Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle

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СКАЧАТЬ we create our own kind of money – a kind of money just between ourselves? A little bit like a blood bank. Why can’t we create some kind of time bank?’

      And then a risk, but a calculated political one. ‘I was married to a black woman, and when we were first married, I knew what it meant for neighbours to help out neighbours. This is what neighbours have always done for neighbours. And you never had to declare that to the authorities. We can rebuild that sense of community we used to have.’

      It was quietly spoken, mild and modest – but a bravura piece of politics for all that.

      ‘It is a kind of bank where you deposit care and giving,’ said Edgar, quoting Ralph Nader. ‘When you need care and giving you can withdraw it. In thirty-eight states where people have been doing this, nobody has been ripped off and nobody has been mugged. I can’t tell you that they are all angels, but I can tell you that people don’t mess with the people they have to live with.’

      I wasn’t so sure about this, but the women carried on listening. Their range of dangling green, pink, blue and yellow earrings were uncharacteristically still. Even the children were a little quieter.

      ‘Nowadays all the rewards are for doing bad, and there are very few rewards for just being a decent neighbour,’ he said. ‘I know they say you can go to heaven, but I want you to get those rewards before that.’

      It was convincing, inspiring even, but also perhaps a little confusing out of context.

      ‘What’s this got to do with setting up our food bank?’ asked one of the audience. Edgar had reckoned without ‘Miss Mary’, the tough-minded residents’ council chair, who had her own very clear political sense. She knew what she could sell, and she didn’t think she could sell her committee the idea of their new food bank being conditional on earning time dollars.

      ‘We wanted to be able to give the food away free,’ she said. Other voices followed, as they began to see the snag.

      ‘What happens if some people are dishonest?’ asked one.

      ‘Some of us got our food stamps five days late this month, and we need to be able to use the food bank.’

      ‘Yeah, I ain’t got mine yet!’ As in all public meetings about new ideas, all the questions were directly relevant, but jumbled up. So were the answers.

      Clarence weighed in: ‘This time bank idea is something where people can begin to do things for each other in a very positive way. There are different activities which need doing which we can help do for each other – or get our friends to do it.’

      ‘I don’t have no friends,’ said one of the more obstreperous women. ‘I don’t need no friends.’

      This was the signal for an enormous argument about something completely different. The woman with no friends stormed that her mother was in hospital and was losing her flat and nobody was helping. The rest of the audience ignored her. It was impossible to follow exactly what was happening. Mary braved her denunciations and said she would help tomorrow. The woman with no friends stalked out of the room in tears, knocking over a few of the plastic chairs as she went.

      There was silence for a moment, but it was clear the meeting was over. Large boxes of chicken and coleslaw from the Roy Rogers chain had arrived and the children were queuing up. Here was the free food. Then in the corner of the room, as everybody else began to clear away, the real negotiations were beginning. Edgar, Clarence, Tina from Ohio and Mary huddled together looking serious. Mary’s big bunch of keys jangled at her wrist, while her small son Michael wandered about in an Old Navy T-shirt at her feet.

      ‘The question is, can people with time dollars get anything extra from the food bank in return for being good neighbours?’ said Edgar, setting out his case.

      ‘No,’ said Mary. It just wouldn’t work. It would be favouritism. She wouldn’t dare.

      ‘What do you think about the idea?’ said Tina sensibly, and immediately the atmosphere lightened.

      ‘I love it, but –’ said Mary. ‘But I wouldn’t dare.’

      There was going to be no movement. Edgar signed the papers anyway, so that the Time Dollar Network would sponsor the food bank at Arthur M. Capper. He would return to the issue later.

      III

      There is a problem about all this, isn’t there? Old people may want lifts to the doctor or supportive phone calls. Parents may want nappies or groceries. But the last thing you want as a sixteen-year-old is children’s clothes or a lift to the local supermarket. If Edgar Cahn suddenly wanted to pioneer the idea of providing time dollars to America’s disaffected youth, in return for so-called altruistic behaviour, he needed to pump-prime his new economy with something different. Somehow the sixteen-year-olds would have to be persuaded that this was new money worth having.

      The answer came to him in the shape of former teacher and computer activist Ken Komowski, though I wasn’t aware of this until I arrived at Edgar’s home and office at 10 a.m. the next day – only to be told I had been expected to meet Ken a good hour before. The Time Dollars office was that kind of place.

      By the time I had dived down into Edgar’s basement-cum-bedroom, Ken was preparing to catch the train back home to Long Island. He looked carefully-turned out, fiftyish, with a dapper moustache and a great untidy, labyrinthine mission: as he puts it, to ‘eliminate the virtual ghetto’. By which he means: give power to the American underclass by making them computer-literate.

      Ken was one of the pioneers of computers in education, but found himself increasingly irritated by the pattern of educational change. He could have been one of those disaffected British teachers you meet in pubs, complaining about what Ken called ‘constant innovation but no change’. In 1994 he wrote an article in the US magazine Education Week entitled ‘The 81 per cent Solution’, urging that we restructure our schools and communities for life-long learning, instead of the brief intense period of inattention we know as ‘school’. The title came from the idea that children spend only 19 per cent of their time in class. What about the other 81 per cent?

      ‘You are what you learn,’ Ken told me, warming to his subject and checking his watch. ‘What you take into your mind is as important as what you take into your body. In the larger media ecology, children are an environment which is in many ways more toxic than their physical environment – in terms of the consumer mess on television, the sex and violence and the drug culture which they talk through on their way back from schools. That toxicity needs to be countered with a message that engages them.’

      What is the message he wants? Well, one of them is that children can learn and earn money at their own home computer.

      How could somebody like Edgar Cahn resist a challenge like that? Here was a whole new aspect of the social economy waiting to be built. The result was that Ken and Edgar set up the LINCT Coalition – or Learning and Information Networks for Community Telecomputing: Americans love these endless acronyms – so that the whole process could be driven by time dollars. Ken had already spun out his organization, a kind of Which for schools called the Educational Products Information Exchange, and was busy campaigning for people with computers to feel responsible for people who don’t. He was one of those who calculated that American business and government departments throw out an average of fifteen million perfectly good but slightly old computers every year. That’s one computer for every poor household in America.

      The СКАЧАТЬ