sutton038

Please note: This piece was originally commissioned by the magazine  MCD , and will be appearing in French in their December edition. I use Dogecoin because I’m emotionally drawn to the dog. Unlike the distant, fossil-like Queen on the Pound banknote, the Shiba Inu is at once transcendent and approachable, self-contained but cuddly, looking into my eyes with a sideways glance, as if it just noticed me and is wondering whether I want to play or be left alone. It’s not an aggressive dog, or for that matter, a bouncy dog trying to lick me. It has self-directed, quirky soul , and it’s almost impossible to imagine this dog being an asshole. Some people in the crypto-currency community have written Dogecoin off as a joke, or even a scam.  Maybe it’s both, but does this matter? All currency in the final analysis is really a scam, and the real question is which of those scams we want to agree to. I for one would rather pledge allegiance to a mystical pooch than to worship the image of...

(Note: I originally wrote this article for the July 2014 edition of Contributoria , and it is republished here under the following  Creative Commons licence. If you wish to use the article, please attribute the original) "Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch, a prison for your mind." This is a line from The Matrix . Morpheus is explaining to Neo that he’s actually stuck in a nightmare prison-world enslaved to computers. The world is not as you think Neo, but I can set you free, provided you take the red pill . In some ways Morpheus resembles one of those single-agenda zealots who goes around telling people that they have a certain secret truth that will liberate them, like the guy who corners you in a pub and says, “Don’t you realise we’re trapped in a corporate prison. The Bilderberg Group owns the world’s governments!” Morpheus, however, is also different to the average conspiracy theorist. The key dynam...

I published an epic 4200 word article on alternative currency in Aeon magazine. Take a read if you're having a lazy weekend afternoon and wish to casually reflect on the nature of economic reality. I believe that coming to basic grips with money itself is a good foundation for making further explorations into the financial system, and economic systems more generally. As I say in the article: "The financial system exists, above all, to mediate flows of money, not to question what money is. Investment banks create financial instruments that steer money from one place to another, with built-in sub-conduits to siphon it back... To draw an analogy with computer coding, we might say that financial instruments are analogous to ‘high-level’ programming languages such as Java or Ruby: they let you string commands together in order to perform certain actions. You want to get resources from A to B over time? Well, we can program a financial instrument to do that for you...  By contrast,...

WANTED: UNDERDOGS WITH ATTITUDE I've got some alternative currency, and I'm willing to give it to interns who can do part-time work for me to help me with publicity for my new book on global finance . I'm going to be resuming work on the London School of Financial Activism soon too, so there are possibilities to get involved there as well. Up for grabs: Alternative currency for alternative work I'd like open-minded people who are keen to learn more about alternative finance. I'll be straight up with you though: Some of it is total drudge work, like trawling through a list of 100 institutions and finding email addresses for them. I have a series of discreet tasks y ou can volunteer for in exchange for  a bounty in certain esoteric currencies I've got from selling my book. Choices include: Bitcoin:  Not only is this an interesting experience to use in itself, but you get to tell people at parties that you're paid in cryptocurrency Brixton Pounds:  I'd lik...

[Note: for my more recent article about bitcoin, see How to Explain Bitcoin to your Granny ] By now many people will have heard about Bitcoin. That’s the global, decentralised, online crypto-currency (check out this Wired Magazine article for some background). You can either buy it on online exchanges , or your can ‘mine’ it by running algorithms that are likely to cause your laptop to catch fire. You can then use it to buy things from vendors who’ll accept it, albeit Sainsbury’s still only accepts British Pounds. There are even mainstream currency traders who actively trade Bitcoin now . I’ll bet all the Bitcoins I have though, that very few people actually understand what the hell Bitcoin is. I myself do not understand it. Try listen to this guy explain it, and feel your mind frazzle. More than anything, I have the sense that Bitcoin is a cult . A strange cybernetic cult. An anarchic techno-pirate, quasi-mystical collective on a dystopian mission to subvert the global monetary sys...

COMING TO A CINEMA NEAR YOU Last week I got published in The Ecologist. The article was called A four-step guide to bypassing high street banks . This is my second article for the magazine (my first was on food speculation ), and this time the aim was to sketch out how people might engage in financial protest, not by waving placards, but by changing debit cards. Many people agree in principle that major high-street banks have too much power, and that they frequently abuse that power. Nevertheless, many individuals don't necessarily have the time, or inclination, to protest about it directly in the manner of the Occupy protesters. There's been a lot of discussion about how to make financial protest more inclusive (including this piece by Kenth Gustaffson on a type of ‘ virtual occupy movement ’), but perhaps one of the most profound (and often overlooked) forms of protest is to distance yourself from mainstream finance by withdrawing deposits and avoiding using the services. The...

A few weeks ago a group of wayward individuals met at Waterloo station. We hitched a ride on a train going north into the English wilderness. Bertrand was forward-thinking enough to have brought beers for the journey, a skill he learnt in his 10 years working for Deutsche Bank as a structured equity derivatives trader. Next to him was Ingo . Ingo does things that make my mind hurt, which involves channelling and managing innovation and systems design, in Sweden. Behind me was Neil . He works for the Young Foundation, helping to design things called Social Impact Bonds, ways of allowing private investors to get involved in financing early interventions that might reduce social malladies. He was chatting to David , who specialises in design, and in particular, new means of mapping and visualising the financial sector. Bertrand started talking about social CDOs , and that's when people on the train started to look at us funny. A girl sitting next to me asked me who we were. Um, how d...

Trading floors and paneled offices in Canary Wharf look profoundly hi-tech, and yet they are built on blueprints inherited from the past, in some cases the very distant past. Modern financial institutions like to use the language of innovation, and yet they endorse only a narrow conception of innovation, focused on product innovation. There’s very little tinkering with the base level assumptions from which they are created. To challenge the deep-level normative status quo requires one to move out of the mainstream salons, and into the fringe coffee shops and covert speakeasies. Close to Moorgate station is one such safehouse, down a small alley, behind an austere wooden door. Enter the Finance Innovation Lab . The Finance Lab initially started as a joint project by the WWF and ICAEW , asking the question “What does a financial system that serves people and planet look like?” It’s now a forum for an assortment of financial heretics, some outrightly so, others more subtly so. The commu...