The year is 2142.

We’re sitting in the publicly open pop-up space and everyone is excited to see the results of the vote coming through… We’ve all seen the data, heard the different perspectives, and placed our votes through our Citizen Stakeholder Stock (aka the Citizen Stake Stock or CSS in short). And yeah, it’s exactly what it sounds like: as an Earth Citizen you are inherently a Stakeholder of the ecosystemic development of the planet. And as a relic from a distant past, where voting happened based on the size of your wallet, the word stock lingered as a memory celebrating how humans were able to come together and create a trojan vehicle that changed the capitalistic systems from within (just) before it was too late.

Back to the campus park; A sense of opportunity and empowerment fills the spring air. It’s not going to take long to see the vote results, resource allocation and regenerative return of investment come through. Because it’s all a completely direct system (representative systems were tried in the past and they proved very inefficient with crazy “overhead costs” that became candy bags for corruption). The Citizen Stake Stock enables earthlings to 1: Vote directly, 2: Invest a free amount of digital currency to chosen regenerative system, and 3: Reap the financial, environmental and social net positive benefits from them (returns required to “sustain” the system are always kept within the system, since products and services that exploited the underlying ecosystem a century or so ago caused the biggest mass extinction in planetary history, making the collapse of the dinosaurs seem pale in comparison). So, considering the climate catastrophe mess the previous generations left us with, all regenerative systems are climate change reversing and resilient as a base (so they can both reverse the mess we’re in, and be resilient in coping with the ongoing roller coaster effects).

0,2 seconds later; The Decision and Vote is done! It’s a tie! The blockchain 3.0 clearly and transparently shows how “REEL version 5.0 (REgional Electrified Logistics)”, “Min Max Modules”, and “Solar Exoskeleton Batteries” got 33.3333333% of the vote each. All will be pursued. So nice to not have to deal with the polarity and conflicts of the past where the bizarre phenomenon of political parties tried to suck up and centralize power and resources to themselves, mostly by black painting their opponents with little traces of facts or science. Some old stories tell sagas of how centralization of power and manipulation of finite natural resources (especially oil and gas) brought the planet on the brink of a third world war. Simply because of a few people controlling (or trying to control…) all power, and how that led to ever widening gaps of resources and inequalities. Thank Us (a new version of the expression “Thank God”) that those days are gone. Now power and resources are decentralized, co-owned and co-developed organically, or (r)evolutionary as most earthlings like to say. All through the neat Citizen Stake Stock :)

When the SDG targets were not achieved in 2030, there was a shift. For the first 5 years after crossing the 2 degree threshold, there was a state of dystopia with countries blaming each other and competing in a race to the bottom - to zero emissions at the cost of happiness. The path forward was one of deprivation to halt the climate devastation, but 1825 days of cold showers and an inability to travel to see loved ones forced the need for an alternative reality and finally a common calling for earthlings to shift from competitors to collaborators.

So, Where does the money come from? Some loud laughter from the background cuts through the noise of conversations. People of all ages and backgrounds are Playing to Earn. Claiming their UBI (Universal Basic Income), driven through harnessing the inherent value in humans and human ingenuity (an interspecies vote and UBI system is also under development, but let’s park that story for now).

The crazy idea of locking humans into work factories (the really dangerous ones being called “offices”, luring people in with shiny stuff) where robots can do their work better, or educational systems financed by student loans that put people in debt to do academic exercises to figure out predetermined answers with little real impact are “thank us” also long gone. Instead, recognizing time and human ingenuity are the most scarce and precious resources (in exponential times of development, every second mathematically becomes more and more valuable) - the historic debt system was instead turned into the base for UBI; people were invited to play and learn to earn. Through this, people could stay up to date with the latest developments, be informed and active citizens in co-creating the regenerative solutions going forward. The more insights cultivated through play and learn - the more effective systems could be developed, with higher ROI and thus increased UBI. A so called Win-Win-Win system, in contrast to the strange Zero Sum Game that used to rule the world; the idea that fictional finite markets were more real than finite planetary resources, inevitably leading to exploitation of human and natural resources. This is why it was such a stroke of genius (or madness, depends who you ask) that some earth citizens stopped fighting the capitalistic system head on, and instead built a trojan financial and democratic vehicle through which co-created regenerative system simply outperformed most other single company stocks on the market. And in doing so unlocked (not imposed!) the biggest reallocation of resources and power yet. Because at the end of the day, that was the root cause problem of the past; There was no strong alignment of incentives, where all could stand to benefit from reversing climate change in a capitalistic system. That is why the Citizen Stake Stock was built. And how it nudged the course of history...