My sometimes-collaborator Benjamin Rosenbaum has written a story called "The Guy Who Worked For Money" for Shareable.net's "Shareable Futures" series, science fiction stories about a future in which sharing is the norm. Other installments are Bruce Sterling's "The Exterminator's Want-Ad" and my "The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening":
"I didn't mean it like — you're a banker?" Nera sent an urgent message to her mouth to stop talking, but apparently it had to go by carrier pigeon. "Literally? Is that even legal?"
"Oh Nera, come on," Malka said, laughing. "Do you read anyone's page before you meet them?"
"It's definitely legal," Jörg said, "Outlawing money exchange would lead to even more extreme distortions in our metrics than we've got." His fingers flicked, his eyes briefly on a point above her head, and more incoming green pinged at the corner of her vision, but she wasn't going to read his goddamn footnotes in the middle of the party. "The Free Society doesn't compete on force or fiat, it outperforms on joy. Wherever there's a reversion to the money economy, that's a signal of a deficit of either trust, satisfaction ability, or information flow. It's better to let that signal manifest rather than –"
"All right, all right," Malka said, patting Jörg on the shoulder. Jörg smiled his goofy grin.
(Image: 337/365: The Big Money, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from daviddmuir's photostream)
