Call for Pitches: The Future of Money

Borders define nationhood, but so do money and currency. While villages around the world once used universal commodities like rice or salt as a means of exchanging for goods—some still do—92 percent of the world’s legal tender now exists as accounting figures on a digital bank statement. Depending on where you live, you’re dealing with some tabulation of rising or falling numbers beside a $, £, €, ¥, ₽, or ₹ sign, as money ownership transfers virtually and instantaneously between you and someone else on financial computers.

Money is intrinsically linked to national identity—both in developed countries and those still developing. It was the innovation that moved us from local barter economies to world trade. It opens access to the wonders of our world, but also segments us into classes—both globally and nationally. Our sense of who we are as people is as much determined by where we live as the faces on the coins in our pocket.

In March 2016, we’ll be hosting a month-long conversation about the future of money and nationhood at How We Get To Next. As always, we need your help finding those stories that aren’t being told elsewhere. We’ve already got a running list of those money-related questions we’d like to answer, but what are yours? Here’s a place for you to start:

• Will we ever have a global currency?
• Are money and nationhood inextricably intertwined?
• Can the current system of floating currency blocs with dollar-based trade and reserves withstand the strains of the global adjustment ahead?
• What was the historical moment that money went cross-border and took over the world?
• Is paper money a thing of the past? Does moving toward a cashless society threaten our personal freedoms and privacy?
• How has the bank note changed over time? How has this affected the art of forgery?
• What is the meaning and necessity of debt to complex civilizations? How do we begin to make sense of it?
• How do countries pay for war?
• What’s the future of alternative currency — from barter to Bitcoin — and how might you go about designing your own? Does anyone actually have the power to invent money?
• What’s in store for the future of buying and consumption? Are shopping malls and physical stores a dying breed?
• How do people sneak money across borders? What are the new methods for smuggling it from one black market to another?
• How do you set up financial infrastructure in perilous sites, failed states, or developing countries where the citizenry is currently unbanked?
• What are the economics of enough?
• We’ve heard of gonzo journalism, but what is gonzo finance? What happens when you apply the hacker ethos to the art of high finance?
• What are some of the newest emerging alternatives to traditional economics and where are they growing in popularity?

Money is an incredibly complex and jargon-filled subject. But we’re hoping to explore some of its more unusual concepts and look at things askew. Our focus this March will be to make our understanding of money more tangible and visceral—more human. Can you help?

If you think you’ve got a story to tell about any of the above, or you have another money idea altogether, let’s talk. Shoot me an email at abigail@howwegettonext.com.

I can’t wait to get this thing started. Cha-ching, cha-ching!