This has been my favorite response so far. It explains nothing, but the mental image is priceless.

I’m glad someone else asked this question.

I haven’t had any tears. Hard to say whether it’s my VCR or the tapes doing the jamming. I’m not very tech savvy, and I was a kid when these were all in use so I haven’t learned how to fix these things. When something doesn’t work right, I usually just take the top off the VCR and wiggle a part, and all goes smoothly after that.

What is a fiat currency?

Oh, I just looked it up. So it’s the USD.

These are great, but they don’t explain what a crypto coin actually is.

I still own a VCR and a vast collection of VHS tapes. I mean, I also pay for streaming services, but without the old 90s commercials for Disney World and previews for movies that were released in 1995, the movies just don’t hit the same.

But what you said there is literally the end of my understanding of what crypto is. It has something to do with computers solving math problems, and somehow that’s worth money.

What?

It’s an interesting thought experiment!

We can just look to indigenous cultures for this. They’ve been doing it for tens of thousands of years before being colonized. Like, indigenous Australian cultures sustained themselves for 60k-100k years without ruining their environment while also living in commune-type societies. Native North/South Americans did it too. We can hand off our kids to untouched/minimally touched cultures to learn how to relate to the environment and each other. There will always be human conflict. It’s how we handle that conflict that we need to learn again, and how to appropriately handle conflict needs to be retaught by those who know how to do it.

Communes (and my run-away-to-the-forest idea above) will never work without the proper cultural education and social rules to prevent that kind of behavior. To relearn how to build a socially sustainable culture, we should look to cultures that have been around for thousands of years and have done it successfully. It would be a really hard transition because it requires a complete restructuring of how we view other people and how we relate to them. Which, honestly, I think we should be doing anyway, commune or not.

This is going to sound out of left field, and I do understand that, but I’m legitimately ready to go learn how to forage year round, build mobile tents out of natural materials, and live in a small band of 10-30 like evolution intended. Let’s pool our resources to buy land back from the idiots who are enslaving us and fuck off into the forest to live a genuinely free existence.

Civilization was a mistake.