Archive

The Internet of Agreements

I was look­ing for the tools that you could use to solve glob­al prob­lems in an envi­ron­ment when the nation-state has turned out to be a very very inef­fec­tive set of machin­ery at all. So I’m going to talk a lit­tle bit about the tech­nol­o­gy. I’m going to talk a lit­tle bit about what it does and where it’s going. And then I’m going to try and tell a sto­ry about the kind of glob­al long-term pic­ture that we could get if this stuff actu­al­ly works. 

Finance is not about Money

I think one first step is to dis­tin­guish between tra­di­tion­al bank­ing, which sells mon­ey it has (or it can bor­row very quick­ly, what­ev­er) and finance, which sells some­thing it does not have. And in that sell­ing what it does not have lies its cre­ativ­i­ty. It has to invent instru­ments. And secondly—and they go together—it has to invade oth­er sec­tors. Because it itself does not have what it needs to produce.