How to Plant a Currency

Couve is Paisagem's social token. We launched it in 2024, and I have to begin with a simple observation: it didn't catch on. I write this text to think out loud about an experiment - the ideas that gave it life, the purpose that moved it, and the difficulties it met.

Couve was born of an old restlessness. We say an artists' collective “has no money” as if noting an absence, but one afternoon inside it is enough to see how much circulates: favors, referrals, a lent piece of equipment, a translation done for free, hours of work no one invoices. The community is full of value. What it lacks is a language to name it. Value and price are not the same thing, and much of what sustains a creative space belongs to the order of value without price: the care of those who welcome, the presence of those who show up, the time given with nothing asked in return.

This intuition has a reference behind it, and it is no distant utopia. The Mexican thinker Gustavo Esteva, a fellow traveler of the Zapatistas and a friend of Ivan Illich, spent his life arguing that the commons are not a thing one possesses but an activity: a way for people to relate to one another and to the world, beyond the tutelage of the State and the measure of the market. In Grassroots Postmodernism (1998), he and Madhu Suri Prakash hold that it is in local rootedness, in the community's own ways of deciding its life, that a real alternative to the global logic opens up. Commoning, for Esteva, is the beginning of another economy, woven from bonds rather than competition. It was within this same family of gestures, long before any cryptocurrency, that the experience which most inspires me was born: in 1998, in Conjunto Palmeiras, on the outskirts of Fortaleza, the Banco Palmas created the Moeda Palma1, a social currency that circulates only within the neighborhood, keeping there a singular wealth that would otherwise scatter toward the big centers and dilute its potential. A community issuing its own recognition, prospering from within.

Couve set out to be a commons like that, to nourish and recognize everyone who collaborates with Paisagem in every way. Every choice was designed with care. It cannot be traded for money - no euro buys it, no euro redeems it - and with that we closed the door to speculation at the founding, because with no market price there is nothing to speculate on. And it does not, nor should it, replace paying those who make an event happen: the technical team, the production crew, professional work have a price and are paid in money. Couve lives on another layer, that of the value without price that no receipt can reach. It does not measure how much someone paid; it measures how much someone was there. It is earned through the Cultivo program: taking part in an event, sharing or creating content, organizing a gathering, contributing to the community's projects. What it gives back is voice: whoever holds Couve votes on proposals, suggests directions, helps decide what Paisagem will be. On paper, everything fits. A currency of reciprocity, a shared governance, a fond name taken from the most ordinary vegetable on our tables.

And then came a silence. I have to be honest about it, because pretending it didn't happen would betray the very spirit of the project. Adoption was low (as, deep down, I already suspected). I am left with the questions, and I offer them instead of trying to give ready answers. Was it prejudice? The word blockchain drags a weight today - speculation, scam, bubble - and perhaps that weight contaminated even a use born to be its opposite, so that those who might have loved Couve drew back at the name of the technology holding it up. Was it the difficulty of understanding? A token that isn't worth money and serves for voting is an idea that needs time to settle, and time is what everyone most lacks. Or was it, quite simply, too much friction on the way in?

Ivan Illich named this last problem long before it existed in the form we know today. In Tools for Conviviality (1973), he distinguished convivial tools - the ones anyone can use, adjust, and repair on their own, widening their autonomy - from those that, once past a certain threshold of complexity, come to require specialized mediation and end up disempowering the very people they should serve2. And here I need to do justice to the technology chosen for the token before merely questioning it. At its foundation, blockchain carries a deeply communitarian principle: decentralization, a record belonging to no owner and no center, and transparency, a common ledger anyone can verify. A technology without a center holds, on paper, the promise of a horizontal mediation, with no single source imposing itself - something close to the Relation that Édouard Glissant speaks of, and to Esteva's commoning. It was that promise that drew me: to put the tool at the service of the bond, and not of profit.

I recognize the irony, though. The same thinking that shaped Couve - Esteva's commons, Illich's convivial tools - is the one that would give me the most cutting warning. A decentralizing principle is not enough if, in the hands of the newcomer, the tool still demands the expert. However much blockchain promises autonomy, the concrete gesture of getting in - creating a wallet, keeping a key, understanding a balance that isn't money - still asks for a series of technical mediations foreign to the everyday of most of us. Couve crossed, without our meaning to, the threshold Illich describes: it was born of a convivial principle and reached people as a tool that asked for expertise. The problem, I understand now, did not live in the idea or in the foundation of the technology. It lived in the distance between its principle and its way in.

And this is where Glissant helps me, once again, to correct course. Sharing knowledge - teaching one another to create the wallet, to keep the key - is necessary and eases the barrier, but it still presupposes it: there is still a step, only now climbed in company. Horizontality will come when the tool itself becomes intuitive, reachable by anyone without demanding prior learning, so that the specialized mediator loses its function - which is, at bottom, what Illich always meant by a convivial tool. And this is open work, available to whoever wishes to collaborate: to dissolve the barrier at its source, through innovation, in the very design of the tool. Only then would the network truly be permeated, passed from hand to hand - like the very value Couve wants to keep in circulation.

I prefer to think of this as someone examining an experiment, because that is what it was from the start: a hypothesis put to the test, not a bet to win or lose. Couve has not died; it is a dormant experiment that can be taken up again. I am looking for ways to ease access, to make earning and using a Couve as simple as picking a leaf from the garden, with no wallet, no key, no fear. I confess I still don't know whether I will manage it, or even whether I should. There are days when I think the idea ran ahead of its conditions, and days when I think it is the conditions that need us in order to change. That doubt I leave open on purpose, because it is the true subject of this text.

The name, at least, still holds. Couve - collard, the humble kale of our kitchens - is a plant of plenty and of sharing: it grows all year, resprouts with each leaf picked, feeds without costing more. A currency of that nature yields more the more it is shared. If Couve has not yet borne fruit, perhaps it is because every seed has its time, and the time of a community cannot be decreed. I keep watering. And I leave the invitation, the same as ever and the most sincere I have: come think this through with me.

References

Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (1998); Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (1990); Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973).

Notes

1 The Moeda Palma was created in 1998 by the Banco Palmas, a community bank in Conjunto Palmeiras, Fortaleza. A circulating social currency, restricted to the neighborhood, it became an international reference in solidarity finance by keeping wealth in circulation among neighbors rather than letting it drain away to the big centers.

2 Illich develops the notion of the convivial tool in Tools for Conviviality (1973): there is a threshold of scale and complexity beyond which an instrument stops widening the autonomy of the one who uses it and begins to require the mediation of experts, monopolizing access and returning people to dependence. Conviviality, for him, is the capacity to use a tool without needing intermediaries.