The Prime Directive

and the Social Vending Machine

Some leisurely writing on my b-day to be read in the voice of Arlo Guthrie’s (Alice’s Restaurant)

Stanza 1: Kirk makes a Mess

Imagine a valley that has a a small reservoir of water that fills up seasonally and supplies water to the plants that live in that valley.

The valley seems to be in some state of relative equilibrium – There are ups and downs but things are peaceful if not perfect.

Now comes along someone named Kirk hiking along a trail at the top of the valley and he smells from above that there is a very nice smelling mint growing down there. Kirk scrambles down the hill and picks up some of the mint and heads back to his ship. Everyone on the ship loves the mint and sadly they don’t seem to be able to replicate it, so they ask Kirk to go get some more.

Kirk is a good captain, so he heads back to the valley and sees that there is very little mint there growing among the other plants. As well the valley looks to be quite dry to him. So he decides to divert a nearby stream to start watering the mint.

An emergency call comes in and Kirk rushes off to put out a fire on the ship and everyone fully forgets about the mint for a full year until it is Scotty’s the chief engineer’s birthday and he wants a mint julep cocktail to celebrate. Kirk’s eyes get really big as he remembers now that he had diverted a stream to help water the mint!

The ship heads back near the valley and Kirk rushes up the beach and climbs up the mountains and finds the valley now over grown with poison ivy! Kirk is allergic to poison ivy so rather than risk touching it. So he decides to dam the stream he had diverted.

And immediately he gets another emergency call from Start Fleet and has to abandon his work.

It’s not until another year passes that Scotty remembers his mint julep cocktail and Kirk apologizes and the ship again rushes again back to the little valley, but sadly finds that all the mint is now dead.

He calls in his chief science officer Spock to investigate. Spock takes one look at the situation and determines that the ecosystem had become dependent on the influx of water and the dam Kirk made had actually dried up the seasonal reservoir at the bottom that the ecosystem had once depended on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive

After Spock finishes citing the prime directive (Starfleet General Order 1) to not interfere with pre-warp civilizations or ecosystems – and reminds Kirk that this especially applies to not creating dependencies on foreign inputs …..

Scotty shouts from over the ridge. “I’ve got it Captain!”

Spock and Kirk rush over and find Scotty holding a handful of mint from another small valley.

“Just enough for my mint julep,” Scotty says with all smiles.

“If we could only grow some more,” says Kirk.

“3 to beam up!” Says Spock.

And they leave the valley in peace (for now … to be continued).

Stanza 2: Juan makes a Mess

Let’s say you are a traveling foreigner named Juan, who found a civilization in some level of social and economic equilibrium – and decided you wanted something from it … like them to help you mine metal from cave and you find they really like sugar – which you happen to have loads of.

How would you as Juan follow the prime directive there?

Certainly – if a bit of mining labor and ore was willingly offered in exchange for just a kilo of sugar – it wouldn’t destroy that civilization or create dependency? Right?

But what if sugar was really addictive and everyone in civilization couldn’t get enough of it and were willing to sell everything they had for it – even people they didn’t like much …!

You, Juan are a nice guy. You might be surprised and not so addicted to sugar yourself. After doing this trade many more times you notice how desperately everyone is trying to get sugar and say, “hold on….” The Prime Directive seems to be being broken here – I’ve created some dependency on a foreign thing that only I can control.

So you say – “a ha! I will fix the problem by helping the native population form a government to cultivate and grow their own sugar cane!”

“I’ve solved the problem!” you thought ….

But no, sadly that government just sells the sugar and everyone is still addicted sells all their goods and services for the substance.

Oh no…..

The culture, languages and customs of this once thriving civilization are all now nearly destroyed.

What do to?….

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Interlude: How it’s going with the Mess

Somehow this is where we are today.

A certain tradition called money – passed down from the Roman Juno Moneta – has been accepts and forced on nearly the whole planet. It has taken over our ability to exchange with each other without it. In fact it’s illegal in many places to exchange services or seed or any without money and taxes being paid. This has destroyed customs and cultures and it’s effects have endangered the entire planet’s ecosystems.

It is a mess!

Wow …. glad to get that off my chest.

ok. So what to do?

What if there was a way to ween people from dependency on money and reconnect them with trusting each other?

What if this was actually just a natural, easy transition?

How might that look?

How could the plants in Kirk’s valley have been weened from the influx of foreign water?
How could the culture being destroyed by sugar be weened off the stuff?
How could societies across our planet be weened from money?

I thought – a biut like Juan- that perhaps groups of people should create their own money – but alas that simply created more market cultures and competition with state monies.

Since I hadn’t understood ecology and never seen human societies doing any other form of resource coordination - I really only had the one model – money. So community currency was the buzzword I organized around.

Now, after many more years seeing other forms of resource coordination – namely rotating labor associations – I realized there was a way to ween ourselves from money – in theory.

This is how that’s going so far ….

It looks like using money a bit like one uses methadone – sparingly and with the intention to build up people's ability to live without it.

At Grassroots Economics we help people create and collect valuable resource commitments (we call them vouchers) into common baskets (we call them pools). Importantly each commitment in a pool has a limit. Only so much money or any other resource commitment can go in there and still be useful. This means that as the pool becomes full of money it must be swapped out for a commitment of equal value - kinda like a loan.

Let’s make sense of this like we would a vending machine.

Stanza 3: Fixin’ the Mess

You are named Jim and you own a vending machine. You stock the vending machine with some money as change (coins) and several products like Doritos and Cheetos and Oreos. Someone can put in a $10 dollar bill and get a pack of Doritos along with change.

You’ve also tricked out the machine so that someone put in a scanned and validated pack of Doritos they can get back some money that had been put in before with a small fee for Jim. This has saved Jim a lot of time in stocking – now anyone can stock the machine.

The limit on how much Doritos or money that can be held in the vending machine are based on physical limits as well as risk of theft and expiration that Jim decides as the owner.

What’s great is that this machine can work without money! If anyone with whole nicely packaged unexpired bags of Doritos wanted Oreos – they could put Doritos in and pull out an equal value of Oreos – up to the capacity of the machine. (considering if there were enough Oreos in there and enough space for new Doritos).

This machine creates a connection between Doritos and Orios and anything else in there - that doesn’t depend on money in the machine.

Of course money can still be used – but they don’t have to have it.

Now imagine this – lets call it a Social Vending Machine is stocked with gift-cards for goods and services of people in a community. A gift-card could say – redeemable for $1 dollar worth of Bob’s Mechanic Services. Another could say redeemable for 1 hour of Sally’s lawn mowing.

One could go in there and buy some of these gift-cards with money, and as well people with their own gift-cards could exchange them for the other gift-cards in the machine. The owner, Jim, of the social vending machine could determine the relative value of each gift-card as well as the limits of how many can go in the machine.

Jim stocks the vending machine with gift-cards he purchased with money from the community – so everyone already got paid and now Jim lets anyone holding those gift-cards to swap for others in the machine (while taking a small fee).

At some point Sally says she doesn’t like the fees and so she creates her own machine and stocks it with her own gift-cards and those of her friends that all give her some. Her friends and her votes as to what gift-cards to add, what their prices should be and what limits they have.

People start using her Social Vending Machine more than Jim’s because there is more stuff in it and it’s cheaper. But eventually there is more demand than Salley’s machine can manage. She tries to increase the size of it – but it just won’t get any bigger without breaking (trust).

So Bob the mechanic, seeing the demand, set’s up another machine with his own vouchers and some others that he owns. Then being a clever mechanic he links his machine to Salley’s and to Jim’s so that vouchers can flow between all the machines – acting like a decentralized exchange. This means someone can now swap their gift-cards in any machine and get out whichever other gift cards they want (up to the limits of the network)!

As the network of these social vending machines grow – people find that if they don’t have enough money they can generally still exchange goods and services. Money gradually becomes known as State Vouchers redeemable for state services and the machines are broken down and replaced with a new decentralized internet.

Weened from addiction to money - a world of diverse cultures re-emerges and life thrives again.

And so it is and could be.

I present to you a Social Vending Machine maker – called Sarafu.Network where you can make your own pools and choose whichever digital assets (including stable coins) you want to allow to exchange in them as well as pricing and limits and fees.

*Sarafu.Network is an Open Source interface to the Celo Blockchain – a Layer 2 of Ethereum.

*Please copy and modify it and make your own! The more of them the better the network is.

For questions please email info@grassecon.org .

Epilogue

Scotty and Kirk were playing poker one night ….

“Scotty … remember that mint julep? … what if we could just go back to that valley and get a bit more ……” but before Kirk can finish the sentence –

“Let’s go make cocktails!” says Scotty as he stands up with a hiccup and bit of a wobble and puts on his jacket.

With a bit of justification along the way they figured - they had already ruined one ecosystem – shouldn’t they try to go back and fix it?

They took a small shuttle to the valley without Spock noticing and started to work regenerating that small bio-region – this time with clear limits to any inputs they put in. They even dug terraces, swales and key lines and connected a few valleys together to provide a larger water buffer. It took them several years – but eventually they helped to grow back a thriving ecosystem - (with an excess mint that they helped harvest - of course).

Spock found out …