Time is an odd thing. We never have enough of it, and yet we waste it like fools. We sell it, we trade it, we give it away for free. Some people hoard it in boardrooms and vacation homes, while others bleed it out in factories and fields. The trouble is, time has always been a kind of currency, though we like to pretend it isn’t.
Time banking, they call it. A friendly idea. You help your neighbor fix his fence, and he owes you an hour. Later, you cash in that hour when you need your sink fixed. A fair trade. No money changes hands, just time, as if we were all keeping a ledger in the sky. It’s honest. It’s human. It says: we are in this together.
But men are clever and greedy. And what begins as a tool can become a weapon. If we look at the movie In Time, where they took the metaphor and made it real. No one aged past twenty-five, and if they didn’t earn more time, they dropped dead in the street. A man with a century on his wrist lived like a king. A man with minutes left ran like hell. The rich kept their time locked away, and the poor had to beg, borrow, and steal to see another sunrise.
This, of course, is fiction. No one is wiring a countdown clock into your arm just yet. But the idea isn’t as far-fetched as it seems.
We have already tokenized time. The company man trades forty hours a week for a paycheck, each hour assigned a price by men in suits. The surgeon’s hour is worth a fortune; the janitor’s, almost nothing. A single mother working two jobs has no time left for herself, while a billionaire lounges by the sea, his time compounded like interest.
And what of the digital age? Everything is tallied, tracked, recorded. Your steps, your sleep, your habits, your clicks. What if, one day, the tokens of time banking—those innocent little credits—became something more? What if a man had to earn an hour of screen time? What if a woman had to trade hours of labor for the right to visit her own children? What if every second of life had to be bought and paid for?
Technocrats have already begun the process. They have tokenized property, art, and even identities. Digital IDs, blockchain tokens, and algorithmic management are tightening their grip on daily life. It starts as convenience, then it becomes control. What if, soon, a person’s time is no longer their own? What if the bureaucrats and financiers start tracking every second, rationing out minutes as they see fit? It could be exactly like the movie—an economy where time itself is currency, and only those with enough credits can afford to live.
The march toward such a future would seem relatively slow, unnoticeable, polite. It would begin with efficiency. “Why waste time?” they’d say. “Let’s allocate it fairly.” Then would come the rules, the rates, the punishments for those who fell behind. The ledgers would grow longer, the margins tighter. And before we knew it, we’d be checking our balance to see if we had enough time left to grow old.
However, there is another path. The ethical use of time co-ops and time banking, such as those proposed by KommunityKoin.com, offers a potential salvation. Rather than centralized control, these systems encourage the building of small sociocratic communities where time credits are used to ensure participation and equitability. In such communities, no one’s time is hoarded, no one is left behind. Time credits function as a way to build trust and cooperation, ensuring that the value of human effort is recognized beyond the constraints of money. Instead of being a tool for oppression, time co-ops and banks can become a model for self-sufficiency and self-determination, allowing people to trade skills and services without being subject to the whims of centralized power.
The march toward a dystopian future is not inevitable. If time is to be tokenized, let it be done in a way that strengthens communities rather than enslaves them. Perhaps time co-ops and banking will remain what it is—a noble idea, a safeguard against greed, a way to remind us that time is meant to be shared, not hoarded. But history has a way of turning good ideas into chains. And if we are not careful, the tokens we mint today may become the shackles we wear tomorrow. The choice remains ours.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.