Beginning.  Again.

I didn't really think I'd come back here after finishing the World Without Oil simulation, but now that the simulation is taking on the appearance of reality -- that is to say, now that the price of a barrel of oil has hit $134 on the futures market and gasoline is selling locally for $4.05 a gallon of regular -- well, hey . . . looks like we're livin' the dream. Who'd have thought it could happen so fast? And for no immediately apparent reason? I mean, they haven't shut down the Straits of Hormuz. The impending attack on Iran has yet to materialize. No hurricane has swirled its way into the Gulf of Mexico, shutting down production. What gives, eh?

What apparently "gives" is that oil exporters are beginning to hold back product, hoarding or husbanding it for future sale as well as to meet rising domestic demand in their own countries. Our president can even go to his good buddies in Saudi Arabia and beg them to open up the taps a little (something they've promised and failed to do several times over the last few years) and be politely but firmly turned down. Are they saying no because they just don't feel like it - or because they are actually incapable of increasing production by any significant increment? Does it matter? Well, yes, because if they can increase output, then this energy crisis, like those of the 70s, is a manufactured predicament, with a political solution. But if it isn't (and that's where I've placed my bet), the predicament has its basis in geology -- and that really doesn't have a solution. You can drill more, and burn it, and open up wildlife preserves and fragile offshore ecosystems to oil production, and burn that oil, and suck the last few remaining drops out of all of those wells that were prematurely capped after they peaked, and you'll get a little bump up in production for a short period of time. But the overall trend, as we sail over the Peak, will inevitably be down.

I attended a community forum on transportation today, lots of political bigwigs in attendance - the head of the Metro Transit District, the head of City Planning, city council persons, county supervisors. They think the problem lies on the demand side and that that can be fixed. They're right, in a sense, although they blame the supply problem on OPEC (and those pesky treehuggers who insist on keeping the oil companies out of ANWR). Well of course, they have to, because they aren't empowered to do anything on that end. The only concrete solution they were able to float out there, in the face of an economy sliding into recession and the consequent falling tax revenues smashing into budget shortfalls at every level of government, was some modest form of rationing. That's it. Rationing.

And so it begins. For real this time.

Did I mention I'm an animator? Yes, I believe I did.

What Have We Learned?

And so, as I send my ghostly self off to seek reunion with his family in Ohio, it’s time to doff the fictional disguise, pull back and take the long view of the month-long oil crisis simulation exercise that was World Without Oil.

I don’t know how many people, stumbling on this blog by accident, followed the links back to the explanation for its existence. I’m pretty sure that “geoff” did not, (he commented on an early entry that, for riding my bike in Los Angeles traffic, I was “another target on the road -- get a car you freak.”)

I never wanted to break the illusion within the space of the blog that I was actually living in this alternate reality that included the onset of Peak Oil in the form of a sudden spike in the price of gasoline, triggering societal and economic collapse; so I provided readers with no indication, other than the aforementioned link, that this was a War of the Worlds-type simulation. Given that some of the events mentioned in the blog overlapped with events in the real world (e.g., the local immigration protest and riot in MacArthur Park), one might very well have concluded that the author was hallucinating some sort of paranoid delusion. But often, that’s what immersion in Peak Oil literature feels like anyway.

World Without Oil, as its designers describe it, was an “alternate reality event, a serious game for the public good. It invite(d) everyone to help simulate a global oil shock. People participate by contributing online stories, created as though the oil shock were really happening.”

The “event” ran throughout the month of May, 2007, with each day advancing the chronological pace of events and contextual storyline by one week, a scheme that was initially a little difficult to get used to. Escalating events tumbled on top of each other, condensing considerably the amount of time one had to react to them, or to make plans as to what should come next. And you never knew where it was going to go. In addition, some user contributions (a report of a U.S. “incursion” into the Canadian tarsand fields, a charge that the U.S. President had ordered an airstrike on Watts [!?]) tended to throw a few hard-to-integrate incidents into the mix. In general, for my part, I ignored them.

Since the initial unexplained price spike of a dollar or so per gallon was supposed to have occurred on April 30, that was the first day for the submission of blog entries, photos, videos, podcasts, email and/or phone messages contributing to a collaborative fiction which eventually summed up to a grand total of 32 weeks of “crisis,” ending in early December of this year, though things seemed to sort of settle down over the last couple of days (weeks) as the nearly eighteen hundred registered “heroes” or, as they were called on the site “Netizens”, began to sense that the end (of the simulation) was near.

What was the point? Again, according to the site’s designers, “World Without Oil aims to help fill a huge gap in our nation’s thinking about oil and the economy. As people everywhere grapple with the problem of growing global demand for petroleum, no one has a clear picture of oil availability in the future, nor is there a clear picture of what will happen when demand inevitably outstrips supply. That will depend in large part upon how well people prepare, cooperate, and collectively create solutions. By playing it out in a serious way, the game aims to apply collective intelligence and imagination to the problem in advance, and to create a record that has value for educators, policymakers, and the common people to anticipate the future and prevent its worst outcomes. ‘Play it, before you live it.’”

So the simple question to be asked is, given its self-stated goal, did this online simulation accomplish its purpose?

For my part, I honestly have my doubts, though I have to confess that I have not read every blog entry or perused every video submitted; and, in fact, due to a ten day hiatus when I was out of the country and unable to access the site, there’s a big hole in the middle of my personal experience of the simulation as evidenced by my lack of entries between the fifteenth and twenty-fourth of the month.

Still, my impression is that the site was no more than a momentary blip on the radar of Internet traffic, even in the relatively small pond that represents interest in the subject of Peak Oil online; to my knowledge, it was only given a couple of mentions and not actively discussed on the web’s best Peak Oil site, The Oil Drum.

Why should this be? It appears to have been well-funded (though not terribly well-publicized) by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and, despite a couple of technical glitches, well-produced by something called ITVS Interactive (Independent Television Service) and WriterGuy LLC. The participation of these organizations, however, raises the question as to whether this was really, in and of itself, a legitimate civic-minded thought experiment to plumb the depths of the public’s fears, concerns, reactions, and possible solutions to such a crisis; or, was the general public (the part with access to the Internet and an interest in the topic) being mined for content to act as creative contributor to some sort of future television series or special on the subject? The answer to that question remains to be seen.

At one point before the experiment began, Matt Savinar, owner of the popular Life After the Oil Crash site, even suggested that this might be a sort of fishing expedition on the part of shadowy government agencies attempting to take the temperature of the citizenry by inviting them to spin out their fantasy scenarios in a public forum. Hm, well, could be . . .

I guess my question would be, what sort of an impact did the experiment itself have? On that score, and without having access to statistical data (the blog I dedicated to the experiment doesn’t count visitors, and I don’t know how many folks eventually checked into the WWO site) I’d have to say not much at all, although the “players” themselves, at least the ones who posted regularly, seemed to register a good deal of “parting is such sweet sorrow” style emotion in their final posts, as if we were all graduating high school together. And I’m not putting that down by pointing it out: online community is a very real kind of experience for many people, though one that qualitatively differs from actual face-to-face type community, a distinction that is often lost on people deeply invested in creating such things. I am, as I noted at one point in this blog sequence, one of those people so invested, by the way.

And that’s why, apart from my concerns about the magnitude of what James Kunstler calls the “converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century”, Peak Oil and Climate Change, this experiment drew me in. I desperately wanted to find out what a diverse group of people, widely scattered over vast geographical distances, thought might occur under such circumstances.

I’d have to say that I was disappointed in the degree of participation, on the one hand, and in the quality of the participation as well. I imagine that the site’s creators might protest, “Well, it was up to you to make it better!” And I’d concur (mea culpa!), with the small exception that online community is a collaborative experience that takes place in a designed arena. You provide people with the toolkit and the parameters of play and set them to work. The quality of the tools you provide (and the arena) determines, to some extent, the quality of the experience. I personally did not find the collaborative experience all that compelling, but that may just be me. Nonetheless, this is a subject in which I am deeply involved – so why was this virtual incarnation of it ultimately so unsatisfying?

This is just speculation on my part, but I think the answer to that question lies within the participants themselves, including the site designers – and so I do in fact include myself in their number. We all live inside a fish bowl, and it is very difficult for we fish to comment on the nature and quality of the water we daily swim in – or what might happen to us all were the amount of water in the bowl suddenly cut in half.

It seems to have been very hard for people to imagine what existence in a world without oil would really look or feel like. This became most obvious in the video contributions, where life was clearly proceeding along pretty much as normal in the background, while the guy in the foreground was trying desperately to pretend that existence was tough and things were falling apart all over. It had a sort of silly quality to it, and while I’ve entertained a number of scenarios of what could occur with the onset of Peak Oil, “silly” hasn’t really entered the picture very often.

Folks contributing little community-based “missions”, hiding caches of tools for others to locate or creating games, puzzles and other “fun” activities didn’t really strike me as credible or effective responses to the kinds of problems Peak Oil has the potential to create. It’s not that I scoff at the indomitable quality of the human spirit or our ability to laugh and entertain ourselves in times of trouble – but folks, the world was supposed to be coming apart at the seams. There was a lot of work to be done – or there would be, if the situation were as serious as it was at first made to seem.

This was a theme I tried to incorporate in my blog, because, if the real situation should in fact overtake us, I think a major problem will indeed be that the general populace will not take it seriously enough soon enough to do what needs to be done to prevent massive social and economic disruption. The evidence? Look around you now. Are we busy making preparations? The Hirsch Report, published by the Department of Energy two years ago, said we should have started twenty years ago. Do you see anybody other than a few Internet hotheads, a couple of not-terribly-well-known authors and Rep. Bartlett of Maryland taking this issue seriously?

I don’t. I think we’re busy whistling past the graveyard, amusing ourselves with visions of an ever more abundant future and “cool” cars that run on biomass and leftover frying oils.

Okay, that said, I did learn a few things from this experiment, the first of which I communicated to one of the site organizers who emailed me early on with words of encouragement (that were greatly appreciated. Thank you, yuckymuck.) I wrote back that one of my first discoveries derived from the process of imagining the scope of the crisis was this: that being aware of the problem is not the same as being prepared for it. For as long as I have been aware of this problem, I have actually done woefully little to address it in practical terms, other than to reduce the amount of my debt, compost my garbage, and plant a vegetable garden in the backyard.

Secondly, at some point I realized that the world was going to divide into two parts, one With Oil and one Without – or rather, one Without the Ability To Pay for Oil. That would be the first stage of a long slow process of splintering and collapse: one part of the world (the part that could afford it) would go on behaving as usual, probably with the collusion of government and an extensive black market economy, and another part would take a dramatic step down in quality of life, perhaps even giving up altogether and being rounded up and shuttled off into government-sponsored “relocation camps.”

I’d never really thought about this before, or about how much violence might accompany such a split in the social and economic fabric of the country, but I seemed to be forced to that conclusion by the circumstances I was describing. It was a sobering experience, and I have to say that, as I began to invest a certain amount of imaginative energy in the process, the dark feelings of the virtual experience began to bleed over into my everyday real life experience. I began to wander around, looking at the things I was certain were about to vanish from my life. The mood colored the remainder of my writing on the subject and, ultimately, led me to banish my fictional alter ego from the community he had helped to form but of which he had never really felt a part. Like many quintessentially American literary figures, he was finally fated to be sent off on an unresolved search for someplace to call home.

The third thing I discovered in the writing was that a recognizable moment of total collapse would never actually come; there would only be a long grinding series of shockwaves that would gradually make the structure, our fossil fuel-based economy, more and more inhospitable and eventually uninhabitable. I used the metaphor of earthquakes in Los Angeles, and the way we deal with such disasters here; but I really think the metaphor applies to a temperament that is peculiarly American, but maybe also peculiarly human as well, this ability we have to live in a shithouse and dream about voyaging to the stars.

Finally, though I have voiced criticism of the experiment and what I view as its result, the jury is still out. It may very well have a wider significance than I have granted it. I personally want to thank the people responsible for it for their efforts and for having provided me with the opportunity to participate. Ultimately, it was a rewarding if somewhat frustrating experience; I would like to see more like it.

This very long essay caps off the series for WWO, and probably my contributions to this blog as well. I would like to request that if you found any of this writing at all compelling and want to see what else I’m cooking up, please visit my regular blog here, in which I’ve previously published some additional essays on the nature of virtual worlds. It is a part of a virtual storefront for a book I self-published awhile back called Chronological Order, a collection of my writings from which the concluding poem “Illumination” was reprinted. Until then, or until Peak Oil brings the whole mad enterprise crashing down around us – take care, my friends. Stay safe, stay sane, and stay alive.

World Without Oil: Illumination


we burned
we burned it all

you who have come after us
have seen our path
emblazoned on your earth
our scorched road
your sterile sea
the blackened sky
the trail of our hunger

we burned
we burned it all

treasures pulled up from the ground
we piled high
and set afire
a beacon on the shore of night
a prayer, a plea we danced,
we sang around our pyre
and sacrificed your future

we burned
we burned it all

in our homes, in our cars
on our way toward the stars
still, so very far away, so cold
so far beyond our reach
tiny fires that give no heat
do you stare at them
and curse us, we

who burned
we burned it all

World Without Oil: Where Things Stand

“Peak Oil may be the trigger for a global economic depression that lasts for many decades. Or it may not. It may plunge us into violent anarchy and military rule. Or it may not. But if Peak Oil doesn’t wake us up to the precariousness of our condition, divorced from our roots in the soil and the forest, annihilating the evolutionary systems that sustain us and replacing them with brittle, artificial, plastic imitations, what will? What will it take?

“. . . It was only a short time ago, two centuries at most, that we fell into our energy addiction and started down a path to ruin. Peak oil is an opportunity to pause, to think through our present course, and to adjust to a saner path for the future. We had best face facts: we really have no choice.”

-- Albert Bates, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook

Albert Bates’ book is one of the volumes that got me through this first phase of the crisis. It’s a great little book, packed with invaluable information, everything from how to ferment sauerkraut to how to tie a sheet bend knot and do basic first aid. I never got around to trying the recipe for Grasshopper Quesadillas, but I may at some point. The other book I’m taking with me is Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual. Indispensable.

I’ve been on the phone over the last several weeks with my daughter and my family back in Ohio, and it became increasingly clear that that is where I am needed. The family has banded together, pooled their resources and survived; and the area, though devastated economically, has not suffered the paroxysms and spasms of violence that have plagued Los Angeles. The Amish in the region, who were way ahead of this curve, served as a stabilizing (and educating) influence. Though winters can be harsh and the growing season shorter, unlike Los Angeles, there is plenty of water to be had – and in my opinion, severe drought and water shortages will be the next plague to hit our benighted population here. How will we practice urban agriculture then, I wonder? Well, if all goes as planned, I will not be here to find out.

What finally answered the “stay or go” question for me? Thanksgiving. We celebrated it together in the neighborhood, gathering in the street that has become our public plaza and makeshift marketplace. We were able to purchase many of the essentials, and we broke into some of our home-canned, dried and cured stuff from previous harvests. It was a semi-traditional feast and, as is usual with Americans, there was too much food. But none of it was wasted. Everyone who showed up went home well-fed.

At the start of the celebration, someone offered up a prayer of thanks. In it, they thanked God (but didn’t mention Him by Name, I noticed) for seeing us all through the crisis . . . now that it has passed!

Really? I sort of had a problem with that.

Which world are these people living in, I wondered? They might have at least offered up a little prayer of thanks to the former drug dealer whose small army of armed thugs is “protecting” our little island of modest prosperity amid the sea of anarchy and confusion that is present-day Los Angeles. (He stopped by, like a politician trolling for votes, to shake hands and taste the pumpkin pies, a handgun prominently holstered at his side.)

Are they aware, I wondered, of the blocks of charred ruins, not three miles distant, that were once pleasant and peaceful Valley neighborhoods like this one, set ablaze in a pique of frustration-fueled rage? Are they not cognizant of the local city college parking lot two blocks away, jammed with cars – Hummers, SUVs, Mercedes, every kind of vehicle imaginable – out of gas and now serving as the semi-permanent residences of their many occupants? Did they think that government-funded food giveaways and jobs programs would long serve as the new status quo in a city of sixteen million restless people, if that is still our number?

I think we are falling asleep again, that we’ve shifted the baseline down without realizing it and accepted it as the new normal. People have taken to driving again, though a little more providently. They rideshare – except when they don’t, claiming that public transportation (or even the Smart Jitneys) are too unreliable and inconvenient to meet their needs.

The crisis has passed? No. It’s barely begun.

So, like the Andersons before me, I am turning over the keys and contents of my estate to the neighborhood. I’ve urged them to use my library (I collected books all of my life) and the house to continue the school I started several weeks ago, the one that became my new livelihood in the World Without Oil. I’ve donated my hand tools to the neighborhood co-op.

I look around me tonight, and it all seems like a dream, a thirty-year-long phantom existence that will vanish in the morning. I will let it go.

Tomorrow I will don my “walk-out” pack and make my way down to Union Station where I hope that the outrageous bribe I have paid to secure a seat on a train headed east will in fact have secured my passage. I can’t be certain, but I can hope that within a few days – or maybe it will take weeks, who knows? – I will once again be greeted and taken in by my family and by the loving smile of my precious daughter, welcoming her prodigal father home.

World Without Oil: Shakey

In Los Angeles, as you may have heard, the ground occasionally shakes.

If it shakes long enough and hard enough, buildings topple to the ground. Structures collapse. But if it just shakes a little bit, things sway back and forth for a few seconds, then the shaking slows and the swaying gradually settles; maybe a glass will wiggle its way off a shelf or a pencil will roll off a tabletop. Lamps suspended from ceilings will swing pendulum-like and then slow to a halt.

Just a little adjustment, and then the earth is solid and firm again. Within a day or two, people will have forgotten that they live in a place where the ground occasionally shakes.

Sometimes, though, an earthquake is more like a swift jolt, a sharp slap and then a violent rocking, and buildings and structures will do a sudden quick two-step sideways and then attempt to recover from being knocked off-balance. Sometimes it works, but sometimes they shift on their moorings. Maybe they don’t collapse, or they start to collapse but then something will catch in mid-fall, and the structure – weakened, unstable, off-kilter – will yet remain standing, though a floor be caved in or a wall pulled apart and angled strangely.

Subsequently, the structure will be inspected and red-tagged, meaning it’s no longer fit for safe habitation. What the sudden jolt started, workmen will have to complete.

That’s sort of the way I look back on this Oil Crisis: the structure has been knocked slightly off of its foundation, its corners are somewhat askew, but not enough yet to be red-tagged as unfit for human habitation.

Things are out of alignment, but you might just want to think of them as “re-adjusted” or “re-aligned.” The structure isn’t completely solid anymore – in fact, the crisis has revealed some of its profound inner weaknesses and inherent faults. The next large quake may very well stress those beyond endurance and then the structure will collapse – but not yet.

I’ve remarked before that people in Los Angeles live with this stuff every day – they laugh, they shrug their shoulders, and go on about their business as if nothing happened. Ha ha, they say. Potential disaster is a way of life in L.A.

So you will note that, despite the picture I’ve managed to paint of my life and somewhat reduced circumstances in what would seem to be the alternate reality of a World Without Oil, gasoline is still being offered to the consuming public at the newly available and, for some, eminently affordable price of $5.62 per gallon. You don’t even have to wait in long lines to get it at this point, as you did during the summer. If you can pay for it, you can have some.

What was it when it was at its highest? $6.00 a gallon? $7.00? Huh, I can’t even remember. How about that?

Same deal with food. Store shelves, especially in the fresh produce and meat and dairy sections, were empty during many weeks of the very long hot summer; and when the stuff was there, it was obscenely expensive. It still is, but those who can afford to pay, pay. And eat. The shortages at the start (and middle) of this crisis were exacerbated by hoarding, which got some people through the worst of it, and will probably continue to get people through the winter. Some people. The people who can afford to make such arrangements.

I need to say that I am one of those people who can afford to make such arrangements.

If I wanted to, I could go out and fill ‘er up again and tool about the city (well, some parts of the city, the safe parts) with impunity in my little Honda Civic, which has sat empty in my garage since the crisis began. I could switch on my electricity and fire up the old TV set, re-subscribe to cable and my Internet service, and just start consuming fossil fuels with wild abandon all over again, at substantially higher costs, of course. I don’t really have to keep turning the compost, saving out seeds, putting in the next round of cold weather crops for a mid-winter to early spring harvest of beets, turnips, broccoli, peas and potatoes. These things will be available, we are assured, in the stores this winter – if you can afford them. And I can.

My point is that it is possible to pretend now that the situation has stabilized. After a period of rigorous demand destruction (for reasons that are still suspiciously unknown), supply has apparently once again reached an accord with demand in the form of a price people are willing to pay and at which oil companies, refineries and distributors can continue to thrive, though one suspects the hidden hand of government subsidies at work behind the scenes.

Banks, credit card companies and mortgage lenders have scrambled to deal with a tidal wave of defaults and foreclosures; many losers have sunk beneath the surface, but a few innovative winners have bobbed up to the top, gasping for air but still treading the waters of economic activity. The stock market has collapsed and rebounded several times in the last few months, slipping always to a lower plateau of pricing to achieve some footing of stability – but overvalued stocks are still being traded back and forth daily. Lots of activity in the commodities markets, I understand. Fortunes are being made – in somewhat substantially devalued dollars. Falling imports have apparently improved the balance of trade deficit, but in doing so have destabilized a now faltering international economy.

But the reality is that, here at home, some substantial portion of the population has quite simply disappeared from view in this new pretend world. Maybe it’s the part that can’t afford to log onto the Internet or show up in front of the TV cameras at the almost daily demonstrations in front of City Hall. They’re the newly-made “invisibles”, unemployed, dispossessed and, I suspect, increasingly desperate.

The Andersons, that nice couple I wrote about here awhile ago, are members of this new class. Where’d they go after they walked away from their nice suburban house, one of several here on my block that has been repeatedly looted and ransacked? Back to their parents’ place? Or the relocation camps, perhaps? Maybe they’ve become a part of that vast army of the homeless living under Los Angeles bridges that is predicted to overwhelm the social service agencies and rescue missions this winter. Very few people speak of them, but they’re out there. I see them everywhere I go. They occasionally raid our gardens. We give them food to make them go away; someday we may have to employ the services of our local warlord to accomplish that purpose.

The truth is, we are all continuing to live inside a fossil fuel-based System that is teetering just this side of being red-tagged. The next price quake, be it a season of foul weather (who can know what winter woes climate change will bring us this year?) or some new international version of petroleum blackmail or nuclear roulette – we’re living in a structure that’s just this close to being condemned. “But see,” we tell ourselves and point and smile with pride, “it’s still standing!”

Ha ha.

World Without Oil: Doing What Needs To Be Done

I realize, in reading over what I posted recently, that I may have conveyed the impression that we were only “saved” here after the guns finally came out – which is, I’m afraid, a pretty typical American formulation, the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys and all that. We have a lot of guns in this country, it’s true, and a frontier tradition of sorts that provides a context for pulling them out and using them as an argument of last resort. Or, in the case of Iraq, as an argument for preemptive action.

But no, it was not the Gunfight at the North Hollywood Corral that saved our collective ass here. That was just the one event that actually seemed to galvanize people locally, to pull them up out of the stupor that was the terminal state of oil addiction cold turkey. By the time it had done so, many were in pretty dire financial straits, having borrowed deeply into a hole from which it seemed impossible to extricate themselves.

That horror, combined with the daily terror in the streets, was driving many people further and further into isolation, as if hiding the condition was the only thing that could bring them solace. Some of them were even still indoors watching TV or surfing the ‘Net (when the power was on) while we were out working in the community gardens, begging for their participation and help, and minions of the banking industry were knocking at their front doors with eviction notices in hand. In some cases I know of, one or two people were even turning their guns on themselves.

During this time as well, inflated currency on credit was being offered at staggeringly low interest rates by both the central banks and the consumer sector institutions in a desperate attempt to keep the whole System afloat. That effort is still underway and, given the fact that it is coupled with a complex of competing (and confusing) schemes of energy rationing at many levels of government, the System (that World That Can Afford Oil that I referred to before) appears to be still in operation. That is, if you don’t look too closely.

What is actually in play is the first phase of a Great Contraction, as evidenced here in Los Angeles by what MsGeek (hi, Michelle – yes, I’m still alive) has elsewhere referred to as Red and Green Zones. I think that Green Zones can be characterized as places with either a) the money and/or political connections to obtain oil and the products of oil, or b) the community necessary to provide what oil cannot. It’s my contention that the Green Zones in the first category will eventually turn a bright glowing Red but, for the moment, the levitation trick appears to still be working.

In the meantime, what has happened locally is that larger and larger connected groups have formed to foster regional productivity on all levels premised on the minimal availability of declining energy supplies and the maximum availability of human capital in the immediate vicinity. That’s a fancy way of saying that, block by block, unemployed people have set up local job boards listing their skills evaluated in terms of an alternate currency we call VALS (for “Value” but it could also be construed as “Valley” given our location.)

VALS are accepted by everyone who signs on to the system. Geographically, it necessarily has to remain a small system. Signing on means that you agree to accept the standards by which we evaluate the skills you have to offer, and those serve as a basis for negotiation with whoever needs your particular skill. I’m paying for this hook-up time with VALS. They also translate into trades for tangible goods. When you go to the local farmers markets (and there are some now), you can see things priced in taxable dollars ($6.50 for a loaf of bread!) or in VALS. By the time government figures out that it wants to collect tax on these transactions (which are currently perfectly legal, but we’ve not exactly asked for their permission), that System will probably have collapsed anyway.

It was slow going at first, getting this thing up and running. There was much discussion and disagreement over what things were actually worth, but since negotiation is an integral part of the process, the kinks eventually work themselves out. What you put in, you get back out again. It evolved out of the barter system and required a certain widespread level of acceptance before it really started to fire on all four cylinders, but it does finally appear to be working.

We knew it had hit a certain stride when one of the local warlords (yes, there are still gang turf wars going on) began accepting his bribes in VALS. Hey, you do what you gotta do, you know?