INTE: It sounds like community building is the central work. If there’s not community trust and network then it’s not going to work. These things don’t exist in a vacuum, they exist in the contexts of nations, with their fiat currency systems, tax systems. How do your projects exist within the wider system? Are these projects existing as pockets? Or would you want to see the whole system change? JULIO: Georg Simmel, the German sociology, was talking a lot about how money is a claim on society. In a way what that really means is that the types of money we use in our society reflects different dimensions, imagination, unpaid labour, paid labour, all these factors are reflected in the money form. So to me what is important is that by tackling money, and embedding ourselves in the political struggles what we try to challenge is the hegemony of the monetary system as a whole whilst being really practical. About the shift that these smart projects can have to the wider context, I think that Bitcoin and blockchain is something we should bear in mind because community currencies existed for decades if not for hundreds of years. But they were still illegal mostly and blockchain came along and issued money which is impossible to stop because blockchain is so decentralised that no government or power can actually intervene. So what the states are doing right now is that they legalised it, they regulate it. The states realised this won’t go away, and so they created rules to try and control it of course, but then it’s legal and we can actually use it. 

One of the main ideas behind Circles is that you don’t need to wait for a national state to provide a basic income, it’s a paradigm shift in how to create a basic income. We call it a democratic money theory DMT, whereby people issue promises to each other, and go in and out of debt with each other as opposed to with a bank or a nation-state.