Incongruous Monetary Matters

In a lecture given at MoneyLab 2016 in Amsterdam, Houldsworth took the audience into the world of science fiction in attempt to “develop radically different notion of money”. Diving into dystopian novels, he drew on fictional monetary systems and reintroduced them into the real world in a form of public interventions. For example, In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s sci-fi adventure “We”, a huge collective structure controls access to cities and holds citizens hostages of their public duties. Inhabitants of rogue states appropriate weapons as payment devices similar to Orwell’s “1984”. Can science fiction challenge the collective imagination to alter and transform the imminent abstraction of money in the Cashless Society?