<nettime> The Money Tree

[Julian Dibbell <julian@mostly.com>]

With apologies to the Swedish stock-picking yucca, here is my proposal
for a money-growing tree, written in response to Feed Magazine's recent
call for "ideal inventions of the future." (For other "Dream Machines,"
including Doug Rushkoff's inspired inner-truth detector, check out
http://www.feedmag.com/invent/dreaminvent.html )


The Money Tree
I'd like to see money grow on trees. Here's how it might work:

You would buy your money tree at a licensed nursery or other financial
institution. You could pot it and stand it in a sunlit hall, or you
could plant it in the backyard, as space and landscaping plans allowed.
A money tree would be an intricate and lovely thing.

The product of intense genetic engineering, the tree would bear fruit
according to precise, chemically coded commands released from a sealed
plant-food box buried in the midst of its root system. The box would
have a network connection to your bank, which would fund the tree at
your request by transferring money from your account to the food box. A
logic chip inside the box would translate dollar amounts into plant-food
doses, stimulating the tree to produce fruit proportionate in total
biomass to the money vested in it.

Once harvested, the fruit could be taken to any nearby genetic-assay
machine (found in bank lobbies, supermarket produce sections, etc.),
which would pulp it, analyze it for DNA markers identifying it as a
financial instrument backed by your bank, and convert it back into cash.
Seedless and difficult to clone, the fruit could also be offered
directly to others in exchange for goods and services. It would be legal
tender for all debts, public and private. It would be money, and it
would grow on trees.

The money tree would also be an investment, of sorts. Food doses would
be calculated so that the value of the fruit when ripe would, with any
luck, exceed the amount transferred into the tree earlier in the year,
perhaps by as much as eight percent annualized. Typically, though,
weeds, bugs, birds, bad weather, or the like would limit returns to four
or five percent (tree bankers would make their cut on the spread between
the maximum possible return and the average actual return). Also, you'd
probably want to buy the bank's insurance against blight, fruit
rustlers, and other such catastrophes, thus further cutting into your
upside.

As an investment, therefore, the money tree would be no great shakes. As
a status symbol, however, it would shine. Its fruit would have a
distinctive look -- I imagine a smooth, intensely glossy skin, colored
in deep, mottled greens and yellows, with variations in hue and shape
depending on the denomination. There would be no mistaking a $100-a-gram
tree (commonly known as a Benjamin tree) from its $10-a-gram cousin
(Monetaria sawbuckus), and of course it would be 10 times as beautiful
to behold.

The tree would thus instantly project its owner's wealth, but more than
that, it would project a stylishly organic relationship to that wealth.
In an age at last grown weary with the increasing speed and abstraction
of its money, the money tree would symbolize patient investment in
things of concrete, human value. It would stand in contradiction to the
usual connotations of money growing on trees, suggesting instead that
money does not come easy -- that its growth requires thoughtful
nurturing, daily care, and a thorough grounding in the earthy realities
of physical existence. It would be especially popular with derivatives
traders, software moguls, and others whose wealth in fact rests entirely
on electronic blips and lightning-fast turnarounds.

The money tree would be a great conversation piece. And many who might
find an outright gift of cash distasteful would accept its fruit with
pleasure. Recipients could tastefully display the fruit on mantelpieces
and coffee tables; they could savor its beguiling scent (said merely to
hint at the deliciousness of the flesh itself) as they carried it to the
bank for deposit.

And for the superrich, the money tree would open up a whole new
dimension in after-dinner entertainment. In ancient Mexico, where cocoa
beans were currency, chocolate was a drink enjoyed exclusively by the
nobility; so too, in a world where money trees were de rigueur, it would
be the privilege of postindustrial aristocracy to serve up slices of
one's net worth with the cheese and port.

Guests might be tempted, of course, to wrap up their dessert in a napkin
and slip it into a purse or pocket; but only the hopelessly gauche would
succumb. The proper guest would chew on the fruit lingeringly and,
especially if he or she had never tasted money before, with a look of
knowing appreciation. And if the flavor were in fact not all it was
cracked up to be -- well, who at the table would dare to say so?



Julian Dibbell is the author of My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a
Virtual World.


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