Colin R. Turner

Hello and thanks for stopping by.

Versa Vice is a series of video thought experiments and opinion pieces by Irish author Colin R. Turner that seek to make the less than obvious, obvious. Covering many topics including economics, society, science, philosophy and human nature, I aim to use simple, non-technical, commonsense arguments to discern fact from fantasy and suggest alternative approaches to everyday life.

Since 2010, I’ve been a writer, speaker, blogger, web activist and campaigner for a shared, open access world - where life doesn’t come with a price tag.

In 2019, I gave a TED talk on the subject.

Why? Because I believe it’s now eminently possible, and that humankind can and should do better in the 21st century.

Since 2010, I have pretty much dedicated my life to the development and proliferation of ideas of how a post-money world could be realised. With your help, I would love to do more...

My achievements to date:

In 2011, I founded The Free World Charter – a document that proposes ten guiding principles for a fairer, freer world. It has been endorsed by 60,000 like-minded people all over the world and translated into every major language. A couple of years later I decided to put my ‘no-money’ where my mouth was and embark on a moneyless odyssey around Europe, relying only on the kindness of strangers (which was a truly amazing experience!).

In 2015, I created Honorpay – an open awards and appreciation network, where users can express gratitude in a meaningful, public way. I saw this as a needed tool for generating symbolic rewards in a post-money world. Today it is used by thousands of people.

Over the course of these years, the idea of writing a novel related to these concepts had been brewing, and in 2016, I published F-Day: The Second Dawn of Man, followed closely by the short non-fiction companion Into The Open Economy, which expanded on the ideas laid out in the novel. (The latter is available freely on Amazon and on the Charter website)

Since 2016, I have been prototyping a sharing site called Sharebay (formerly Freeworlder.com), where members all over the world can share goods and services freely with each other. Still a work in progress, the aim is to create not just a great library of free things, but also to shift behaviour away from zero-sum transactions and towards shared ownership and open access.

I believe Sharebay is my most important work to date, as it promises a way of showing that a moneyless economy can work – even in a monetary one.

At some point along my path, I realised that the economic theory I was proposing didn’t quite fit with other similar theories like gift economy or resource-based economy that are popular. So in 2017, I launched a wiki called Open Access Economy to give it a proper name and invited other like-minds to contribute to it. To date, this is probably the most definitive long form of the idea.

In 2018, identifying the need for sharing values to be instilled from an early age if an open access economy were to have any hope of flourishing, myself and three others embarked on an educational project called LifeGames. The idea was to try and foster skills like empathy, compassion, cooperation, communication and various life skills through a programme of classroom games aimed at 5 to 12-year-olds. In early 2019, we created a compendium of over 200 group activities and released them on a free app for teachers.

Why Money?

While I have engaged in fund-raising a few times over the years to bring these projects into being, I have for the most part volunteered my energies to this cause because I’m so passionate that an open access economy is the better, possible path for us.

Naturally, the irony of inviting financial patronage is not lost on me, but, since I am bound to accept the prevailing reality, your patronage will help free me to focus more energy and time on this work.

I have been promising a video series for some time as I think it’s the most effective way I can communicate the ideas, but it has always been time and cost-prohibitive for me to do so. I hope with sufficient financial support I can realise this ambition and help expose more people to the full gamut of possibilities life has to offer, and ones they may never have considered.

I have also started work on a movie dramatisation of my F-Day novel, which I hope to complete over the next months and begin the job of looking for backing to produce the movie. I have a number of interested parties already helping me with this project, and, by all accounts, this may be a very timely story indeed.

Your support of any amount is greatly appreciated, and for which I hope to provide you with excellent value!

And finally...

As a final note, I would like to pay homage to those who have helped shape my ideas and thoughts since 2008 – and whose work I would highly recommend: Peter Joseph of The Zeitgeist Movement; Jacque Fresco of The Venus Project; Michael Tellinger of Ubuntu South Africa; Steven Pinker; Richard Dawkins; Caitlin Johnstone; Rafi Allaouirdian; Sam Harris; Derren Brown; Russell Brand; Charles Eisenstein – to name but a few legends!

Thank you,
Colin

Overview of where donations will be used:

• Maintaining and upgrading Sharebay.org
• F-Day movie script development
• Creation of regular video series
• Maintaining Open Access Economy wiki
• Maintaining Free World Charter website
• Maintaining HonorPay website
• Maintaining LifeGames Books website and app
• Maintaining colinrturner.com blog site
• Future books and articles