Economically Devastated Greece Has Turned To Internet-Powered Barter Economy. Awesome.

…Not the economically devastated part, mind you. What is awesome is the idea that people of Greece have turned to thinking outside of the (western) culture box and adopted an internet-powered bartering economy. Living in fiction, man. Someone’s dream. Or nightmare.

Boing Boing:

An  interesting piece in the  Guardian  this week about cashless commerce in Greece, where the currency crisis has prompted citizens to take unusual measures to obtain essential goods.  One exchange website in particular is cited, and a unit of barter known as “tems.” The network has been online for about a year and a half. Snip from a portion of  Jon Henley’s report  about the open-air markets where tems are exchanged for daily neccessities:

“They’re quite joyous occasions,” she said. “It’s very liberating, not using money.” At one market, she said, she approached a woman who had come along with three large trays of homemade cakes and was selling them for a unit a cake. “I asked her: ‘Do you think that’s enough? After all, you had the cost of the ingredients, the electricity to cook …’

“She replied: ‘Wait until the market is over’, and at the end she had three different kinds of fruit, two one-litre bottles of olive oil, soaps, beans, a dozen eggs and a whole lot of yoghurt. ‘If I had bought all this at the supermarket,’ she said, ‘it would have cost me a great deal more than what it cost to make these cakes.’”

What rules the system has are designed to ensure the tems continue “to circulate, and work hard as a currency”, said Christos Pappionannou, a mechanical engineer who runs the network’s website using open-source software. No one may hold more than 1,200 tems in the account “so people don’t start hoarding; once you reach the top limit you have to start using them.” And no one may owe more than 300, so people “can’t get into debt, and have to start offering something.

The whole piece is pretty dope, serving as a look into one of the microcosms most people are assuredly unaware of. Operating within the Blue Sphere. Under our news, subsumed by reports about Celebrity Pregnancies and Sporting Player Doing X.