pART iii
As soon as I got out of bed, Ynkö led me through one of the many corridors surrounding the Hall of Singularity, leading us to a modest anteroom. The room had a wooden table with a glass top and two padded chairs, besides another door that looked like an exit.
As soon as we entered, I noticed a shiny object in the center of the table. At first glance it resembled a smartphone, but unlike the ones I already knew, this one had its finish in a beautiful black marble.
“This is a tokenpad. We believe this is the best way for someone from your Age to start,” said Ynkö.
When I picked up the device, I felt a mixture of admiration and perplexity. What I thought was marble actually turned out to be like a very light textured carbon fiber, extremely robust. The screen in turn appeared to be glass, but responded to the touch with a soft and somewhat moist feel, and even with the passing of the fingers it remained always clean and crystalline.
When I asked myself where the turn button would be, the tokenpad anticipated and woke up on its own, emitting a discreet graphite light that filled the entire screen. On the illuminated background emerged a minimalist interface, in which the available apps presented themselves one by one, in short introductory animations.
I immediately recognized some traditional tools of my Age, such as GPS, messaging, voice communication, calendar, and also the personal diary in which I began to record these experiences.
The last application to be presented was “Tutorials". Curious, I opened the application and found that it presented only one option, called "Tutorials of the Applicant of the First Age - #1 - Keep Calm and Open Your Mind".
I was about to start spying on the tutorial when Ynkö interrupted me, asking me to open an app called "Wallet". I thought it was strange, but when I answered the request of my newest friend, I had the grateful surprise to see that my wallet was not empty!
The app featured several different acronyms, each accompanied by a number indicating its respective amount. The list was so large that I had to scroll a few times until I found the ending.
“What is all this? Money?” I had to ask.
“Not exactly, Namascoin. These are tokens, they are part of everything and are everywhere. I know there are a lot, but initially I want to show you just a few that, not by chance, are very similar to what you think about money. Filter your list by ‘utility token’.”
I looked back at the tokenpad screen and found the classic magnifying glass button. I pressed the button waiting for a keyboard to appear, but instead, the button just glowed under the outline of my finger.
“And now, are you going to tell me that I just need to speak?” I asked excited.
“Better than that... you just need to think.”
I was wondering if it was a joke, but as it was worth trying, I kept the button pressed and thought of the words "utility token". The result was instantaneous and astonishing, with the apparatus highlighting a small set of acronyms.
“How is that possible, Ynkö?” I babbled.
“It is not so simple, but for now let’s consider that the tokenpad understands what you feel and think.”
I looked suspicious at the device that was in my hands, where only three tokens appeared now: BED, FOOD and SELF.
According to Ynkö, this was the basic wallet for any Applicant. The tokens were used to cover accommodation costs (BED), food (FOOD) and personal expenses (SELF). In fact, they looked a lot like money, but each one could only be used for purchases of its own category.
Next to each of these tokens, however, there was an observation that made me curious:
“Ynkö, what does this mean: ‘renewable’?”
“That’s exactly what it says it is, Namascoin. The amount of BED and FOOD tokens is renewed every day, and SELF tokens every week. This way, during your stay with us, you will always have something to eat, somewhere to sleep, and something to do.”
‘Renewable money’ was a strange concept: waking up with the same amount in the wallet, every day, but not being able to accumulate it from one day to the next… or every week, or month or so. The more I thought about it, the more I came to a conclusion.
“Is it just me, or does it look a lot like —”
“Like a basic income program!” Ynkö exclaimed, interrupting me.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought. I just didn’t understand why money was provided — in fact, tokens — in a renewable way like that. It seemed to me that the system would cause a lot of waste.
“What happens to tokens that are not spent before their renewal?” I asked.
“It’s simple. They expire, which means they will be drawn from your wallet and transferred to social funds.”
It was very strange; I had second thoughts about that "money" being mine after all. Right away, I came to think of a criticism that I made a point of sharing:
“But Ynkö, this seems to me an encouragement of consumerism! Think with me... since you can’t accumulate tokens overnight or over the week, you’d better spend everything, all the time, to avoid losing anything.”
My young friend found the reasoning very curious:
“‘To spend everything, all the time, to avoid losing anything’... wow, that is so First Age!”
I confess that when I heard the phrase back it sounded really odd; in reality I spoke it without thinking.
“Remember that expired tokens are not destroyed, but transferred to social funds. Half of them go back to the ‘Keep Cool’ program, which maintains our universal basic income, and half go back to the ‘Got Your Back’ program, a response fund for major disasters,” — Ynkö elaborated.
"Got Your Back " was in fact called "Universa Veraque", a fund naturally fed by the excess of wealth available in times of prosperity, and that served the purpose of ensuring enough resources to mitigate the effects of disasters and calamities, in difficult times.
Also, the "Keep Cool" program was actually the nickname for the "Fide Liberta Veri" fund, which, unlike what I imagined for a basic income system, offered different income plans where each individual could choose — that’s right, choose — a preferred one, depending on your age and the lifestyle you wish to adopt.
By then the explanation was incredible, but it was not yet finished.
“It turns out that when citizens engage in paid activities, whose income is cumulative, they still continue to receive the basic income of their choice. In those cases, it is common that they let their renewable tokens expire whenever possible, thus collaborating with the strengthening of society,” Ynkö explained.
He then paused for a while, before concluding: "What you see as individual loss; we see as collective enrichment."
This was a stark contrast to the reality I was used to. I thought to myself that, although I could consider myself "free", the truth is that I’ve always felt continually forced to work and to live in agony. I ended up thinking about all the inequality of my time, and it occurred to me that several of the "great minds" of the First Age would see Ynkö’s explanation with a very different bias.
“Ynkö, I don’t know how things are around here, but some people in my Age would say that you are communists, and that it’s not a good thing.”
“Communists? Have you ever seen a communist system where people can choose to live the way they prefer, and still earn a basic income specially designed for that?” he answered.
It was hard to question the young counselor’s line of reasoning. Given my obvious limitations in that area, the next question was even more predictable:
“So, you are capitalists?”
Ynkö sketched visible disgust. Theatrically, he brought his left hand to the top of the forehead, in an exaggerated facepalm.
“What you understand as your ‘capitalism’ we now study as ‘Cumulative Competitive Capitalosis’, a gloomy term that can be attributed to both the serious collective mental illness that plagues your time and the obsolete economic system derived from it.
“Wow... but then what are you?” I asked.
“We are what we are, each in oneself, and all in the whole. You will eventually understand this, one day, but in order not to remain unanswered until then, here is a didactic simplification: we are humanists and decentralists; the first because it is right, and the second because it is the most efficient way to achieve the first.”
That was one of the few times I felt some sense of familiarity.
“Ah, yes... I know what ‘humanism’ is!” I exclaimed, happily.
The feeling, however, did not last long. It was enough to look at Ynkö’s expression and listen to his answer.
“That is the problem with oversimplification. What we are calling ‘humanism’ here is not just a set of principles that can be obtained through a book, but rather the very comprehension of what makes us ‘human’, considering all possible and different dimensions.
“Perhaps I don't know what it is, after all…” I thought out loud.
Ynkö then took a short dramatic pause, and proceeded with a solemn performance:
“As my friend Hiann would say: ‘It is the vision that guides our steps towards the unknown, but that doesn’t cease to evolve with us once we get there.’"
I could feel a lot of security and authority in Ynkö, which was surprising for someone so young. As he kept speaking, the startling abyss between the humanity I knew and the one I was beginning to know just continued to grow.
It was only then that an extremely curious question occurred to me:
“Say Ynkö, how much exactly did I travel into the future?”
