Crowdfunding something for someone who could already somewhat afford that something is a profoundly meaningful activity (Visa isn't rich btw, but he is eg giving a $1k grant this year) Let's see if I can articulate this.
Crowdfunding, fungible money, and group needs-and-resources conversations
19 tweets · November 2021 · 154 likes · 3 retweets · read on Twitter
The fungibility of money is weird. It makes it hard to figure out what's reasonable to pay for (and how much) and makes it hard to connect the dots of how your contribution to the world has wound back up to your present abundance great thread:
contribute ofc etymologically means "tribute-together" which has a bit of a submissive vibe but going back even further, "tribute" means "allot among the tribes or to a tribe"
I'll finish this later, but for now I'll leave you with this:
So this thing about buying @visakanv a laptop reminded me of a friend's laptop that got purchased in January. The Goal-Crafting Intensive team decided to try @planetaryperson's prototype of a money conversation process, as a way to talk about what to do with the money we'd made
The conversation form involves each person writing out their needs and their resources, which include financial or fungible items, but also skills and intangibles like "enthusiasm". And one person needed a new laptop. She maybe had enough cash to buy it, but not comfortably.
We put that item in the middle, and happily routed money from the GCI profit to the friend. But in the process we discerned that she also needed help figuring out which laptop to buy, and tagged in @LordChisholm (a close friend of mine who wasn't in the convo live) for that.
We barely scratched the surface with what's possible using forms like that but I knew I'd tasted something profound. The next tweet is a reflection I sent to @planetaryperson later that day (which I'll unpack for this thread in the following tweets)
I think these money dialogues reveal something really important though about actually trying to solve your needs. Somehow doing that together feels like a way different endeavor than trying to figure out if it's okay to spend money you have solving needs you have.
Human sensemaking naturally occurs in conversation, for better and for worse. When we make decisions, including what to spend our money on, we're tracking what our friends will think of it. This can be neurotic, but ideally it's a source of collective wisdom!
So one thing that's happening here is that people are voting with their money for someone to get a new laptop. This is clarifying in terms of priority! It hits different when your friends are like "no, definitely get a new laptop!"
Sometimes ofc, people also need no-strings-attached support—money that's not earmarked for something in particular. That can also happen using dialogues like this, but it's a more advanced challenge (afaict!) than when there are concrete problems to tackle together.
I feel like I'm struggling to articulate what I really want to say here 🤔
There's a kind of space of humility, that I've found when I talk to my friends about money. We all kind of agree we don't really know how it works and we're all trying to figure out how to deploy it sanely.
There's also a kind of space of humility around our needs. I have a sense of what my life would benefit from having, and I'm ultimately the final arbiter on whether something works for me, but maybe my friends can conceive of a more beautiful solution to my situation than I can!
We're all trying to figure out how to make it all work, from our own vantage points. Eventually it needs to bottom out in paying for energy—both food & electricity. But that doesn't mean it's wrong to make art, or force-multipliers such as @CompliceGoals.
As I pause to jam to Taylor's Version on "the ukulele my dad got me for my birthday as covid started", I'm thinking about how my relatives have lately taken to giving me cash gifts, and how I've been trying to "spend it" on something I might not have bought otherwise & tell them.
The money itself is fungible, but it feels good for the ukulele to not just be "this random thing I bought"
In summary, buying each other gifts is how we relate to our resource flows in a less alienated way, how we help each other prioritize, and how we encourage each other to actually buy things that will help us pursue our dreams but that we've been nervous to take the plunge on.