While rarely discussed in the mainstream media, an awakening is currently underway: More and more people are coming to realize that what we use as money is not some natural force or omnipotent being, but a magic spell. This spell is maintained by the oracles and high priests of finance from their well-guarded temples — the banks and treasuries — where they alchemically transmute little bits of paper or blips of data into valuable artifacts, using occult symbol, incantation, and numerical abracadabra. Indeed, what the financial sorcerers fear more than anything is a collective loss of faith in the abstruse and arcane instruments they use to bind the great human mob in invisible chains of debt, servitude, and scarcity.

~ excerpt from the introduction to the anthology What Comes After Money? Essays from Reality Sandwich on Transforming and Community, edited by Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordon (http://realitysandwich.com/120464/impossible_alternative/)