Activate Generosity with Circles UBI Community Currency
How losing my bike led me to a new trust-based universal basic income
How losing my bike led me to a new trust-based universal basic income
This weekend someone decided that my third-hand bike secured with a seven-year lock was worth the effort to break and take. Most people who live in big cities have had this experience, and this is not the first and won’t be the last bike that I sacrifice to the urban cycle gods.
What was different this time, was that my search for a replacement bike did not turn immediately to eBay, Facebook marketplace, or god forbid, to Jeff Bezos. I turned to the Circles Bazaar – a quickly growing Telegram group of Berliners who participate in an alternative currency: Circles.
I posted my request and quickly received an offer – a used bike and lock for 120 Circles, the equivalent of 120 euros. I met Blanka to pick up the bike and transferred her the Circles after she ‘trusted’ me through her account.
What makes Circles unique from being another currency by another name, is that I regularly receive a deposit of Circles to my account – 240 Circles every month, or 8 Circles a day, without needing to do anything, and without any end date to this steady inbound deposit. Circles is an unconditional basic income. I don’t need to do anything to receive my Circles — simply having an account is enough.
Earlier this week, I attended my first Circles General Assembly, with a happening market and a community concert. I contributed Circles to support the band, and I traded a few Circles for a bursting full bag of chard, kale and beetroot freshly picked from Tiny Farms, as well as a set of beautifully crafted cloth earrings from a local jeweler. Each vendor provided a QR code that led to their account, and trades were done on an honor basis.
How does one get Circles? You register an account and need to receive three vouches of ‘trusts’ from people already in the Circles community before you receive your initial issue of 50 Circles that can be traded right away — something that if you were physically at a marketplace for, would take less than a few minutes of tapping people on the shoulder to accomplish.
It felt pretty magical to be getting things for what felt like free money. But I also wondered if we were re-enacting the digital equivalent of printing money on an as-needed basis — one of the practices that have led to skyrocketing inflation and subsequent economic crashes in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and more distantly, Weimar Germany in the 1920s.
I still have lots of questions about Circles. It seems the people at the forefront of this burgeoning economy were contributing more, being the first to foot the cost and risk of accepting a new currency without knowing if they would get it back in the value and within the timeline they would need. But I also saw how excited they were to be doing it. The smiles and joy I saw at the marketplace spoke volumes, and the generosity people showed each other in offering more than they needed to, or gifting things to each other reminded me of fables from the past when marketplace vendors would actually try to send buyers away with more than they paid for, because they cared about the relationship, but also because there was more than enough to go around.
Essentially, at this marketplace, it felt like there was surplus instead of scarcity.
It called up the question of how we can dismantle the all-pervasive idea of Scarcity and its role in the corroded economic system that we have now. In contrast to the belief that money and value are finite resources, it seems to me that Circles operates on a few principles that support an abundance mindset:
Value is comprised not only of tangible goods, or measurable services, but also of intangible things like care, attention, and love that permeate the spaces of the system and make it work
This kind of intangible value can be recognized and appreciated as gifts to each other in Circles (or anything else!)
There is enough value to go around for people to be generous with their exchanges
The exchange of this untapped ocean of value can be activated with a push of an unconditional income into the system
People are incentivized to be generous when they don’t feel they have to count their Circles because they know there would always be more coming
One of the criticisms of universal basic income is that people will become lazy, unmotivated vegetables who will stay home, get high, and play video games for the rest of their lives. I can see this perspective and can imagine that if we distributed UBI in the faceless, bureaucratic governmental way that social benefits are currently administered, that there could be a segment of the population who may indeed do just that.
But what again makes Circles, and other community-based currencies different is that you enter the economic ecosystem not as an anonymous user identified only by number and birthdate (I’m looking at you, German system), but through being vouched for by current community members. Your trades happen not over faceless Amazon, but with real people whom you’ve ideally met in person.
Circles calls itself a people-powered currency. To me, people-powered means relationship-powered. Each transaction you make is not only a goods-or-services for money exchange with a stranger you will never see again. Every time you trade with Circles, it initiates and strengthens a relationship. People become more than the vehicles for their commodities, and economy becomes more than a measurement of the movement of goods and money. Through a community-based currency combined with unconditional income, an economy is able to shift into what it actually should exist for — a structure to encourage and enrich diverse relationships between the people who make up an ecosystem. The key difference between Circles and any other kind of digital currency is community, and the people who give life and love to it.
I saw this come alive in my own behaviour in the last few days. My bag of Tiny Farm vegetables cost 5 Circles, but I was happy to give 10 for it. Aquafaba, the fabulously energetic band that gifted us with a concert at the end of the General Assembly asked for contributions. I didn’t need to hesitate to give 15 Circles. The organizer of the space asked for donations to support the space. It was a no-brainer to give another 15 Circles, simply because I had enough, so why wouldn’t I share?
I experienced firsthand the feeling of abundance and felt such relief to see myself behaving generously, with an openness to support others just because I could. I saw how the belief in scarcity that I had been conditioned to operate under — the one that tells me giving something away leads to me having less — had created in me thoughts and behaviors that I see as being petty, calculating, and stingy.
I saw how easily these few exchanges with a belief in abundance changed my feelings and behavior within days. I noticed how quickly I started thinking differently about the motivation of my transactions — that they were not only about trading for delicious vegetables, or beautifully crafted earrings, or a slick second-hand bike. What made the biggest difference to me was feeling that behind every transaction, I had a desire to support someone else and to feed this economy that was designed to nurture us. I became motivated to pay it forward with every exchange I made, because I could see, sense, and understand how the value went into a healthy system that would eventually find its way back to me. I felt in my body how my participation in this system actually enriched it and gave something to others more than I took it away from them, or that it ‘set me back’. I suddenly felt that it did make a difference that I was there and that I wasn’t just another body that had to be administered and extracted from so that the sick system that I lived in could continue to survive for its own sake.
I am now off to MADAMEZORRO’s boutique — a visual artist at the Circles Assembly who crafts felted delights — I can’t wait to trade with her and get to know her entry to this new economy, which is so much more than simply economy — it is both a step into something new, but also re-entry into something that has existed for ages in our histories, but has become sick with false beliefs that what there is to go around is finite, quantifiable, controllable, and should be hoarded.
I’m inspired and excited, and I still have many questions about Circles and the UBI econosystem that I hope to answer. Some of them are:
How does it actually work with the numbers when more users join, and start receiving circles? Will it create an inflation similar to countries in the past that have printed money as a solution to shortage?
What’s there to stop people from creating multiple accounts, and receive multiple deposits of Circles?
How can users decide who to ‘trust’ into the system? How can this community currency be kept aligned to its intention, and not be co-opted by the same enactors of greed and oppression that have shaped our current system?
I’ll be coming back to the Circles General Assembly next month, and if you want to find out more, you can too.