The past several years have not been kind to the world's working class and working poor. The foundations on which we have built the institutions of commerce—the markets, the banks, and government—have proven to be less reliable than we had believed, resulting in a wave of monetary crises around the world. Each was met with our brightest national leaders scrambling to correct the instability through obscene injections of capital and massive creations of debt on behalf of the peoples of this world. If one could capture the zeitgeist—the deepest thoughts of our fellow man—it would be this: the institutions that have served us for decades are now failing us.
Nevertheless, there is one institution that has continued to innovate and serve humanity where the others have failed: the Web. There is hope in this institution, a last bastion bringing power to those who have none and a voice to those who seek it. It is time to put forth a plan that uses the Web, the best communication platform that we have today, to solve our collective monetary crisis.
This is the first article in a five-part series that will explore how money is handled and what it does for society. I will identify lessons we have learned in the world of technology and transparency that will lead us toward a brighter future. First, though, we need to understand how we arrived in this predicament and examine the purpose of debt, money, and banking.
