rules and issued by them. We, in part, advance, fall behind, or gain strategic advantage according to our ability to understand, acquire, use, and manipulate those tokens, and the rules behind them. But do we play the board, each other, or play with a team against another? It depends on the game.
Debt is "I owe you." In a game of livelihood that defines you and I as individuals of no natural communion on a game board of resource conflict I issue my debt to you under my condition of need or want paired with your condition of 'have'. My debt is a simple statement and request, "If you will give me credit, I will owe you."
In games of communion with common cause we play the board too. The board consists of the circumstances we are in together and the common conditions we share. The rules we develop align individual desires and proclivities under common purpose given the game board we play on, because common cause arises out of shared circumstances.
Credit is, "We need you." In our different game of livelihood that defines civilization as made up of societies, cultures, communities, and creative individuals, on the game board of a Planet in a Universe, the game rules issue us our sacred tokens (credit) so that we can play together. Civilization's credit then is a simple statement and request, "You matter. We need you. Will you play with us?"
… money was a great structured symbol for balancing and healing and growing closer.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange LandFor balancing.
Credit does and must have its counterpart as debit — but it isn't a catch; every 'this way' has a 'that,' as south has a north. Debit isn't debt. On the game board of a Common Planet with a rule-set like Creditism our balance point is different. The game gives credit to people because our ancestors gave credit to us. We create together so we don't squander our cultural inheritance so we can give credit to our children. Because we can't pay it back we pay it forward instead.
Rather than trying to balance growth with regeneration, we balance luxury and necessity. Rather than our current moment competing with the future, we balance our pasts and futures on the fulcrum of now.
For healing.
Given the game-board of a Common Planet with a rule-set like Creditism we can all clearly see the healing work that humanity needs and wants to do together. People that know something about degradation and regeneration will be proposing notions, jobs, projects, plans, and sweat lodges for cleaning those things up. They will be credited for that work. Then anybody that wants to and is in a position to contribute can do so and be paid for their participation.
For growing closer.
Because there's just us and we know it, we rediscover tribe, we enact a story of humanity together that moves us and rejoin The Tree of Life as responsible Children and Grandparents; relatives in The Tree of Life. When we can see who we depend upon because our communities are our own, we begin to value each other again and reclaim our sense of place.
Capitalism → Creditism.
The old loop. The new loop.
The old loop
- Creative activity discovers what's possible.
- Investors determine what will be produced from the possible menu.
- Markets define 'sound investment' and determine along with monopolies the prices and quality of products.
- Prices determine incomes for individuals competing with one another for jobs.
- Incomes and profit and loss ratios determine success, failure, standard of living, and class status.
- Standard of living and class status determine largely who can be an entrepreneur and an investor.
- Success or failure determines future use of productive capital.
- Continued use of productive capital to the purpose of investor profit monopolizes human activity.
- The monopolization of human activity determines what The Human Project is invested in.
- Investment in quantity, growth, corporations, and shareholder profits determines the trajectory of human and planetary futures.
The new loop
- We design a standard scale of pay rates for communal vitality, sentience, and spark.
- We invest in each other, and our basic standard of living and income.
- Our self-selected activities determine our additional incomes.
- Creative activity discovers what's possible.
- Individuals in communities determine what will be produced to what standards of quality.
- Income, regeneration, and markets determine prices.
- Prices determine profit and loss ratios among groups competing in similar industry under quality measures.
- Assessment of value and quality created determines success or failure.
- Success or failure, or completion of a group's purpose, awards bonus and determines continued or changing use of productive capital.
- Continued and changing use of productive capital for varied purposes increases standard of living and liberates human activity.
- Increasing standard of living and liberating human activity determines what The Human Project is invested in.
- Investment in our children, our future, humanity, ourselves, and our biosphere determines the trajectory of human and planetary futures.
We're caught in a quagmire.
We need to play a different game.
Creditism is an answer to our dire and (let's be honest) ridiculous predicament. Enacting it is our Common Planet. We have got to take stewardship from the bottom up, recall and invoke the fire of ancestral wisdom, and leap out of The Anthropocene and into The Ayucene as we act with delight and poise in A Play For Life.