Episode 35: Elena — A Draft of the Non-Consuming Economy
It was after the number reached five thousand that Elena Vasquez's pace of filling her notebook changed.
She was from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Thirty-eight years old. She was an economist. More precisely, she was an economic anthropologist. She was someone who had studied how humans allocate resources and how that allocation shapes society.
It was through Carlos that she came to Gong. They had met years earlier, in a different life, when Elena had spent a semester studying how cartel-controlled towns in Jalisco allocated resources during supply blockades—a research trip her university had been reluctant to approve and Carlos had quietly made possible, for reasons neither of them discussed afterward.
Carlos contacted her first. He said the community needed an economist. Elena asked, "Why?" Carlos replied, "There's no one here who understands how the economy of a community where people don't eat works."
On her first day there, Elena asked Hoon,
"How does exchange work here?"
Hoon thought for a moment.
"I'm not sure if the concept of 'exchange' even exists here. People just take what they need."
"What about when there's a shortage?"
"We've never had a shortage so far."
Elena wrote that down in her notebook. The sentence looked strange on the page next to everything she'd been trained to assume. Every economic model she had ever studied began with scarcity. Take scarcity away, and half the discipline simply had nothing left to explain.
Then she spent a week just observing.
She watched how Lee Jae-in's construction teams formed and dissolved without anyone assigning roles. She watched how James's calculations got passed from hand to hand and revised by people who had no formal training in engineering, simply because they happened to be standing nearby when a question arose.
She watched the dining table—fifty people, then a hundred, sitting with nothing in front of them and somehow never once competing for the seats closest to the center. None of it matched any model she had studied. She filled the margins of her notebook with question marks before she filled them with answers.
* * *
After the population reached five thousand, Elena's notebook began to fill up quickly.
One evening, Hoon asked Elena.
"How is it going?"
Elena looked at her notebook and said,
"There are three differences from the food economy."
Hoon listened.
"First, the distribution of time is different. The time that used to be spent on meals goes elsewhere—mainly to cooking, learning, and talking. The day feels longer."
"Second."
"The motivation for exchange is different. In the food economy, exchange happens for survival. Here, since survival is a given, exchange happens for other reasons. Because you want it. Because you want to give it. Because you want to be together."
She gave an example. Two days earlier, she had watched one of the newer arrivals, a woman from Mali, spend an entire afternoon repairing a stranger's sandals, unasked, simply because she had noticed the broken strap and happened to know how to fix it.
No payment changed hands. None had been expected. In the world Elena had studied for fifteen years, that transaction would have needed an explanation—a favor owed, a relationship being built, a reputation being managed. Here, it seemed, the explanation was simply that the woman had wanted to.
"Third."
Elena closed her notebook before she said it, as if she wanted to be looking at Hoon rather than her own notes for this part.
"Accumulation loses its meaning. In the food economy, hoarding is a kind of insurance against survival. The more you have, the less you risk going hungry. But when there's no risk of going hungry, there's no reason to accumulate. The desire to hold more than you need right now simply disappears."
She had tested this for herself, in a small way. In her first week, out of habit, she had kept a private store of extra notebooks and pens in case supplies ran short. After a month, she noticed she had stopped doing it without deciding to stop. The habit had simply had nothing left to feed on.
No one else hoarded anything either, as far as she could tell—not tools, not building materials, not even the better sleeping spots near the river. People used what they needed and left the rest where the next person could find it.
Hoon listened to those three points and thought.
This was the foundation of the new economy Elena was designing. An economy for humans who don't need to eat. It wasn't just a theory. It was being demonstrated right here and now by the five thousand people living their lives.
"What replaces ambition, then?" Hoon asked. "If no one needs to accumulate."
Elena considered the question for a long moment, the kind of pause that meant she was deciding how much of an honest answer to give.
"I don't know yet. That's the part I'm still writing. I have theories. None of them feel complete."
"Tell me one."
"Status doesn't disappear. People still want to be seen, to matter to others. But what earns that recognition changes. In the food economy, having more often signals worth. Here, I think it will be something else—what you make, what you teach, what you carry for someone who can't carry it themselves. I don't have proof yet. Just five thousand small examples."
She looked down at her notebook again, at a list of names she'd been keeping without quite admitting to herself why. Lee Jae-in, the one everyone asked for by name when something needed building.
Samuel, whose notebooks people borrowed and returned more carefully than they returned anything else in the basin. David, whose advice on the entrance design had become something close to law without anyone voting on it. None of them owned more than anyone else.
All of them mattered more than the average. The correlation interested her more than she let on.
"Write it up as a paper."
Hoon said.
Elena looked at him.
"Like Viktor. By hand."
Elena nodded.
"I'm writing it. Already."
* * *
The first line of the paper Elena was writing was this:
"All economics begins with the premise that humans are hungry. This paper begins where that premise does not exist."
She had crossed out two earlier versions of that sentence before settling on it. The first had been longer, hedged with qualifications an academic reviewer might have demanded—"under certain conditions," "in a limited subset of cases."
The second had tried to soften the claim, framing it as a hypothesis rather than a fact. Neither had felt true. The third one did, and she'd stopped revising after that.
She thought, briefly, of every paper she'd published before coming here—peer-reviewed, footnoted, careful never to claim more than the data could support. This one had no footnotes. It had only what she had watched happen, every day, in front of her.
It was handwritten. On paper. In ink.
In a language AXIS cannot read.
Author's Note:
New episode drops daily at 7 AM (Philippine Time, UTC+8) until Part 1 concludes (Ep. 55) on July 25th.
If you're enjoying UNFED, please take a second to add it to your Reading List or leave a Favorite. Your support helps this daily machine running.
Support this story:
- Register: Click the 👤 icon at the top right → 'Register'. (Note: Clicking '♥' without logging in won't save it.)
- Follow: Click "Add to Library" at the top → ♥Reading▼ → Check "Reading" to bookmark your progress.
- Like: Click the ♥ icon on each episode.