We all use money all the time: rent, groceries, tickets, bills, flights, gifts, drinks at the bar. It’s everywhere, except Burning Man (kinda).
For all the time we spend chasing money, worrying about it, or celebrating when it arrives, very few of us stop to ask a basic question: what actually is money?
For some people, money is about putting together just enough each month to survive. For others, it’s a way to keep life steady, to make sure things get paid on time so the rhythm of daily life holds together. Sometimes it’s about convenience: taxi over subway, Uber Eats, first-class flight booked with a tap. And other times it’s for pleasure — a hobby, to impress, self-care, to spoil someone, to make an evening unforgettable or even to give away.
The ways we get money are just as varied. Some work a nine-to-five. Others build businesses, trade influence, style, or code. Some inherit it; others gamble, hustle, or risk it all on a coin flip.
Money isn’t just personal. It’s how societies hold themselves together. In capitalism, money isn’t only how you buy food or pay rent; it’s how corporations coordinate workers and production, how governments collect taxes and fund infrastructure, how armies are maintained, and how markets decide which industries rise and fall.
Money isn’t just your bank balance. It’s the framework that organizes collective life.
Economists say money has three jobs: store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account. That’s the textbook version. But in real life, money rarely performs those jobs cleanly. Inflation eats away at value; some things can’t be priced at all. And not all exchanges are cash-based. People trade credits, points, favors, and trust every day.
Money is also part language, part ritual, part spell. Every transaction is a tiny performance of belief. Spending money is like speaking: a coffee purchase is one word, a plane ticket another. Dollars, euros, yen - different languages. Airline miles, festival tokens, in-game gold, even Venmo emojis are dialects of value with their own grammar.
Money is also a spell: a series of symbols repeated until they produce effects. Hand someone cash, abracadabra. Swipe a card, transaction complete. Send crypto and, like a wizard, you’ve cast a spell across a decentralized network.
The spell has ingredients: trust, symbols, repetition. And like any spell, it can be rewritten. History is full of new incantations including shells, stones, gold, paper, cigarettes, digital credits. Each worked because a community agreed to believe in it.
Money shapes what can be built and for whom, depending on its design. Fiat money builds nation-states, corporations, skyscrapers, armies. Festival currencies build temporary worlds: DJs, sound systems, shared beauty. Local credit systems build food co-ops, housing projects, networks of trust.
The outcomes aren’t automatic. Money doesn’t use itself. Communities decide which version to wield, and those choices ripple outward to become the structures we live in.
A community can and should design money so it flows back into land, housing, food, and energy instead of drifting into the black holes of distant banks and corporations.
Many see money only as survival or consumption. But money is more than that. People have always invented new forms whenever the old ones stopped working. Each system worked because enough people agreed to use it.
At festivals, on islands, in intentional communities, functioning examples already exist: tokens, gift economies, trades, credits. Some thrive, some collapse, some just make for good stories. But they all show the same truth: money can change.
And once you see that clearly, a more interesting question appears:
If we can redesign money, what kind of futures do we want it to build?