In the bright and shiny world of tomorrow, the sci-fi utopia of our dreams, every human on Earth has food to eat, clean water to drink, and a safe place to sleep. People are free to roam the planet, fall in love, and pursue the things that bring them joy. At least until the alien virus arrives and turns everyone into shapeshifters.

But I’ve been wondering for a while now… the stuff before the alien virus part, the part where basic needs are accounted for… is that really such a far-flung, starry-eyed ambition? It seems like food, water and shelter are some pretty meager standards for a species that’s figured out how to put a remote-control helicopter on Mars.

Have we seriously not worked out a way to make sure every squirmy, wailing baby who gets born into this crazy world has access to the resources it requires to not die? Ever since we split off from our monkey ancestors over 7 million years ago, humans have been strutting around this planet like we own the place, evolving tools and systems to tackle every conceivable challenge. During all that time, was it really too much trouble to figure out a way to make sure everyone can at least get a banana??

What’s our excuse again? Is there really not enough food and water to go around? Food literally grows on trees. Water falls out of the sky onto our heads. And don’t tell me there’s not enough junk lying around to make houses out of. Abundance abounds. The world contains everything in the world, including all the empty pockets and the stuff it would to take to make them not empty. The world may not owe you a living, but it can certainly afford it.

The only real problem, as far as I can tell, is that the stuff isn’t always where it needs to be. Nomadic tribes used to wander around going wherever the stuff was. According to National Geographic, they were actually pretty good at keeping each person properly nourished, even the babies and old people. If there was scarcity, it meant it was time to move elsewhere. It was only later, when someone decided to grow crops, that we realized we could spend less time walking around and more time arguing over who has the nicer shoes.

But ok – we at least figured out how to translate physical resources into money, which made it so a person could carry the value of a banana without having to carry the actual banana. This allowed trade to flourish and generally kept wallets and purses from getting all mooshy.

We even figured out how to electronify the money, to the point where the banana-value could be transferred from one place to another through invisible wires at the speed of light. Now we can trade it, spend it, lend it, invest it, Paypal it, or convert it to virtual in-game credits to acquire the Moonstone Ultra-Throne and prove to the guild, once and for all, who truly rules the realm of Pathetica.

So… we’re cool, right? There’s enough food, water and shelter to go around, their value has been converted to money — a material that’s indistinguishable from imagination — the money can flow freely through naturally-occurring channels and can be redeemed, when convenient, for the required resources. Everybody good? Now we can play?

Those who are quick to turn a blind heart might have you think so, but the rest of us can see very plainly that most lives are still spent pursuing the necessities of survival. And underneath even the loftiest life goals, lies the gnawing concern that the rent won’t be paid and that maybe you should have waited until the next paycheck to buy that accordion that will launch you into YouTube stardom.

If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that this whole civilization thing we got going — this system of systems that took us from hunting and gathering to getting nachos delivered by Doordash and sending the driver back to the restaurant because he forgot the sour cream — it’s maybe not as rock-solid as we thought.

As most of us have suspected, staying nourished and sheltered is not just a simple matter of going to school, getting a job, and saving for retirement. That strategy has worked okay-ish for some people, but as soon as one twist of fate gets in the way, the whole plan falls apart. One minute, you’ve got a conference room booked at the Courtyard Marriott for your money-management seminar, and one microscopic germ later, you’re stuck at home getting texts saying: “Don’t cry it’ll be ok. btw – still waiting on that refund.” We’ve discovered the hard way, that most of us are only one sneeze away from financial ruin.

But the germs have also reminded us of something equally important: That we can coordinate our behavior on a large scale without wearing matching uniforms. Most of us are not social-distancing and wearing masks to avoid jail time or Instagram-shaming. We’re doing it to mitigate the otherwise devastating consequences of letting a virus run rampant through our species. We’re coming to understand that how we function as an interconnected macro-organism has a direct effect on our own lungs’ ability to oxygenate blood. Your physical health is being decided by the behavior of strangers — some of whom you wouldn’t be friends with even if your summer camp counselor forced you to perform a skit together.

With all this in mind, I got to wondering, while stranded on the lifeboat of a dwindling savings account, adrift in a sea of “unprecedented times,” is there anything we can do to paddle to the shores of a future that’s closer to the utopia of our dreams? Or one that’s at least — I don’t know — a little less sucky?

I had this idea, a while back. for a web app called Comingle that could help people combine a portion of their incomes to make sure everyone’s basic bills got paid — a network in which the collective cost of things like water, electricity and internet could be distributed across a population. People would agree to give a little money when they have it to make sure everyone has money when they need it. Whenever I shared this idea with people who are smarter than me, the feedback seemed to be: “It’s so crazy, it just might work.” Which to me, are words that call for action.

Over the past year, finding myself free from such distractions as “leaving the house” and “seeing people’s mouths,” I resisted the urge to learn how to make naan bread on a space heater, and instead poured as much time and energy as I could into the idea of a tech-driven solution to income scarcity by starting it up as a startup.

For the hardcore programming, I got in touch with Paul Barros, a wise and talented backend engineer who I had worked with previously on a number of professional projects. He jumped on board and got to work setting up the infrastructure that could support the idea, while I further refined the design and business strategy.

Along the way, we discovered other people who had been thinking in similar terms like Sage Cammers-Goodwin, Ryan Harrison, and the good folks at Group Income. We explored the possibilities presented by cryptocurrencies. We connected with people like Stacey Rutland and Scott Santens who’ve been calling out for Universal Basic Income. Of particular interest was UBI proponent Conrad Shaw, who had built a thing called the UBI calculator, an online tool that can very quickly determine the economic impact of various UBI policies. He helped us re-shape the bill-focused approach we began with, into a simplified, income-oriented calculation that could achieve the same results with a two line formula. After that, Comingle’s potential became so apparent that he joined the effort as a co-founder.

Conrad brought with him a wealth of other knowledge, including documentary evidence that having extra money is actually good for people (a concept that is, for some reason, quite controversial.) He and filmmaker Deia Schlosberg had finished a project called Bootstraps, in which they raised the funds to give an extra $250 a week to 21 people around the country, then filmed how it affected their lives. (Spoiler: It helped!)

The insights we’ve gathered during this deep-dive into the many efforts to alleviate scarcity have given me reason to believe that the futuristic dream of a shiny world where everyone’s doing ok — it’s maybe not such a dream after all. A meaningful, widespread change in how we manage our collective resources is a necessity we can actually get started on right now.

When it comes to systemic change, the general consensus seems to be that there is no general consensus. There’s massive disagreement on even the most basic questions: Does the change need to happen all at once or will it require generations? Should it be led by the government or is government the problem? Should we take to the streets, or just post a few Facebook comments?

But when you step back and look at the problem with the eyes of a nerdy, detached observer — the kind of person that others “forget” to invite to the Zoom happy hour — it becomes obvious that what we’re dealing with is optimizing the distribution of resources across nodes of a dynamic network. (aka: Getting money to where it’s needed the most.) A dynamic network model can be used to analyze things like the spread of viruses, the survival of forests, and even the human brain. Optimizing resource distribution also happens to be something that super-computers like the one you’re looking at are quite good at.

And when we combine our techno-brains with a little design thinking, a bit of high-school math, and basic human kindness, we can raise the minimum amount of money allocated to each member of our advanced society to a number that is, at the very least, always above zero.

Besides a handful of loud, crappy people, I think it’s safe to say most of us would prefer to live in that shiny world where you and/or the people you share it with are thriving instead of struggling. Whether you’re a kid scraping by on the streets, or a billionaire in a private submarine, that vision of a world without scarcity has crossed your mind at some point. It’s a concept that’s been with us since we’ve been human and it seems like now is as good a time as any to start tinkering with it. 

Head over to the Comingle website if you’re interested in learning more about the project. You can sign up for updates or drop us a line if you’d like to help in some way.