A Series of Stressed Out Snippets of Thought

Six days ‘til the move. Coherent thoughts aren’t really sticking in my head. It’s full of task lists and checkboxes, dealing with rescheduled truck drivers, and lawyer meetings.

I read at night, sometimes on my phone. I’m slowly making my way through a series of Bookchin essays but slipping in and out of Substack essays too. When something catches my attention, I open up the QuickMemo app and jot down thoughts with the intention of coming back to them when I have more space and time. The list is growing. 

So instead of a post, you get my tornado brain dump. Enjoy :)

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“Equivalence asserts itself as exchange value; through the mediation of money, every artistic value, indeed every moral qualm, is degraded to an exchangeable quantum.” - Murray Bookchin, Towards an Ecological Society

I can’t remember where, but I was listening to a podcast or reading a substack last week that commented on the transactional nature of human relationships in late-stage capitalism. This quote came at me shortly after, and Bookchin’s imagery of “an exchangeable quantum” shook me.

I had asked this question in my Instagram stories as well: How do we move beyond transactional relationships? What does it look like to have relationships grounded in something more than the exchange of goods and services? Some people pointed towards friendship and community, but I think it has to go deeper than that. I think we need a seismic shift from this culture rooted in exchange value to one grounded in collective care. 

When we focus on providing care, on giving, rather than receiving goods and services, on taking, our intention shifts from entitlement to responsibility. I believe this is a shift towards decoloniality: Quinn’s Takers and Leavers.

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I have thought and written a fair bit about the gift model, pay-what-you-want, and alternative currencies. This is because I love them, but especially the gift model. I love the concept of living in the gift rather than barter or exchange because, as mentioned above, PWYW or barter often requires one to put a transactional value on a good or service, whereas giving gifts is often based on sharing one’s skill, craft, or surplus without expecting a reciprocal exchange. 

I wonder what it might look like to adjust the pay-what-you-can model (where folks are offered the opportunity to pay what is either available to them or what feels appropriate, sometimes on a sliding scale) to be a pay-what-you-have model with the idea that what you have to give is based on the gifts that you can give. 

It feels like a hybrid model where reciprocity is expected, but there’s no exchange value. 

Here’s an example: in the gift model, if I build someone a website, a skill that I have to offer with little to no financial overhead, I wouldn’t necessarily expect anything in return. I have built sites for people who paid me in the future, who offered referrals, etc., but there was no expectation of financial reciprocity. 

In a pay-what-you-have model, I would expect something in return, but it would be based on what the person has to give. If I were building a website for a farm, they might offer me a CSA share. If I were building a website for a therapist, they might offer me a number of sessions. If I were building a website for a tea maker, they might offer me a year’s supply of tea. I think you get the point. 

I know that there is a time and place for money, especially as we exist in an economic system that requires its use to have our basic needs met, but how cool would it be to go to an event and offer herbs or graphic design services or the option to get your car fixed at a local shop? Rather than placing an hourly wage on our labour, what if we gave it freely in exchange for helping meet our own needs in a local community? A guy can dream ;)

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This note has been sitting in my phone since March, and I think we all know this at this point, but I want to spell it out clearly: we are no longer at a point where we are trying to stop the runaway train of social and environmental devastation. We are living in it. We are now tasked with the reality that we need to continue to exist in this world, where devastation is our new reality. As such, instead of asking “how do we stop this?” we must to ask “how do we live with it?”.

And I mean, of course we keep trying to stop it, to shift away from, to prevent from happening, but we do this with the knowledge that we are living in it, not trying to stop it from happening in the first place.

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And a final note, literally cut and paste from my notes:

Colonialism = Sameness. 

In colonial culture, we want to create cookie cutters so that things can be knowable and controllable.

But science now confirms the traditional ecological knowledge that tells us that diversity means resilience. 

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences. Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.” - Audrey Lorde, Learning from the 60s

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<3 <3 <3