Monetary Consciousness: The Perception and Reality of Money

I sit down with Brett Scott, author, journalist, economic anthropologist and former financial broker, to discuss the politics of money systems and how he uses creativity to explain it

👋🏼 Hey, I’m Joanna! I’m a communications consultant sharing insights and ideas relating to democracy, wellbeing, business, AI, culture, spiritualism and the human condition…read on if this has piqued your interest.

As the end of the year nudges closer and with Christmas just around the corner, many of us will unite in our need to buy gifts and spend money in the process. Despite money being a key part of our everyday existence, the thing which enables us to do many things – from travelling, to experiencing safety, offering opportunity and for some, enabling their spiritual evolution – our understanding of it is often limited. From Bitcoin to the global banking system to the declining use of cash, money – what it is and what it represents – has undergone a radical and shifting metamorphosis over the last few years. Few of us can keep track, and it’s often hard to communicate. Why has money become so complex?

I’ve become increasingly interested in money over the last few years, its role in everyday life and what it represents in the economy and world politics. From the meaning we give to money, vulture capitalism, to the new currencies emerging from Bitcoin to the barter economy, money has evolved from being a physical currency in exchange for goods, to a medium used to track your data. How do you perceive the function and value of money?

The idea of monetary consciousness – becoming more aware of the different perceptions and interpretations of money – was what drew me to Brett Scott’s Substack, Altered States of Monetary Consciousness (ASOMOCO), where he explores the frontiers of modern money and technology through both writing and visuals.

As well as taking a deep dive into money and the economic system, we also talk about our shared need to combine creativity with logical analysis (or in Brett’s words, “a warmer take on the world” rather than cold hard analysis alone), something which we are both able to materialize here on Substack.

Enjoy!

---

Joanna: Hi Brett! For my readers who are new to you, can you tell us about yourself and where you interest in rethinking the economic system came from?

Brett: I’m the author of The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance, which came out in 2013, and Cloud Money, which came out in 2022. I publish the Altered States of Monetary Consciousness here on Substack where I write about money, finance, tech and general life in an economy, often from an anthropological position or an economic anthropology position. I come from South Africa originally, and I studied anthropology, history and international development before working in the financial sector, so I have actual experience in working in high finance and also left-wing activism. Because of this experience I’ve combined these together into a sort of cocktail of anthropology, politics, money, finance and activism. In recent years, my focus has been taking quite complex economic concepts and reveal them through metaphor and visual imagery. That's what I often have fun doing on my Substack.

Joanna: Like me, you’re a creative combined with logic. I’m fascinated to know what inspired you to fuse them together in your Substack, Altered States of Monetary Consciousness?

Brett: In the past I would write for journalism outlets like The Guardian, CNN or WIRED and they would never really allow much playfulness in those types of publications. I'm quite an artistic person in many ways and I grew up like that. My mother's an artist and I always had that quality within myself. But I when I worked in the financial sector, I went more into this political world of left-wing activism which heavily relies upon a cold hard analytical take on the world.

Personally, I want a warmer take on the world. That's why I don’t have a “normal” writing style on finance, I never use numbers and graphs. I always try to show how the world is. What I've learned is that economic and financial systems are human systems. They're not mathematical or scientific systems.

I’m able to use a lot more of my creativity, and I enjoy that so that's why I put them together on Altered States of Monetary Consciousness.

Joanna: In your piece Money is a Nervous System, you say that you call your newsletter Altered States of Monetary Consciousness “because if money is the nervous system of the global economy, it contributes to an emergent ‘consciousness’ in our superorganism that’s often both delusional and disassociated, and a core aspect of this is numbness: an inability to register or act upon pain.”

You make an acute observation:

“When a monetary economy is your primary means of survival, it becomes as if you’re tied into a nervous system that’s dulled out its pain receptors and can only ‘feel’ one type of thing - profit. When we’re plugged into a systemic entity that cannot sense anything except monetary gain, it steers us in a very particular direction.”

Do you think it’s possible that in the next few years we will look beyond profit as the thing we’re most sensitive to gaining? Could climate change reach a point where we will have no other choice but to un-prioritise financial profit because the state of destruction to human and animal survival is too immense?

Brett: I think many people do look beyond profit, but the question is can you act upon that?

On an individual level a person can understand that we need to change something, but our economic system doesn't really operate on the level of individual human beings. It's a collective system, a kind of super organism in a way. If you're using that super organism metaphor you can say that individual cells in the super organism might realize that there's problems, but that doesn't mean the overall entity itself will. People working in an economic system understand that there are things going on that aren’t sustainable and yet they don't experience a feeling like they're able to do anything about it. Many people will critique profit and yet won't feel like they can override the systemic logic.

It definitely is possible that people in the next few years will look beyond profit as the thing they're most sensitive to gaining. But that doesn't mean they will necessarily be able to act upon that right. I often think about economic systems as these battles between different forces, so one of the biggest forces that pulls on us is the systemic default behaviour, a pull to ever more expansion and acceleration. If you want to stop that mode of behaviour you have to create a counteracting force which acts against the default, the default being something that happens in the absence of choice.

In many ways that's how the logic of a capitalist system plays out. Nobody perceives themselves to be in control, so the systemic default plays out. To overcome the systemic default, you need to build collective action. People can look beyond profit, but then the question is can you organize in such a way and build political consensus that you want to act in a different way before the system breaks?

Joanna: Looking at this from a human connection and intuition angle, people are increasingly seeking and searching meaning from their lives as technology makes people feel disconnected from themselves. The digitalisation of their lives is just stressing them out. Gen Z are ditching smartphones for dumbphones.

What do you make of this observation? It seems to me that there is a digital backlash of sorts in response to the fact there isn’t a balanced system. The dominance of quantifying success and productivity through the economical and scientific perspective has lessened the more philosophical and spiritual way of exploring how we ought to live.

Do you think that there will be a resurgence in the more philosophical and spiritual way of moving through life? Is this something that corporations will inevitably have to take into consideration?

Brett: It seems to me that there's a digital backlash of sorts in response to the fact that there isn't a balanced system. I think the far-right movement could be seen as a backlash to that, also psychedelics culture, hippie culture and spiritual groups. There are lots of different people attempting to form these alternatives, and as I mentioned earlier, if you think about our economic system as having a systemic default that plays out, regardless of what people are wanting, there's many different responses people can have to that default.

Part of the systemic default is to commodify, so corporations take this stuff into consideration, but they also try to commodify it all. Historically, the way corporations deal with these backlashes is to turn them into new products. So they'll see these things and then they’ll try to create some new marketable objects from these backlashes to capitalism.

Will there be some sort of systemic contradiction that emerges that basically forces corporations to authentically change? Post-capitalist groups often imagine that they're coming out of this Marxist tradition where maybe the system evolves to a point where it outgrows itself. Anti-capitalists historically have had an attitude of “We're going to break or fight the system”. On the other side of that you have the left-wing accelerationists who want the system to break itself, so they almost want to accelerate the system. There’s also the post-capitalist vibe which is a bit more like what you're saying there which is something will emerge where people get exhausted by the contradictions of the system and something new emerges. So you'll certainly have corporations not pursuing endless profit, they’ll actually have to do something about it.

Joanna: Your latest book, Cloudmoney, discusses the fusion of big finance and tech and the growing requirement that physical cash be replaced by digital money or 'cloudmoney'. You highlight that cash protects privacy and is resilient in the face of natural disasters and banking disasters (Note to reader: you may recall the CrowdStrike IT outage this year in August which disrupted many industries, including the banking sector where many people couldn’t use their bank card or access cash).

Since writing this book, what have been the most significant changes you’ve observed in this area that you think is vital we should be aware of?

Brett: There's been a lot more discussion about central bank digital currencies with central banks and states saying maybe they will need to create a digital alternative to cash which the commercial banks hate because it will compete with their own systems. In terms of cash, there isn't necessarily any big significant changes other than central banks are in a bind because they know the banking sector and the tech sector have been attacking the cash system for decades now.

Pro-cash campaigning is still at quite an early phase. I'm one of the few people in left-wing circles that does this, so it's a slow process. Power outages do create some awareness of this. As big card companies get their monopoly power people start to see the consequences of them raising fees and so on. Bitcoin's back in the news because Trump and crew are, in the absence of having a true social welfare plan, going to encourage gambling and present themselves as champions of the people because a lot of the crypto world relies upon the image of it being populist finance.

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed it, let me know with a heart ❤️ above or below. I would also love to hear what you think in the comments below!