As I have started my experiment with giving freely and receiving freely, people have of course asked the obvious question of where the idea came from. As with many ideas, I didn’t really know at first, it had been buzzing around inside my head for quite awhile before I finally figured out how to express it and how I would go about it in practice. As I’ve thought about it more though I have identified a number of sources of inspiration over the last several years that have sat in my subconscious and worked away until I have come to where I am now in my thinking.
International Financial Crisis and Recession
One of the biggest factors I think has been the international financial crisis and the prolonged recession that has followed it. As a result, a lot of people have been having a really hard time financially and some of the inequities and problems with our financial system that normally would go unnoticed or at least not thought about in any detail have become more prominent. I guess the saying ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it’ is actually pretty good advice a lot of the time, but the recent problems have made it clear that something is broken with our system and the way our society functions.
Occupy Wallstreet
A lot of people have been thinking about this and protesting, advocating different kinds of changes that might address the issues. Probably most prominent amongst these is the Occupy movement. Starting with Occupy Wallstreet, this movement spread all over the world including to New Zealand where protesters occupied various public spaces for long periods of time. One of the things I found interesting about this protest movement was that no-one really seemed to have any specific demands, other than a fairer financial system which didn’t make the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. How exactly they wanted this to be achieved was not made clear and in many ways I don’t think was an aim of the organizers, but the did want people to think about it and I think in that they have succeeded. I didn’t personally pay a great deal of attention to the protest movement, but I think it did trigger some things of in my own mind to get me thinking.
I think maybe the reason that the Occupy movement didn’t have specific demands to address the situation was that the situation is complex and a solution may not be simple, or maybe the solution is simple but we are so ingrained into thinking about things in a certain way that it is hard for us to see it at this point. Maybe when our perspective changes the solution will in fact be clear and simple, we just have a lot of ‘deprogramming’ to do to bring us to a new way of thinking about our world and in particular our financial systems. I’ll write more about this in a future post.
Unease and Action
Anyway, the combination of these factors and probably a host of others has left me with a general feeling of unease about our financial system which has been hard to exactly put my finger on. I think in a way this has been a good thing, because it often takes discomfort to motivate change and action, but what action should I take, especially when I hadn’t really identified the problem fully yet.
Inspiration
Well a few other ideas of things I had heard about in recent times were percolating around in my head as well. One of the high profile ones was when Radiohead released their album ‘In Rainbows’ in 2007 on a ‘pay what you want’ basis. It was a very unusual concept at the time (and still is really) and provoked a lot of media attention. There was a lot of speculation at the time that it had been unprofitable for them, but when figures were eventually released it turned out that the opposite was true and it had been very successful for them. Theres an article about that here: http://www.techdigest.tv/2008/10/radiohead_pay_w.html
Something else I heard about awhile ago was a cafe here in Auckland that was operating on a ‘gift economy’ basis. I recall thinking it was very strange and wondered if it would work (and here I find myself doing basically the same thing). The cafe is called the Wise Cicada cafe and as I was writing this I found an article about them here: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/blogs/nick-smith/3795026/Gift-economy-cafe-confounds-some
I don’t know if they are still operating that way now, but I have contacted them to ask so hopefully I will get some feedback from them and be able to write about that in a later post.
Finally, there was one other article that I read, although this was after I had already begun my experiment. It was about a coffee shop in the central city operating in this was for just one day to mark an anniversary. The article is here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/consumer-information/news/article.cfm?c_id=164&objectid=10805546
Zeitgeist
Even though this article was after I had begun my experiment, it shows that there is a general zeitgeist around this idea. There are many other factors of course, the prevalence of downloadable content on the internet, open source software and so on. People are looking for different ways to exchange value. The idea is out there floating around and some people are beginning to latch on to it, including at this stage me. While the idea is still very much on the fringes, as I have written this and thought about some of the things that have inspired me, instead of feeling like I’m breaking new ground I’m actually starting to feel a little like maybe I’m actually a bit of a latecomer to the party.