The Infinite Game: A Play For Life

How do we achieve our Common Planet?

There are 3 necessary and overarching actions for a Common Planet, regardless of how we navigate and transition toward it:
  1. Reclaim our credit. Create credit for the benefit of ourselves in communities, for our own purposes, from our own activities.
  2. Reclaim our commons. Move capital from private to communal ledgers.
  3. Reclaim our purposes. Act in communities to create credit for purpose, then delete currency when spending to ensure that the purposes of credit creation are ever evolving, and can never again be captured for the singular and barren purpose of money for money’s sake.

    These actions accomplished are an economy of Creditism. Interacting with each other in that economy is a Common Planet.

Rules and Games

“Our money can’t make money. People make money, then it disappears, fulfilling its nature as a symbol of the cooperative human spirit. Repeat. It serves the purposes of people and life, not its own through us. Is that ‘money?’ Let’s call it a currency.” – 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 large; 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.” If we have no common cause to begin with I have to manufacture one in the form of a contractual transaction, “IOU.” Conversely, and under those same conditions, you can seek to issue credit. You say, “I will give to you if you owe me.” In that game we play the board against each other with temporary alliances and dependencies. But see, the purpose of issuing debt or credit depends on the rules of a game that say we are individuals of no natural communion. There are other games with other rules.

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. To the Iroquois shell beads were sacred. They used them to weave together the treaty of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and by that craft brought their tribes together as a union in diversity; a sacred trust. The flow currency we suggest is sacred too. It is a tapestry we weave together around the world that tells us we are brothers. Having cast it, debt and credit have a different source and take on different meaning. Debt becomes DEBIT, and credit comes first.

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?” Those rules take as their starting point that we have common cause, that we were credited with the evolutionary inheritance of a planet, and the cultural inheritance of our ancestors, and then those rules go on to further credit people freely acting in the spirit of that game. Many of us will do so hesitantly at first as we look around suspiciously wondering what the catch is, but as we go on playing together it’ll dawn on us, sometimes quick and sometimes slow, “Ah! We’re in this together!” Life can have that meaning.
Robert Anson Heinlein said a lovely thing about money once that I never understood ‘till recently. Here it is with some context:

Mike did not share Jubal’s annoyance at the postal avalanche; he reveled in it, insurance ads and marriage proposals. His trip to the palace had opened his eyes to enormous variety in this world and he resolved to grok it all. It would take centuries and he must grow and grow and grow, but he was in no hurry – he grokked that eternity and the ever-beautifully-changing now were identical.

He decided not to reread the Encyclopedia Britannica; mail gave him brighter glimpses of the world. He read it, grokked what he could, remembered the rest for contemplation while the household slept. He was beginning, he thought, to grok “business,” “buying,” “selling,” and related unMartian activities – the Encyclopedia had left him unfulfilled, as (he now grokked) each article had assumed that he knew things that he did not.

There arrived in the mail, from Mr. Secretary General Joseph Edgerton Douglas, a check book and papers; his brother Jubal took pains to explain what money was and how it was used. Mike failed to understand, even though Jubal showed him how to make out a check, gave him “money” in exchange for it, taught him to count it.

Then suddenly, with grokking so blinding that he trembled, he understood money. These pretty pictures and bright medallions were not “money”; they were symbols for an idea which spread through these people, all through their world. But things were not money, any more than water shared was growing-closer. Money was an idea, as abstract as an Old One’s thoughts — money was a great structured symbol for balancing and healing and growing closer.

“… for balancing and healing and growing closer.” Whaat?! Indeed dude.
 
I didn’t understand what Heinlein said because that truth is buried beneath the surface grime of money on money returns and you gotta scour it back down to credit to shiver with grokking in happy beauty, you dig? Then you see that the obvious question and power is, “Who or what could create credit and why?
 
For balancing…  Credit does and must have its’ counterpart as debit (and the cynic says, “I knew it!”), 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. Rather than you owing me or some institution, we balance our consumptive natures with our creative natures, both inside and outside, in a self-determined way, and everybody’s consumption depends on every ones creativity. That’s how it is anyway, only hidden and captured, isn’t it? Who owes what to whom in Creditism? All of us owe a Common Planet to the Universe, Gaia, our Ancestors, and our Children. How do we pay for (balance) it? Through prices that internalize all costs overall and reflect the purposes that something is built for. To state that well is tricky. Makes me feel like we’re talking about rationing or austerity measures or something. But that notion is rather off kilter here.
 
Most important prices right now in our current economics are considerably above what they would be under a different system. A house for instance might cost $250,000 today to build and sell for $400,000. That’s already a claim on our work as if we can’t simply build houses together for each other, but add in the fact that wages over time do not keep up with prices over time, then add the fact that speculative finance is artificially increasing prices further at an accelerated rate, and it becomes clear that our activity (wages, labor) is being used to make us have to do more activity. But if houses are free ‘cause they’re not for buying but for making homes in, AND it still takes human activity to make them (especially as awesome as we’d like), THEN something else has to cost because currency is for buying the buyable stuff we make for each other,  but our activities are no longer being wasted in speculations. You cogitate?
 
So, PlayStations might cost more, least until some enterprising group comes along and figures out how to make ‘em more robust and updateable so we don’t have to buy the next version while throwing the last away in the trash, BUT if cost’s are lower overall, AND your activity (labor, wages) aren’t being wasted by a stranger for god knows what, THEN do PlayStations cost more?
 
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. Firstly, people that know something about degradation and regeneration – those that study water and air, chemicals, trash heaps, and our collective unconscious – 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 in addressing that problem. We wont have to talk about the cost of cleaning stuff up anymore. We will correctly see that the cost of not cleaning it up is an increasingly diminishing future in terms of all of our real wealth. We will be paid for it, and will know transparently that the immediate cost is an increase in the price of luxuries that are currently scarce and inefficient to produce providing incentive for enterprising groups.
 
The cost of everything cannot go to zero, because the human activity required to produce and maintain things cannot go to zero? Would we even want it to?

I had an overwhelming feeling with all those eyes on me. I didn’t say it, but I was thinking, not of the technical and philosophical questions I was raising, but about fulfillment. That it was better, having a world where we had to work to build our own communities, to help our neighbors and their children, to feel valuable, not just because of our humanity, but because we were valuable to humanity. I didn’t ever want to live in a society where we’d just handed off our responsibility to our tools, to let the hammers construct the future for us. What would we be then? What would the renaissance masters have thought of that? The future had to be ours. – P.E Rowe ‘Singular’

That isn’t to say that drugerous work cannot become rare, or that automation should not make working hours more efficient, fun, diverse, or optional. Of course some of us want a good dose of that, and communities will deliberate over those considerations, but neither do we want to not need each other. It’s fun to raise a barn together. It’s human.
 
Also, every reduction in costs increases and decreases other things whether or not we are aware of it. An example many are familiar with is a corporation like Walmart. When the price of Walmart’s goods go down, as the size of the Walmart corporation and their profits goes up, the business diversity and profitability of local business goes down, and thus a town’s wealth and buying power goes down, because the international corporation called Walmart is not investing their profits in your town, they are investing their profits in their future increase of profits. Negative externalities always cost something to someone somewhere. On a Common Planet we know at the end of the day that there’s nobody else somewhere else that can heal us. There’s just us.
 
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, and its infrastructure is there for us to use for one another, and our commons are ours to take care of together, we begin to value each other again and reclaim our sense of place.
 
Our appreciation of each other brings us closer together in fellow-feeling, what in German is called Gemeinschaft and in Arabic is called ʿaṣabiyya, while at the same time expanding the sphere of that feeling and waking the dormant animist eyes of our ancestors within us. The atomism of individuals out for individual gain, conditioned by the nightmare of money gaining mastery over us, is unwound, and our tokens of credit become but a beautiful reflection of our real participation as we dance, sing, call, and respond, and contribute our sweat and laughter in A Play for Life.

A Strategic Puzzle

Many groups and strategies will be needed to bring us all to Common Planet, and a lot of excellent folks have been thinking about it for a long time. Acting together on a common game-board can allow us to leverage our powers together. Here is a very incomplete list of some pieces of the puzzle we’ve noticed:

That 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, and thus are generators of collective abundance. If nations create the mass of currency for the enaction of communal projects, then that credit creation becomes an expression of the will of the people to pursue their communally beneficial goals. A challenge associated with that particular avenue of approach is that if the political infrastructure for determining what projects or programs get funded is not determined in a sufficiently democratic way then communities would be subject to the purposes of policy makers who may or may not have the interests of the public and planet at heart and cannot know the unique aspects of those communities and ecosystems at ground level. Credit creation and allocation is always a deployment of working hours to some ends. Crowdsourcing the crafting of solution making through several rounds of refinement can ensure sufficient communal participation in creating solutions suited to our communities.
Such a system would ensure that the purposes for which we work are self and communally determined. If the activity of people from the bottom up create the mass of currency then we ensure agency in the production of what a community wants or needs. The challenges associated with that avenue of approach are that if nations don’t accommodate, acquiesce, or help to facilitate such a currency generating structure then 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.
Crowdsource populating communal and personal ledgers on The Visible Hand through gamification with a record of all global production, capital, and resources. How that would work is that we would create an app, that i’m calling The Visible Hand at the moment, which is both your access to and collectively is the HNDB with the programming of Creditism. You’d create your private account, and would receive sacred tokens if you wanted to play by going on quests around your community to gather info about the shape and stuff and work in your town or nearby. You might go hike a trail to say something about trees and waterfalls, and water quality. How much algae is in the water? Fill a vial to deliver to someone else on a quest of theirs that intersects your own. Are there dry gulleys that used to have water? Do they flow seasonally? Go back and check in spring. Is there an abundance of rock in the area for the creation of permaculture check dams and sheet flow spreaders to slow the seasonal water to rehydrate the land? If so organize a community quest to go and do it. Take pictures with the help of apps to identify ground plants. Collect samples. It’d be like Pokemon Go but for the purpose of an excellent human and planetary future. That would allow us to know what we’ve all got and what shape it’s in, and what we need and want to do in our communities in terms of what should actually be defined as the commons. It would begin populating The Visible Hand with more quests on the job board. We would begin taking ownership of our surroundings, in the lovely sense of that term. Enacting its reality further as a commons refers back and forward to the other pieces of the puzzle.

This one we lifted from Yanis Varoufakis who took it from the syndicalist movement (thumbs up, dude!). It would consist of changing corporate law so that every employee would be defined as a voting partner in the firm. They would receive one non-transferable share that constituted their voting identity. Shares would no longer be sellable. Implementing that change in corporate law would reclaim an enormous portion of our commons in one fell swoop. But it wouldn’t reclaim housing.

This passage excerpted from David Korten’s ‘The New Economy: A Living Earth System Model’:

“As proposed by Tim McDonald and John Fullerton, pension funds, the endowment funds of foundations, and other public interest endowment funds may hold a key to this transformation. Responsible for trillions of dollars of financial assets, they have the means to buy large corporations, hold them accountable to the public good, and gradually convert them to cooperative forms.”

That 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, the economics of Creditism, and our Common Planet with one rather satisfying “wack!”

A change of law making it illegal for businesses to own housing done carefully and with a means of exit would begin to state within The Human Project that houses aren’t for profits they’re for people to live in, and would bring their prices down to more natural levels. For an exit strategy, this piece might be combined with national or decentralized credit creation (pieces 1 and 2) allowing business’s to cash out their residential holdings, or with the power of endowments and foundations (piece 5) transforming Real-estate businesses into co-ops that can simply distribute that housing to their members and others under Creditist principles.

Towns, cities, and counties could potentially 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, and non-local business). 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.

Any notion of a Common Planet will need to, in some way, conceptualize and encode returning the ownership of the biosphere back to itself – and to all of life – while instantiating human beings as responsible stewards of that sphere. We do this first by recognizing that we cannot escape some conception of The Anthropocene – we have GOT to be stewards – and resolving to move all of us within The Tree of Life out of the Anthropocene and into The Ayucene (others have called that ‘The Ecozoic’). We conceive of this as The Ledger of Life. It would exist on The Visible Hand, as a distinct Ledger unto itself, and consist of descriptions of every existing waterway and body, species, habitat, ecosystem, and biome. Descriptions of their ecosystemics, weather, climate, and geosystemics (like water purification, carbon sequestration, methane production). Their overall states of health and degradation by every conceivable quality measure. Indications of what needs to and can be done to improve their biodiversity, regeneration, and antifragility (which would further populate the quest/ job board), and communally agreed expert assessments of what parts of it can be sustainably extracted, at what rates, with what regenerative measures of ‘intraction’ (extraction’s opposite). It would not and we believe must 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 terms of labor activity, in order to be responsible stewards of it. It tells us that we belong to Earth, each other, and The Tree Of Life, and begins to rewild us as a species of peculiar talent as we lean into the primeval wisdom’s of the natural world and the full scope of human being.

“Organization and planning of National Economic Boycott = Labour + Students + Consumption. How do we materialise the Eco-Social Contract? The [citizen cells] force the new Eco-Social Contract by unleashing the power of the market. It starts by organising permanent consumer boycotts that target specific products and services and companies that exhibit the lowest regard for truly social and environmental sustainability. Once people are well versed in the organisation and execution of consumer boycotts and the national assemblies have agreed that the indispensable tipping point of a critical mass of citizens has been reached, a national boycott is organised to demand the organisation of a Constitutional National Assembly of the citizenry to write a new constitution for a new Eco-Social Contract between people and the planet. This involves a labour, student and consumer strike. People do not go out to demonstrate in the streets. This cancels any possibility of the government unleashing any kind of repression. People stay at home, do not go to work, to school and to stores, until the government agrees to celebrate the Constitutional Assembly. National strikes must be organised to last as long as necessary to force national governments to agree to a Constitutional Assembly. Roughly every week of a calendar is equivalent to 1,92% of a country’s GDP and one month equivalent to 8,3%. If the movement strike has a critical mass of 25% of the population and lasts one month, it would be equivalent to 2,1% of GDP, which would constitute an enormous pressure on the system.” – Álvaro J. De Regil: Transitioning to “Geocratia” —the People and Planet and Not the Market Paradigm — First Steps – The Jus Semper Global Alliance, May 2020.

This fit’s nicely together with other pieces of the puzzle. In his paper Mr. De Regil (very cool, sir! Did i ‘mister’ your name correctly?) discusses prior and ongoing efforts to localize resources and basic supply chains which would create some community resiliency for enacting the civil disobedience he describes. We conceive our network, The Visible Hand, as functioning that way as well. In the early stages of adoption some local business (and our sacred tokens) can begin to come on line in our game under Creditist economics. We can self-organize as citizen cells through The Visible Hand, and post assemblies on the quest board  leading up to the grand quests of the National and Global boycotts, and the Constitutional Assemblies. That way way we can have coffee and sandwiches as we act ‘en mass to reclaim and evolve ourselves and our Common Planet.

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 other’s strategies and tactics on a common game board?

Each of those strategic pieces are currently available (let us know about other ones) and we can fit them all together. Our organization, also called Common Planet, is focused on communicating the conception of Creditism: an infinite game of mutual rules allowing our credit, commons, and purposes to be permanently reclaimed and uncapturable. Others in and out of our developing network are focused on different pieces of the strategic puzzle, and we believe Creditism is a big enough game-board on which to deploy them for mutually assured evolution. The Common Planet we all enact together is vastly bigger than us. We just contribute our bits.

The Visible Hand and it's Elements

“By decentralizing the Economics, we can democratize Governance and that’s about the best system possible. Democratizing Economics doesn’t work because the majority can decide to capture more economic benefit then use that to capture more and more as history shows.” – Remzi Bajrami

If we want to create a Holochain Network Database with popular and excellent interfaces to streamline, gameify, and decentralize economics and credit creation at scale from the bottom up, thereby circumventing national credit creation and launching us into The Ayucene, 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 writ large, and our expertly crafted communal agreements of the portion of harvestables if any, amounts, rates, practices, and regeneration. That will contribute to The Quest Board.

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, and a Global Ledgers/ accounts. To be populated with all capital and resources collectively reclaimed and owned by the respective communities. Community credit will flow to these.

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. CC is also allocated equally to individual private accounts for use in forming or supporting groups.

Co-op ledgers/ accounts. These are the accounts of groups or individuals engaged in the enterprises of production or service. They require community credit for some of their operations that they either pool together from the individual CC of their members or can request from other individuals or communities to be approved democratically. Community credit is not directly allocated to these groups, people use their community credit as a way to decide what groups to form and support and what community projects they want to enact. That’s part of the point of CC. Bonus personal credit for excellent implementation of quality and efficiency goals will flow through these to be distributed to the members of the co-ops however they decide.

Bonus. The incentive structure and rate of bonus that flows through collective pools can and must be designed to promote friendly competition between groups engaged in similar industry, rewarding those groups that are most successful in producing balanced quality outcomes for social and/ or ecological good. You hackers and gamer’s know about that. We need to code out the exploits to embed equitable communal ‘imploits.’ The basis for various pools of bonus is a fun riddle to try and solve.

Personal Private Ledgers/ accounts. To be populated with individual’s or family’s private possessions and only accessible to them. Personal credit and community credit will flow to these.

Personal Credit. Created and allocated as UBI, and additionally created at the point of payable activity. Used by individuals to purchase from the Marketplace. Never spent by groups.

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 that are used in the making of awesome things.

The Exchange. This is where we list the used items we own that can be sold to others in exchange for some of their PC but only at the price it was last purchased for, though usually less cause entropy’s a thing. This is the only case in which PC can be transferred from one individual to another.

The Abodium. Here’s all the nifty houses available to take up residence in and private unrevocable stewardship of (we think it’s a different class of legal relation ‘cause you don’t buy ‘em).

Abodium Rating and Level. In order to ensure a smooth transition into the new game, and fair distribution of housing within the game, we need a point system based on past experience and merit, without which there’d be a mad dash for the best digs creating a tussle of avoidable conflict. Dwellings are rated 1-10 overall based on various quality measures, then adjusted on a curve as a group within a locale so that there are houses in each place to actually live in. Each individual will get a housing level based on their past experience of housing quality and then they can freely advance their level if they wish, either through buying up a level with their PC or improving the level of their existing home also with their PC, in a fair and cooperative game of participation.

The Sphere. Common Planet’s social media and news platform for any who want to. If we’re gonna have such a thing it should have transparent algorithms that the user can play with so we’re not being manipulated behind the scenes. Integration with projects like The Society Library would allow us to upgrade our understanding of one another by being exposed to the best versions of every one’s view points on a spectrum of concerns.

The Talking Stick. Integrated voting mechanisms for local, regional, and global scale with direct ability for the crowdsourced crafting of legislative proposals and transparent records of the political activities and votes of council members and other political figures.

A standard scale of pay rates. This is so that if you do a similar thing with similar skill in a different place you aren’t disadvantaged for it. It allows skilled labor to remain in communities when there’s need and desire for it. We can’t poach each other and play people against one another by din of perverse market forces, but we can still request each others skills. That scale says you are systemically equally valuable as anybody else with those same skills regardless of where you happen to be, while the actual need for your skills, and thus where you can use them obviously depends on what communities need or want them. In our current system the incentive is to outsource jobs and negative externalities, which is a direct result of differential regional pay and power. When that’s the case we are not players, but pieces on someone else’s game board.

The Balance. These are algorithms for the ongoing balance of prices with the overall volume of credit in the system at any given time. As the cost of necessities or digital goods goes down, and as we do “unproductive” non Marketplace work that our communities value like rehabilitating ecosystems or doing theoretical mathematics, both of which are without really foreseeable marketable products, the cost of scarce luxuries must go up. That is because our consuming-of-pretty-bobbles side needs to be paying for our doing-important-shit-side. The algorithms for balance should transparently show the increasing state of individual’s and community’s buying power.

The Portals. A bangin’ graphical user interface granting every one access and interaction with all the wickedly dope shebang. It will be easy to use, allow customization of various notifications like quests you’d dig in your area…

Plugins. Various components that can be added as desired and needed for questing and whatnot like plant identification apps etc.

With those elements combined we are Captain The Visible Hand.

Individuals and groups all throughout history have envisioned some version of a beautiful Common Planet, or nation, or community. We’ve had fits and starts, then more often than not we end in failures of one sort or other, and the economic bulldozer continues to plod onward. Why do we fail time and again? What is it!? We have no code of our own; no uncaptured infrastructure that can run a rule-set of The People. So era on era we have to resort to trying to wrest our commons away from the swords and guns and cannons, and we bleed. Then, if we manage to capture Park Place, we struggle to do a little good under the same old monopoly guy rules.

Economy is a tool of power. It is the most potent tool, and it cuts sharp. That tool is either ours, or someone else’s, and its rules decide what bleeds. Let’s not have it be our hearts anymore; not our communities, families, and relatives in The Tree of Life.

Any group or figure, contemporary or historical, could run their most hopeful protopian vision, given the digital infrastructure, game-board, and game rules described. Our trouble is that we can’t organize at scale if we can’t understand at scale that we need each other. We need to combine OUR powers. We say that, and little else. We speak the tiny detail that’s been swept under the rug.

We still have to onboard our physical capital and resources as pieces in the new game obviously, and that’s a challenge, but having created a game that scales, the transition becomes possible as nodes in the game can more simply and smoothly just come on line as we fit together our puzzle pieces and reclaim ourselves as cooperative players in an Infinite Game on a Common Planet.

Our organization is not currently focused on securing funding for the development of that digital infrastructure, though it may become a focus once the Phoenix of Creditism is happily fluttering about the Zeitgeist and lighting people up, so please have at it. However, we will be sending an army or opensource militant nerds to check your work for bugs, back doors, and correct implementation of Creditist principles. Mmhm.

The 3 Forbidden Invisible P's: How dare you

We believe that there are 3 key determinations any conception of a Common Planet cannot outsource to The Invisible Hand of markets:
  1. Purposes. 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.
  2. Pay. When markets determine our source of pay and our rates of pay under the rubric of prices, and the overall volume of currency available for incomes under a rubric of debt based currency for profit 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.
  3. Products. Market conditions defining what is ‘cost effective’ for us to make for each other 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. There is for example a light bulb that has apparently been burning since the early twentieth century! Can you believe that?
If the above points sound a little circular it’s because they are. Purposes, pay, and products are interconnected aspects of the same game we’re playing. Market determinations of them are the viciously circular bowl of quagmire we are stuck up to our eyeballs in. Markets aren’t free and they don’t facilitate liberative, ecological, communal, and creative swagger when they determine any of those 3 things.

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.

If we want smart phones, cars, and water heaters that are nearly indestructible the groups of us creating such things will need to be primarily competing under metrics of quality and purpose instead of metrics of profit and growth. If we want vibrant ecosystems and waterways people will need to be paid directly to help regenerate and maintain them in ways that our communities agree are excellently legit. Extra profits above our normal pay will flow to us in the form of bonuses achieved for outstanding implementation of purposes under quality and efficiency metrics carefully decided upon in communities and aimed at increase of social and ecological wealth and regeneration, and meaningful community solidarity. That’s different.

Such a mechanism for purpose, pay, and produce differs from the current system in that cost and profit no longer determine at the outset what can be produced, or what level of quality a product has.

Under a system of Creditism what is “cost effective” is redefined allowing us to afford the implementation of inventions and projects that are currently shut out. We always either afford our purposes with our activity toward those purposes, or some one else affords their purposes with OUR activity towards their purposes. There can be hybrids, but there isn’t a third option, and where currency comes from directs us. Currency needs to come from us, because that’s where it always comes from.
The cynicism’s implicit in questions like, “How do you afford a UBI for everybody?” for example, are answered rather simply in Creditism, “UBI is the beginning of our economics, not the end. It is our collective investment in ourselves, our children, Creditism, and our Common Planet. People are where money comes from. We aren’t liabilities, we’re assets. Our existence isn’t a cost. It’s the obvious origin of anything else. (Apologies to the accounting community for the non-technical use of the terms, but you can see it if you just mirror everything…)

Now Let's Juxtapose! 🎶

In Capitalism:
  1. Creative activity discovers what’s possible.
  2. Investors determine what will be produced from the possible menu.
  3. Markets define ‘sound investment’ and determine along with monopolies the prices and quality of products.
  4. Prices determine incomes for individuals competing with one another for jobs, and competing with companies for wages, and determine profit and loss ratios among people and companies competing for market share in disparate industries under homogeneous measures like GDP and market cap.
  5. Incomes, and profit and loss ratios determine success, failure, standard of living, and class status.
  6. Standard of living and class status determine largely who can be an entrepreneur and an investor.
  7. Meanwhile, success or failure determines future use of productive capital.
  8. Continued use of productive capital to the purpose of investor profit monopolizes human activity.
  9. The monopolization of human activity determines what The Human Project is invested in.
  10. Investment in quantity, growth, corporations, consumption, and shareholder profits determines the trajectory of human and planetary futures in the context of Capitalist markets with pernicious roots, meager now’s, and shallow futures…
  11. Repeat.
In Creditism:
  1. We design a standard scale of pay rates for communal vitality, sentience, and spark, cross-cultural sincerity, and individual liberty.
  2. We invest in each other, and our basic standard of living and income.
  3. Our self selected activities determine our additional incomes.
  4. Creative activity discovers what’s possible.
  5. Individuals in communities determine what will be produced from the possible menu to what standards of quality.
  6. Income, regeneration, and markets determine prices.
  7. Prices determine profit and loss ratios among groups competing in similar industry under quality measures tailored to those industries.
  8. Profit and loss ratios determine success or failure.
  9. Success or failure, or completion of a group’s purpose, awards bonus and determines continued or changing use of productive capital.
  10. Continued and changing use of productive capital for varied purposes under quality and carefully considered efficiency metrics increases standard of living and liberates human activity.
  11. Increasing standard of living and liberating human activity, with incentive for creative activity under communally agreed quality metrics, determines what The Human Project is invested in.
  12. Investment in our children, our future, humanity, ourselves, and our biosphere determines the trajectory of human and planetary futures in the context of Creditist markets with ancestral roots, relevant nows, and deep futures…
  13. Repeat.

I don’t know who said it, but if the revolution isn’t fun I ain’t showing up. (“If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution” – Emma Goldman. We like to edit each other 😉)

We’re caught in a damn quagmire and most of us see it or sense it. We need to play a different game, and we can.

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, dig our bare toes down into the lovely and pungent earth, recall and invoke the fire of ancestral wisdom, and leap outta The Anthropocene and into The Ayucene as we act with delight and poise in A Play For Life.

Come play with us.