What’s Money Worth?
13:30 – 14:20 Uhr
Freitag, 3. Juli 2026
Money is one of the most powerful systems of collective belief – yet it can take radically different forms beyond coins, paper, and crypto. On the Western Pacific island of Yap, for instance, giant stone coins were used for centuries. Too heavy to move, many of them never physically changed hands. Ownership existed as shared memory, maintained through trust. Elsewhere, money has been worn as jewelry, used as weaponry, consumed for breakfast, and employed as propaganda. These historical alternatives speak to today’s challenges of abstraction, instability, and inequality. Drawing on these forms – as well as speculative currencies by Jonathon Keats for the Festival der Zukunft and by participants in an FdZ workshop – this talk explores the foundations of money. What if money were "devised for the good of the community", as Nicolas d’Oresme suggested in the Middle Ages? What is the good of the community? The speakers discuss what money is and could become – philosophically and practically – as a basis for alternative economic realities.