Hey Guys, We Made an Economic System That Is Better Than the Current Terrible One
As I sit here typing this, I’ve just returned from walking my rescue pup, Bowie. I grabbed the mail as we headed back inside.
There was a letter from my landlord’s attorney, informing me that they’ve requested a trial to evict me from my studio apartment. Right now it’s Thursday night, and they ask to do it on a Monday. Maybe it’ll happen 4 days from today (?!).
(By the way, this building is called Trio Apartments, and it’s in Pasadena, CA. Never live in a building owned by Trio or their parent company, Greystar (they own buildings elsewhere too). If the management’s corruption doesn’t get you, the staggering incompetence will make you maybe wish it had).
Trio Apartments claims that I didn’t pay the rent, though I did (I have the certified mail receipts to prove this). They also claim that they posted the legally-required-in-California-3-day notice to inform me that there had been an alleged issue with rent payment, which they didn’t (perjury).
When I got help with documentation I needed to file in court from a government worker specializing in cases like mine, she was convinced that the building was discriminating against me because I had been vocal in pointing out questionable management practices.
Regardless, this creepy, highly corporate building that I made the mistake of choosing to live in can lie, afford to lawyer up, and then force me into a position in which I need legal support (expensive) as well…or else I may end up homeless.
Because, folks, that’s late-stage capitalism. And it’s time for it to die.
As we’re in the midst of this global pandemic, my heart goes out to the people who have lost their jobs and homes already. By consensus, the U.S. Government’s handling of this has been woefully inadequate, and our economic and health care systems have broken open like a ruptured boil.
I believe this is happening because of their capitalistic foundation.
Douglas Rushkoff shares an idea that I’ll poorly paraphrase here: What’s terrible about the tech industry is terrible because its OS, or Operating System, is capitalism.
I’d like to extend this idea a couple steps further: what’s terrible about late-stage capitalism is terrible because its OS is patriarchy (which is why communism doesn’t work either).
I think it’s most useful to define patriarchy as a system that trains humans of all genders to overvalue unhealthy forms of masculine energies and suppress and denigrate feminine energies. We then unthinking perpetuate this imbalance within ourselves, we do it to one another, and resultantly, it manifests in sometimes tragic ways inside the systems we create.
Patriarchy manufactures unnecessarily zero-sum scenarios and leaves us in situations in which striving, “being productive,” and endlessly chasing the external are all we know how to do to be “happy.” It severs our access to the essential knowing place inside of ourselves.
A system like that doesn’t permit us to comprehend the hot electric force field that is the feminine ‘being’ energy: receptivity, expansive understanding, true nurturance, unbridled creativity. A patriarchal system doesn’t even make us intellectually aware that this is a thing to value… that it’s even a thing at all.
But we feel it.
This knowing, which transcends rational understanding, shows itself to us in the nagging dread that so many of us have: the sense that something is very wrong. COVID-19 is helping to awaken awareness of this in many of us, because it’s requiring the world to sit in the feminine — in our homes, with our anxiety, and in more serious cases, in hospital rooms where we must receive in order to survive — instead of achieving or “doing” to mask it, to avoid it, to stay one step ahead of its grasp.
I used to be a stock trader, and the world of stocks is one of contrived zero-sum paradigms. If I made a dollar, it meant that someone else had to lose that same dollar. As such, the current monetary system indoctrinates in a scarcity mindset, a deep belief that ‘winner-take-all’ is what’s real. From that frame of reference, if we don’t defend it we’ll inevitably lose what’s “ours.”
But the thing is, money is not scarce. It’s fucking everywhere. It just flows in stupid ways because there are gate-keepers who control it from a place that is not conscious of the human heart. The feminine knows this, because feminine knowing is about connecting to universal abundance.
More of us are waking up now. When we come out of self-isolation, living in the old way will be impossible for many of us. We’re going to need a better system with which to engage. A new way with a more mindful, human design.
And a system like this will make a hell of a lot more profits.
I’ve tried to build this, and it’s called Seeds. It’s been around for 7 years. I’ve often talked about it and felt like nobody could hear me or understand what I was saying.
But something tells me that more people may be able to hear me these days.
Seeds is designed to provide a bigger pie for all. We have a cryptocurrency, also called SEEDS. The cryptocurrency sector is arguably the most toxically patriarchal of all and as a female startup founder, I’ve experienced terrible treatment within it.
But blockchain, the underlying technology, offers the possibility of creating new economic systems, and we’ve leveraged this for good.
Anyone can redeem a SEED to make a request for monetary help, and receive it as a gift from our community. One SEED = One Request for Help. So far, the biggest gift we’ve given was for $2200, so one SEED + time (and it took a long time, about 19 months) resulted in that. We’ve already sent gifts to folks in 15 countries or so, and as our ecosystem continues to grow, we hope to be able to share larger gifts more and more quickly.
We show the requests on our own platforms, and also in partner apps that have integrated our free tools. If an app business is realizing that they need to prioritize social good in order to connect with customers who increasingly demand that — but the app previously ignored social good altogether — that app can integrate a Seeds front-end tool in about 30 minutes to build social good directly into their product. Using Seeds will increase their profits by as much as 30%, because helping others inspires more people to spend. In fact, the data shows that making it easy to give in-app is the most effective way to convert non-paying app users into payers. Win-win.
SEEDS can also be sold on decentralized exchanges — peer-to-peer marketplaces which aren’t controlled by a centralized entity like a government or a bank. In this way, we give people more options regarding what to do with a SEED — it can become a $2200 gift, as in the instance above, or, if someone needs help more quickly, they can sell their SEEDS in these liquid marketplaces. As of this writing, each SEED goes for about $0.01.
A World of Creators
As we keep pushing this forward, I dream of a world in which people no longer have to trade their time for money in order to survive. You are meant to offer something to this world that only you can. If you had the monetary support that you needed so that you didn’t have to worry about survival, what would you make?
We want to support you in this. A SEED once resulted in a $1500 gift to stage a play at the Minnesotan Fringe Festival. In the future, we could fund films. SEEDS could eliminate the need to deal with VC if you’re a startup founder (and as a female founder, I can tell you that the misogyny, as well as the sheer volume of investors who are straight-up bad at investing in startups and wasting founders’ time, are clear indicators that that sector is also racing to obsolescence).
What if you simply need to recover from trauma? A SEED was once used to help a rape victim cover her rent when she couldn’t work as she healed. I’m a rape survivor myself, and it never occurred to me that monetary support would even be available for me after the rapes happened. So today, I’ve made certain that Seeds is working to provide that for other people. I dream of a world in which people can redeem a SEED to get, say, 6 months of living expenses covered, so that they don’t have to worry if they lose their jobs. So that they have the support they need to heal.
Because this is a time of healing. We’re meant to be rediscovering the power of feminine energies, and as we do this, we can experience an entirely new way of being that isn’t about fitting ourselves into an external box designed by someone who didn’t know any better because we’re forced to in order to “make money” to survive. Seeds offers an interconnected, global digital community that allows us to support one another, creating a bigger pie for all.
Another thing about our design: if you’d like to receive SEEDS from us, you do so by giving. You can make a contribution to a Request for Help made by someone in need who redeemed a SEED themselves.
This Request for Help was made on behalf of service workers whose livelihoods have been hurt by COVID-19. After you’ve given and we’ve sent you your SEEDS in thanks, you can then redeem them to make requests for yourself, or on behalf of others.
I’m full of rage about how badly this old system has treated us… but I’m also hopeful. I think our future can and will be beautiful.
But first, the old economic system must fall away.
To get there, we need to engage with a mode that was designed with the human in mind. A structure built with a healthy balance of feminine and masculine energies from the outset.
A new system of abundance. Please join us.
