Outside The Box

“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

We all know the Economics 101 definition of “money” as a medium of exchange. Scrutineers of history observe money as a proxy for power, while those with a gentler grip on reality see money as a form of energy.

Some of the most energetic people I have known were possessed of the least amount of money, so for the purposes of this discussion we’ll concentrate on the second definition, marking in passing how people with money seem to afford more justice than those without, how fame, money and influence are interchangable, and how so many enter politics as debtors and leave it as multimillionaires.

We’ve all heard about digital, or cryptocurrency by now. Bitcoin and Ethereum are two of the most well known versions, and a regular part of the news cycle on financial pages. Legacy media does not devote much attention, however, to an acronym that will become embedded in all our financial futures whether we like it or not: CBDC, which stands for Central Bank Digital Currency.

CDBC is the digital version of fiat currency. Fiat currency is “money” that is not backed by any physical asset, its value determined by supply and demand, the stability of the government that issues it, and the ability to coerce other governments into using it. The US dollar is a fiat currency.

There is mounting concern about the ability of the dollar to pay our bills and provide our entertainments as we watch our purchasing power diminish. Our government habitually spends far more than it makes, and the Federal Reserve conjures more dollars to accommodate that addiction, making what we earn worth less every year.

This relationship seems to prioritize survival of the government over the well being of of the people. Blockchain currencies like Bitcoin were envisioned as an alternative to and escape from the coercive power of central banks over our financial system, and a hedge against the inherent weaknesses of fiat currencies.

Block chain currency represented an opportunity to break free of that bondage by offering a currency subject only to market forces, independent of the whims and aspirations of banks and their elected officials. It was designed to be, by virtue of encryption, private and extremely difficult to steal. If you consult the record of the evolving treatment of cryptocurrency by legacy media and government talkers, digital currency initially appeared to have represented an existential threat to the status quo.

If you can’t beat them, join them. Central banks have now embraced digital currency after first appearing to resist it. Over 80 central banks have researched it, and it has been implemented by several.

There are pros and cons to CBDC. It enables people with or without access to banks to use money without an intermediary. It eliminates the danger of a local or regional bank collapse. It makes the transfer of money instantaneous.

On the other hand, CBDC gives central banks and their governments unprecedented coercive power, should they choose to use it. Imagine the money in your bank account tagged with an expiration date, use it or lose it, in order to “stimulate” the economy, and the value of that money decided, not by market forces, but at the convenience of government. Imagine your purchasing power tied to your “social score” as determined by your benevolent government, such as China’s ongoing efforts to achieve a “holistic assessment of an individual or a company’s trustworthiness.” Imagine any government with the ability to track every financial transaction in real time.

Thus the origin of the term which headlines our discussion today: Slavecoin. It was “minted” as a warning to all of us to pay close attention to what banks and their governments are preparing, and the possible consequences.

Yesterday I was reading an article by Wolf Tivy, Editor of Palladium Magazine, in which he expands the scope of Slavecoin. He writes, “Slavecoin is anything that is apparently valuable from inside the spectacle, but in fact, offers no possible independence from it, and can’t be redeemed for hard vital power. Slavecoin is fake in its substance: think of all the prestige, credentials, career attainment, identity validation, pleasures, luxuries, and financialized wealth that no longer buys power. These things seem valuable and have extensive social narratives backing them up. But when viewed skeptically from outside the system, there is much less substance there than the trusted social consensus would lead you to think.”

For the student of history, Slavecoin is bread and circuses. It is the price of our addictions and our servitude to the pushers of those needful things. Slavecoin is the dissipation of our vital energies in pursuit of things which have no intrinsic value in this empire of debt, ephemeral things for which we exchange the power to determine the course of our lives.

Debt has always been tied to servitude. Today that servitude is managed by technology only vaguely understood by the vast majority of people. Have you checked your credit score lately?