Post #27: we can do better than money. introducing Munny.
I’ve been writing these posts for a little over a year now. The gist has remained true to the name of “existential relevance.” Every topic explored or idea proposed has been an effort to understand how our civilization currently pursues or could pursue “relevance,” or meaning.
I’ve come to appreciate that we use our institutions- economies, governments, religions- to keep ourselves on a meaningful path. Then each of these complex systems uses a symbol- money, law, god- to make it simple for people to know what to focus on and pursue.
Our economic systems have surpassed religions and governments to become the main driver of our attention, with money acting as the symbol we all work to collect.
Money has been an amazing symbol. For the most part, it has accurately represented value for centuries. What an incredible coordinating tool it has been. While our civilization has no shortage of problems, what we’ve built together is truly incredible. Money is certainly to be thanked for its coordinating role.
However, as we get deeper into the digital age, we can see that money isn’t scaling to meet the complexity of our 21st century civilization. The symbol is breaking. I’ve explore this idea in previous posts including this one. The general idea being there are a few ways money doesn’t work anymore:
Money can be “earned” by completing tasks that aren’t actually valuable (i.e. optimizing ads platforms or damaging the planet or working on redundant projects)
Money can be “printed” without the creation of value (i.e. what the U.S. Federal Reserve effectively does by controlling money supply)
Money can be held and not invested into value creation (i.e. wealth inequality).
A participant in the Relevance discord, Justia.eth, helped research some specific examples of people pursuing money without adding value:
182 different energy drink companies in the U.S.
200 companies producing TVs in the U.S.
1,400 supplement companies in the U.S.
24,000 different prescription medications
These four examples demonstrate how much redundant work happens under our current system. There is a lot of energy that could be allocated towards more meaningful work than the 200th TV company.
Munny
The next idea for a project I’m proposing is to redesign money. I’m calling this redesigned symbol Munny.
You can visit the munny.org website here: https://www.munny.org/
Over the past 40 years, we’ve built a technology stack that includes a global computer network called the internet, AI, and blockchain. This stack is the foundation to a more effective 21st century institution. Now we need to create a symbol that uses this incredible tech stack to accurately represent value, helping people know what to pay attention to in order to create a more meaningful and existentially relevant future.
I’m hosting a remote creative session on August 20th to brainstorm Munny. You can join the discord channel (https://discord.gg/wpcTbfk5) and ask for an invite, or get in touch me with elsewhere and I’ll send you the calendar invite.
xo,
Michael