Yawn.

At the 2012 edition of TEDxLeeds, we’ll showcase the most interesting ideas about the future of money and promise that any stories of stockbrokers, building societies, accountants, call centres or bankers will be challenging and provocative!

Humanity has begun to see money as a natural force – like air or gravity – speaking of “market forces” as if they exist outside human agency, yet the constructs and cultures of money are entirely of human invention… and consequently anything we invent, we can innovate and enhance. Wall Street’s “unnovation” of money – thousands of little algorithms… volatile, unpredictable, and impossible for humans to comprehend – brought us a global financial singularity, which still threatens to form a black hole…

However, there are others that are innovating new futures for money – as tools for localism, as exchanges for creative skills and as anti-corruption mechanisms.

We’re going to take you on a tour of the future of money and the people currently remixing the meaning of money. We hope this will returni Leeds to its role as a genuine innovator of money – with humanity as its master, not its slave.

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Our speakers for the evening will include the some of the people behind BitCoin, Civilised Money, the Brixton Pound, crowdfunding and Macon Money.

But this won't be just a talking heads exercise. TEDxLeeds is about activism and we intend to demonstrate some of the ideas being discussed.

This may be something as simple as a basic clothes swap or more ambitiously, the creation of a local currency (a Leeds Pound? the Holbuck? the Jimmy?) which exist for just a day, or perhaps a week a month…

We hope to have a roomful of creative and talented people tinkering with the concept of a medium of exchange, so be prepared to find something innovative at the event.