The Payments, Commerce (And Golden Toilet) Utopia Is Upon Us

The denizens of Silicon Valley are occasionally accused of being utopians, particularly when it comes to the transformative power of innovations and technology.

It’s not an entirely unfair label. The last few years have seen people of the biggest and brightest names in Silicon Valley trying to use their considerable know-how to use tech to engineer a better world.

Elon Musk is simultaneously trying save mankind from the scourge of fossil fuels and (in case that doesn’t work out) colonize Mars. Peter Thiel is a founding investor in a manmade island that aims to be a libertarian utopia in international waters. PayPal CEO Dan Schulman believes that one of PayPal’s most important use cases will be to finally bridge the gap between the banked and unbanked worldwide by democratizing money. Jeff Bezos is also exploring space — he’s not as of yet colonizing Mars, though we assume he has a plan for two-day inter-solar system Prime delivery once Musk gets the first colony up and running. Mark Zuckerberg has decided to fund a project using his vast fortune by building a better world for his daughter’s generation. And some even suggest that he might be running for president when he’s first old enough to in 2020.

No joke.

He recently renounced his atheism (over 40 percent of Americans will not vote for an atheist), had Facebook’s board vote to allow him to maintain control of the firm even if he left for an extended leave to work for the government and made his New Year’s resolution to go on a 50-state listening tour so that he can meet Americans from all walks of life.

And even if one wants to look past the various crusading and utopian projects of the tip-top talent in the Valley, there is the annual spectacle/social experiment/technotopian party on the Playa that is Burning Man. Every year, between coverage of the art exhibits, public nudity, heroic drug abuse and conspicuous consumption of the most elite attendees, at least 30 think pieces are written about how Burning Man is the ideal vision of the Silicon Valley utopia — or the ultimate perversion of it.

Burning Man has been around for two decades — the concept of utopia, on the other hand, is celebrating its 500th year this month. The term was first coined by Sir Thomas More, a Renaissance lawyer and thinker who served as England’s High Chancellor until he and King Henry VIII had a disagreement about England’s religious future, which the king resolved by beheading him.

But before King Henry’s first divorce ended with More’s head and shoulders becoming permanently estranged, More penned Utopia — about the political system of an imaginary ideal island nation.

Much has been made about how much More liked his idealized island nation — and how much he was satirizing it as a concept. The word utopia itself is actually a pun, a combination of the Greek words for “a good place” and “no place.”

We found ourselves thinking about More’s Utopia this week — and how our various payments and commerce innovators, that bold crop of Utopian futurists, would like living in the original edition as imagined by Thomas More.

Some of it, like the fact that it was basically a communist society, probably wouldn’t have much appeal to even the leftist-leaning Silicon Valley millionaire or billionaire. Even Mark Zuckerberg is redistributing his wealth fairly slowly. But some of it not only would sound appealing, it would sound downright familiar. In those cases, it seems like we are a little bit already living in More’s Utopia.

The Utopian Problem For Payments

For those who’ve read Utopia, on its face it looks like a pretty dark place for the payments and commerce innovators we write about day in and day out because there is no money or commerce. In More’s Utopia, people work nine hours a day and have all their food and drink brought to them by farmers, who also are not compensated with anything but the gratitude of their fellow citizens. Housing is reassigned every decade by lottery, and the state distributes everything.

More’s Utopia is probably also a pretty apt description of libertarian Peter Thiel’s perfect vision of hell. And libertarians have a good historical line about why this kind of utopia won’t work out — people, when provided for free, don’t strive, innovate or work particularly hard.

But while all of society is probably not looking to jump on the radical redistribution train, the clever payments and commerce innovation watcher would note that while we are still paying the farmers for the food and demanding to be reasonably compensated for our “nine hours a day” of labor — in fact, much is given away for free in the technotopia. And in fact, giving out the tools and relying on people to do the labor out of desire instead of want for pay is kind of the common backbone of a lot of the new digital economy powered by mobile.

Much Given, Much Created

Google, Facebook, Snapchat, PayPal, Venmo, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest: What do they all have in common other than their uncanny ability to sap up one’s workday productivity? They’re free for their users — all those users have to do is show up and use them whenever they want.

Which their users do — now with tiny supercomputers in their pockets — day in and day out — and also for free. Those digitals every day create millions upon billions of Facebook posts, Snapchats, Pins, Instagrams, Tumblrs and P2P payments, and searches are created and feed into the vast petrobites of data that those companies (plus a few score more we didn’t list) use to actually make their money.

The workers are supplied the tools, and they bring home the digital harvest that makes the entire ecosystem of tools work.

Pretty much More’s Utopia in action, except there are also Amazon and money, so at the end of all of that positive contributing, one can reward themselves with a pair of shoes.

Stranger Similarities

There are, of course, some very mainstream similarities that indicate we live in a version of More’s Utopia. In the age of kings, More described more or less representative democracy. At a time that people (More included) were burning heretics at the stake, the author was writing about a utopia where religious freedom was the norm. At a point in history where women had slightly more rights than horses, More’s Utopia made the minimum marriage age 18 and gave women the right to divorce.

All of these things have gone from being radical suggestions about a possible future social order and what most of us expect from day-to-day life.

Then there are the stranger similarities.

For example, in More’s Utopia, because they are a wealthless society, children’s toys are festooned with gold and jewels, and toilets are made of precious materials.

Silly, right?

Consider the number of iPads, Kindle Fires, laptops, smartphones and all make and manner of high-end electronics that were just given to our nation’s children for Christmas. All of those devices include a host of precious metals — in small amounts — but that doesn’t change the fact that they are used to festoon our children’s (and our) toys.

And though individual amounts are small, it adds up: The EPA estimates that recycled smartphones contain about 35,274 pounds of copper, 772 pound of silver, 75 pounds of gold and 33 pounds of palladium. Also according to the EPA, Americans actually throw away $60 million in gold and silver annually by tossing their cell phones.

And then, there are the gold toilets. Granted, those are not the norm and probably never will be. Though there were rumors that President-Elect Trump is the proud owner of a golden commode, some quick Snopes research indicates that, in fact, Trump’s taste for gilded decor is not quite that extreme.

So, it’s not quite Thomas More’s Utopia, but it may be the better (more tasteful) parts.