In this excerpt, Richard D. Bartlett reflects on the work of the Inspiral community—a roughly 200‑person, invite‑only collective that experiments with new organisational, accounting, and legal structures. He acknowledges the appeal of novel accounting systems (contributive, flow accounting) and alternative legal forms, but stresses that the real bottleneck is relational: maintaining open, safe communication, handling conflict, and making decisions efficiently without descending into chaos. Bartlett describes a concrete practice the community uses—a “warm currency” system where members who earn high market wages voluntarily share a fraction of their income, which is then redistributed internally according to the community’s own values, thereby challenging the market’s arbitrary valuation of work. He cautions against the temptation to blame external structures alone for societal problems, urging personal responsibility and immediate behavioural experiments that can pre‑figure new structures. Ultimately, he argues that commitment, shared purpose, and willingness to experiment can achieve progress even with simple tools like spreadsheets, while the biggest challenges remain relational rather than legal or technological.
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I can pick up on that. Thanks, Michelle. I was just thinking about Inspiral, where we've had a community of— it fluctuates, but around 200 people doing a lot of experimentation with different forms of organisation and really trying to do a kind of community that's engaged in business and trying to do a kind of business that's engaged in community. And I take your point, Rachael, about structure, that behavior is kind of downstream of structure in a sense, and that metaphor of we drive on the paved roads, I mean, I think that's really helpful. And I'm hearing, Michelle, you're talking about these different innovations in accounting, and I think all of those are useful, pieces of the puzzle, but there's a part of me which is a bit unsettled because it's very easy to, you know, when we look at the state of the world and how it's not the way that we would like it to be, it's very easy to come to this conclusion like, oh, if we only had these other structures, then we wouldn't have a problem anymore. And you can kind of bypass your own personal responsibility in the situation by saying, oh, we just, you know, the problem is we've got these capitalist things and these kinds of accounting things that come from a really horrible old set of values which don't suit us anymore, and if we just could change that, then we'd have a different way of being. It's a little bit of almost like a Judeo-Christian wish, you know, that we'll go to the afterlife and things will be good after some kind of threshold that we're going to cross. And my instinct is always to pull it back into the personal and into the immediate and into like, yeah, what do I actually have an influence over and what choices can I make now? And not just me as an individual, but me in relationship and community and like what kind of new behaviors can we experiment with that might prefigure some new structures? And I guess, yeah, I'm kind of biased on this. I always find myself coming into these conversations and kind of leaning heavily one way, which is like, I'm glad that there are people experimenting with new contributive accounting and flow accounting and these sorts of things, and new legal structures, certainly we need those. But in my experimentation that we've done with Inspiral over the last decade or so, surely we've hit limits where we go, ah yes, we're lacking a piece of technology, we're lacking a piece of legal structure, an accounting system is not there. But for me, when the will is there, when the commitment to some kind of shared purpose and shared vision and the willingness to experiment and to learn together, we really made a lot of progress just using spreadsheets and agreements, not having something formal that's really robust, but the willingness to try things out. So we've done a ton of experimentation with— I think one good example is thinking about how for the people within our community, which is a reasonably exclusive invite-only community, we've got some complaints about how the world works. And one of the complaints is the way that value is accounted for out in the world and that it's quite arbitrary that someone who happens to know a programming language can earn $1,000 a day and someone who is a caretaker earns almost nothing or maybe earns nothing. Their work isn't classed as something that gets a wage. And so our little adjustment to that internally, kind of like you say, the warm currency on the inside is that people who are out there in the marketplace earning a lot of money, they'll choose some fraction of their income to share with the collective., and then we do some redistribution inside of the collective where we say, well, within this boundary, our values are different. And it doesn't reflect the values of the marketplace, it reflects the local values of us here, and we'll decide how we're going to redistribute this money to each other. And those experimentation that has been extremely fruitful, and the obstacle or the shortcoming has not been legal, it's not been technological, it's been relational. It's been about, well, how do you actually keep that communication flow open and safe, and what happens when conflict arises, and how do we do engaged decision-making without spending forever in meetings, and how do we evolve and make adjustments and still have things predictable without it being a bit chaos-like.
