Alan Alves Fortes
Base: Amsterdam
Social Media trends follower
Sustainable futurist. Open source advocate. Welcoming the great shift in economy & society. Radical innovation admirer.

I design software and live in San Francisco, CA. My professional interests are in integration technologies applied the financial domain.

In my spare time, I research the future of money: how technology is changing not just the way we earn, manage and use our money, but how it is changing money itself and with it, our communities and society.

open source currency project

Is the economy just in a recession or is their a bigger transformation afoot? Symbionomics is a media project about the new economy.

Meet Fran Ilich, a media artist and activist who started his own investment bank six years ago with nothing more than server space. On the eve of Bank Transfer Day, he sits with me in the dimly lit kitchen of Eyebeam Art and Technology Center where he is a fellow, to discuss the Spacebank and how he ended up at Occupy Wall Street.

The bank is a complex nano-macro economy that includes funds and eleven virtual enterprises that can be traded in a stock exchange. Ilich has set a virtual currency, the Digital Material Sunflower, designed to help people achieve their goals.

The reason I blog is because there are not many people writing about the topic I'd most like to engage people in. Specifically, it is about currencies as social DNA.

You see, corporations, institutions, governments, and nations are in fact living organisms. This is not a lofty metaphor, but literal truth.

They have a survival instinct to self-perpetuate, they breed new corporations and institutions, and even as the cells within them are replaced, their fundamental pattern continues. And we are their cells.

A fixture of online gaming, virtual currencies are moving into other digital markets and may break into the physical world. But will acceptance costs and regulatory concerns stymie their growth?

For more than a year, the American Bankers Association has pushed to limit the power and budget of the government’s newest consumer watchdog agency. The association, which includes the nation’s largest banks as members, is spending about $2 million every four months on lobbying, according to the Associated Press, most of it to limit the authority of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act that created it.
But there’s at least one area where the ABA wants more regulation instead of less: FarmVille.
In a letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the bank association asked the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to consider regulating virtual currencies, like those used on FarmVille and Second Life.

I am Sustainability Manager within the think tank of the Institute of Chartered Accounts in England and Wales.

I am one of four co-founders of The Finance Innovation Lab, the largest social innovation project in Europe focused on finance.

I am also and one of five co-founders of UnLtd*Future, a programme of support for social entrepreneurs with sustainable and disruptive business models in partnership with WWF, Nesta, UnLtd*, Shirlaws and Imperial College.

From last night’s GA [Occupy Wall Street "General Assembly"] meeting: “Work began today on a proposal trying to implement a currency for this movement. The Wall Street banks and their best customers, the multinational corporations control the source and flow of $$$$. This is an open invitation for you to join us in this process! We will be meeting at 11am every day, every week, until we’re done, at the red cube in the Southeast corner of Liberty Park.”

My latest book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, is now available.

Order it from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookstore. You can also read a preview containing several chapters at http://books.google.com/.

My latest book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, is now available.

Order it from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookstore. You can also read a preview containing several chapters at http://books.google.com/.

Ripplepay.com is a payment system where everyone is a banker. Connect to your friends, family, and associates and your credit with them becomes a fully-functional currency. Read more.

Venessa Miemis's blog

What we commonly refer to as “the economy” can be understood on three levels:

Psychology – What do humans value, and therefore seek? Why?
Economics – How do humans behave in the domain of activities related to seeking value?
Technology – What mechanisms and systems are used to mediate economic behavior?
Mainstream coverage of “the economy” is myopically focused on the day to day details of one specific set of technologies – the markets and conventions that pervaded the industrial economy. But, these specific technologies and conventions represent only only a subset of the total universe of value exchange. The mainstream coverage has completely lost touch with the reasons why these technologies exist at all. What are the fundamental values that real people seek to satisfy?

Now a new set of technologies is emerging that threatens to disrupt the current paradigm, but that does not mean existing knowledge can be safely ignored. Those economic insights that describe fundamental human motivations will continue to be relevant in any technological environment. This blog addresses psychology, economics, and technology in an effort to better understand what will persist, what will be threatened by disruption, and what emerging technologies offer the most promise of producing real human value.

THE ties that bind the 92,000 residents of Macon, Georgia, are a little tighter these days. Since October, the locals - college students and senior citizens alike - have been playing Macon Money, a "social impact game" that uses a currency of the same name to overcome socioeconomic barriers in the small city by encouraging people from all backgrounds to meet and collaborate.
The game has turned heads with its high level of participation and use of technology to promote social cohesion. Macon (pronounced "make-in") is one of America's poorest cities, and the game's designers targeted it because diverse groups, from the unemployed and elderly to the relatively affluent students of Mercer University, exist in close proximity but rarely venture out of their social bubbles

The Brixton Pound (B£) is money that sticks to Brixton. It’s designed to support Brixton businesses and encourage local trade and production. It’s a complementary currency, working alongside (not replacing) pounds sterling, for use by independent local shops and traders.
The B£ is the UK’s first local currency in an urban area and the fourth transition town to have its own currency, following the Totnes Pound in Devon, Lewes Pound in Sussex and Stroud Pound in Gloucestershire.

Economic growth is determined by the supply and demand of investment capital; technology determines the demand for capital, while human nature determines the supply. The supply curve has two distinct parts, giving the world economy two distinct modes. In the familiar slow growth mode, rates of return are limited by human discount rates. In the fast growth mode, investment is limited by the world's wealth. Historical trends suggest that we may transition to the fast mode in roughly another century and a half.Can some new technology switch us to the fast mode more quickly than this? Perhaps, but such a technology must greatly raise the rate of return for the world's expected worst investment project. It must thus be very broadly applicable, improving almost all forms of capital and investment.  Furthermore, investment externalities must remain within certain limits.

Open money is a means of exchange freely available to all. Any community, any association - indeed, any body - can have their own money. Open money is synonymous with LETS - an invitation to come inside and play, as in open door and open house; collaboration as in open hand and open for all; attitude as in open mind.

The purpose of the open money project is to bring together and organize the people and resources necessary for the development and propagation of open money everywhere.

Bitcoin’s success would be the greatest victory for human liberty since the creation of limited democracy, the emancipation of slaves, or woman’s suffrage.  If it works, Bitcoin will be the legacy of our generation, more important potentially than the internet itself.  It is that important.

We invite you to explore innovative interpretations of money, economics and society which are resulting in a new way of thinking about our future. You will find  pieces of the puzzle on this web site to understanding the next economy.

In an article for the Hayek Society Jon Matonis welcomes a new age of monetary exchange and commerce.

An exploration of monetary and economic issues by Eli Gothill

DYNDY is an effort at building a Pattern Language for Alternative and Complementary Money Systems to inform and empower grassroots communities with concepts and tools to overcome scarcity, instruments and reflections for the Exodus from proprietary money.

Imagine a world without war, poverty, misery or money. Imagine a world where all people work together in a spirit of cooperation and not competition. Imagine this safer saner world and you are closer to understanding what the Zeitgeist Movement is about.
A close look at our present social systems which are built upon fundamentals which produce war, poverty, murder, crime, violence, compromised healthcare, media monopoly, corporate corruption and indifference for the environment, greed, apathetic self interest and desensitisation from others suffering, obsolete and archaic political systems based on subjective opinion (guesswork) and not on scientific and empirical certainty.
Its abundantly clear that we need to adapt our thinking because it will definitely be to our collective detriment if we do not. If we carry on so carelessly and wastefully into future, our future generations will pay the price for our mistakes. The Venus Project has the solutions.

The Venus Project advocates an alternative vision for a sustainable new world civilization unlike any socio-economic system that has gone before. It calls for a straightforward redesign of a culture, in which the age-old inadequacies of war, poverty, hunger, debt, and unnecessary human suffering are viewed not only as avoidable, but totally unacceptable.

Adbusters invites economics students around the world – especially PhD students – to join the fight to revamp Econ 101 curriculums and challenge the endemic myopia of their tenured neoclassical profs. Read some of the introductory articles, check out the latest dispatches on our blog, then download the Kick it Over Manifesto (and other posters) and keep pinning them up in the corridors of your department. Get a small group together and start jamming! Put your university at the forefront of the monumental mindshift now underway in the "science" of economics.

Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development.
How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done.
For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions.
In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production.
Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups.
It seems passé today to speak of "the Internet revolution."
In some academic circles, it is positively naïve.
But it should not be.
The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep.
It is structural.
It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

Bernard Lietaer, author of The Future of Money (translated in 18 languages), is an international expert in the design and implementation of currency systems.   He has studied and worked in the field of money for more than 30 years in an unusually broad range of capacities including as a Central Banker, a fund manager,  a university professor, and a consultant to governments in numerous  countries, multinational corporations, and community organizations.  He co-designed and implemented the convergence mechanism to the single European currency system (the Euro) and served as president of the Electronic Payment System at the National Bank of Belgium (the Belgian Central Bank).  He co-founded and managed GaiaCorp, a top performing currency fund whose profits funded investments in environmental projects.  A former professor of International Finance at the University of Louvain, he has also taught at Sonoma State University and Naropa University.  

nef (the new economics foundation) is an independent think-and-do tank that inspires and demonstrates real economic well-being.

We aim to improve quality of life by promoting innovative solutions that challenge mainstream thinking on economic, environment and social issues. We work in partnership and put people and the planet first.

nef was founded in 1986 by the leaders of The Other Economic Summit (TOES) which forced issues such as international debt onto the agenda of the G7 and G8 summits.

We are unique in combining rigorous analysis and policy debate with practical solutions on the ground, often run and designed with the help of local people. We also create new ways of measuring progress towards increased well-being and environmental sustainability.

nef works with all sections of society in the UK and internationally - civil society, government, individuals, businesses and academia - to create more understanding and strategies for change.

The New Economics Institute is a US organization that uniquely combines vision, theory, action, and communication to effect a transition to a new economy -- an economy that gives priority to supporting human well-being and Earth’s natural systems. Our multidisciplinary approach employs research, applied theory, public campaigns, and educational events to describe an alternative socio-economic system that is capable of addressing the enormous challenges of our times.  Our premise is that a fair and sustainable economy is possible and that ways must be found to realize it.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new money or tracks transactions. These tasks are managed collectively by the network.

"Money is an invention of the human mind. The creation of money is made possible because human beings have the capacity to accord value to symbols. Money is a symbol that represents the value of goods and services. The acceptance of any object as money - be it wampum, a gold coin, a paper currency note or a digital bank account balance - involves the consent of both the individual user and the community. Thus, all money has a psychological and a social as well as an economic dimension. As human consciousness has evolved, the nature and function of money has evolved too." Wikipedia: Social Evolution of Money
As the technology of money and currency advances, how will it effect the social and psychological dimensions of our uses of, and interactions with money? This website is a summary of projects by MA students in the Design Interactions Department at the Royal College of Art exploring future possibilities for e-money: New pleasures, opportunities, hazards, and rituals.

Capital - it's going up in smoke, right? That's what, for example, Meredith Whitney - the analyst who predicted the banking meltdown - argued recently: that trillions in capital has been destroyed by the ongoing macro crisis.

It's more accurate to say that what's being destroyed never really existed in the first place. If my car's a Ford - but I call it a Ferrari - capital hasn't been formed, and value hasn't been created. I've simply created a fiction - like those we belatedly discovered Wall St was peddling.

The macro crisis tells us in no uncertain terms that we've got to shed the stale economic logic of the 20th century. Economies are powered by capital. Whitney, Bernanke, and the bankers of the universe are right about one thing: we've got to recapitalize a starving economy. But they're getting the bigger picture wrong: to power a wave of new industrial revolutions, we've got to seed it with newer, more valuable kinds of capital entirely.

REX is the Relationship Economy eXpedition.
The next social and industrial order has more to do with abundance and trust than with scarcity and stickiness. The key assets are trusted relationships.
Here we'll build key elements of the Relationship Economy, playing out what it means for business, culture, society, governance, education and more, because its effects will be far-reaching.
If you want to dig deeper, I run a private workgroup that is exploring this future. For more info, see "About REX" in the menus above.

Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities (and most of the luxuries) of life are free for the taking. A person's current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net.

Imagine an economy in which life is valued more than money and power resides with ordinary people who care about one another, their community, and their natural environment. It is possible. Millions of people are living it into being. Our common future hangs in the balance

The era of transition that we are entering will be disruptive—but it may bring a world where markets are servants, not masters

The scene is a restaurant in 2020. A waitress has just left the check on the table for a group of friends dining together. Mobile phones are pulled out, and the diners take turns scanning a code on the bill. One person slips something that looks like a credit card out of her wallet. Her fingers tap on several dark squares on the card which light up when her personal code is activated.  The card – an intelligent check - is waved over the bill and debited. Their waitress prefers to be compensated in Facebook Credits, although some of her co-workers ask for tips in an alternative digital currency called Ven, or transferable frequent flyer miles, any of which can be automatically placed into their linked accounts with the tap of a diners’ finger or the wave of a mobile device.

Hayek's proposal calls for privately issued, competing fiat currencies. That is, Hayek proposes that individual firms issue pieces of paper that are not backed up by any production or consumption good. In a sense, Hayek wants to privatize central banking.