195: The Great Trump Depression and the End of Money
A dispatch from the future on the ontological paradox of money
The current state of current affairs seems fraught with peril and propaganda, and thus while we’re tempted to analyze and offer comment, we feel the need to wait until the public narratives reach a modest point of coherence. Consequently we’ve accessed our portal to the future for today’s issue.
Relatedly our salon on Ontologies was a resounding success. One of the purposes of the pilot was to stress test Descript.ai as service. In this our test successfully demonstrated the inadequacies of the platform, and there will be no recorded version. The next salon, date tbd, will be on the Nature of Nature. 😝
Money Isn’t Real. Authority Is.
A dispatch from the year 2050.
Greetings from the other side of the paradox.
It’s strange now to recall that, for centuries, we believed in money. We measured everything by it: our time, our worth, our survival. We called it "the economy," as if it were something separate from nature, from people, from reality itself.
Of course, none of it was real.
Money was a story.
Authority was the author.
The collapse of that story — and the liberation that followed — was not inevitable. It came at great cost. But it came.
The final crisis arrived faster than anyone expected.
In the late 2020s, after Trump’s return to power, the fusion of state corruption and financial fantasy accelerated. The farce reached its climax with the full-scale institutional embrace of cryptocurrency.
Markets ballooned beyond all connection to material production. Entire national budgets were collateralized by decentralized ledgers nobody controlled, but everyone gamed.
Then came the crash.
What we now call The Great Trump Depression began with the collapse of crypto-finance. Banks failed. States defaulted. Supply chains froze. Billions lost access to credit, to wages, to the fictions that had governed daily life.
But unlike earlier panics, something remarkable happened.
People finally asked:
What exactly did we lose?
With money discredited, the political horizon widened overnight.
For generations, we had been told we could not afford:
Universal healthcare.
Guaranteed food security.
Decarbonization.
Restorative land stewardship.
Global poverty eradication.
We believed these were problems of scarcity.
In truth, they were problems of imagination.
The financial system had functioned as a bottleneck, not a resource allocator. A game designed to protect existing authority, not distribute abundance. A medium that transformed collective capacities into artificial shortages.
As David Graeber once wrote:
“There’s no better way to justify inequality than to pretend it’s the inevitable consequence of impersonal market forces.”
When the markets dissolved, so too did their authority.
At first, barter re-emerged.
Then coordinated resource networks.
Trust remained.
Obligation remained.
Gift economies, mutual aid, and localized planning flourished.
The paradox was revealed:
We had never needed money to coordinate labor or distribute goods — we only needed systems of trust, accountability, and shared purpose.
Stephanie Kelton’s argument was vindicated retroactively:
Governments had never been financially constrained — they were politically constrained by adherence to a false narrative about money's scarcity.
Once freed from that narrative, planning replaced pricing.
Cooperation replaced competition.
Resource abundance replaced manufactured scarcity.
Money as Dead Media
Today, in 2050, we study money the way historians once studied obsolete communication tools.
Shells.
Coins.
Credit Cards.
Digital tokens.
Each iteration had less to do with value than with authority.
Each collapse brought us closer to the realization that money was never real — only the relations it mediated were.
Marshall McLuhan, who few took seriously in his time, was precisely correct:
“Money is a medium. Its content was always trust. Its effect was always control.”
Money was the most persuasive — and ultimately most fragile — medium of authority.
Once authority was reclaimed, the medium was discarded.
The climate crisis forced our hand.
We could not afford to keep pretending that the planet would wait for prices to signal action.
In rejecting money as the arbiter of possibility, we returned to older truths:
The Earth is finite.
Human creativity is infinite.
What we produce is bounded by material limits, not by accounting entries.
We are no longer ruled by the lie of money.
We are governed by the reality of responsibility.
That is the true gift economy:
Not barter, not charity — but the collective stewardship of life itself.
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