Dissentertainment

Weird economists of the world unite! 

The External Revenue Service is bringing together smart people doing weird things with money to talk about the future.

About the summit

Crowdfunding. Bitcoin. The sharing economy. Microfinance. An inn in Maine for $125. The world of money has gotten distinctly weird. To introduce its system of peer-to-peer taxation to the world and celebrate this new era of technological and financial biodiversity, the External Revenue Service is assembling thinkers, makers, and doers turning traditional financial models on their heads for a day of lectures and discussions on the intersection of creativity, capitalism, and the common good.

The Summit is tentatively scheduled to take place in New York City in mid-September 2015.

How you can get involved

Be a financial backer: I am running a Kickstarter campaign through July 18 and I need your help to get the Summit funded. Kickstarter backers have first crack at tickets to the Summit and External Revenue Service membership and will receive updates on location, date, speakers and topics as they are announced this summer. Back the project >>

Be an advisor: If you know of someone who would make a great speaker, feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

Be a megaphone: The world is wide and full of weird economists, but I don’t know all of their hiding places. Spread the word about this campaign and help me fill the room with tinkerers, hackers, entrepreneurs, designers, technologists, activists, Occupy refugees, libertarians, microphilanthropists, and other people who will pay a little more to make the world a lot better. 

About the External Revenue Service

The External Revenue Service is the world's first and only peer-to-peer tax system. External Revenue Service members pledge a percentage of their annual income to a portfolio of people, organizations, and causes that they care about most, and recipient members receive monthly contributions from the members who have elected to be taxed by them.

If you are interested in following along with the External Revenue Service as it comes into being, subscribe to the ERS newsletter at tinyletter.com/ers.

In the past few years I have found myself wearing a costume that I’m not used to. It’s the costume of the Professional Office Person, and I’ll admit, it comes with some pretty nice accessories. One is called health insurance, but the other is called wealth. Not excessive wealth. Not I’m-on-a-boat wealth. Not even NYC wealth. But as someone who grew up in a working class household and spent the last 10+ years in New York grinding out an artistic life, arriving in a place of plenty feels like wealth, particularly when I look around and see so many of my friends still struggling to get by.

I have often wished for a mechanism where those who feel like they have more than enough could easily share a set percentage of their income with other people and causes that they care about. My Brooklyn Commune Project collaborators heard me rant about this often in the form of the “artist’s tithe” (my parents were big on tithing) or radical generosity, but it boils down to my belief that generosity is both contagious and addictive and that building tools to make philanthropy and fundraising easier for both givers and receivers can help reverse the culture of greed that dominates our culture.

This month I am fortunate enough to be working with the good folks at Orbital NYC to help me develop these ideas further and begin to transform them into a concrete project which I am calling the External Revenue Service.

The External Revenue Service is a peer-to-peer tax service made of up of a community of givers who elect to tax themselves at a certain percentage of income and redistribute it to other members of the community each month. Part civic design and part technology project, it is also a way to transform my Professional Office Person costume into a form of bureaucratic drag* to protest against the kind of drag (as in friction) that the IRS and other bureaucracies create for nonprofits and individuals who are trying to make the world better.

If you are interested in learning more about the External Revenue Service as it comes into being, subscribe to the ERS newsletter at tinyletter.com/ers.