I feel what's to happen, all happened before

Kathleen Murray

05 Jan 2026 • 9 min read

A Note on How to Read This

This is a long post, intentionally.

If you’re interested in practical next steps:

Why We’re Starting with Skills, Not Stuff
Keeping Time, Locally
Building Below the Cloud Line

If you’re interested in why some economic experiments quietly fail while others survive:

Money, Control, and the Narrow Corridor of Permission
The SHEN
Bitcoin as a Reference Case

Field Notes from a Place That Isn’t a Blank Slate

Some changes don’t announce themselves with a press release.

They arrive as a feeling. A pressure shift. A faint sense that the weather has a mood.

What we’re doing here isn’t about inventing something shiny and new. It’s about noticing what’s already humming beneath the surface: old circuits, half-forgotten efforts, community muscle memory that never really went away. This region isn’t a blank slate. It’s a palimpsest.

The pandemic scrambled things. A few structures dissolved. Others went dormant. A surprising number survived quietly, waiting for someone to remember how they fit together.

The work ahead isn’t to overwrite any of that.
It’s to map it.
To reconnect it.
To see what happens when familiar pieces are allowed to speak to each other again.

Wind’s in the east, mist coming in.
Like something is brewing, about to begin.
Can’t put my finger on what lies in store,
But I feel what’s to happen all happened before.

This post is a progress marker.

Over the last two meetings, you shared ideas, needs, and half-formed hunches about what this community might actually want to do. I took those seriously. I followed threads. I made calls. I dug into existing efforts, old toolkits, and parallel experiments to understand what already exists and where friction reliably shows up.

So the next meeting will look a little different.

I’ll spend about thirty minutes walking through what I’ve learned so far: what’s active, what’s gone quiet, what surprised me, and why I started the Sovereignty Salon in the first place. Not as a manifesto, but as field notes: things I wish I’d known earlier, and things that keep connecting the longer you look at them.

After that, we’ll break into teams.

The goal isn’t to converge immediately on solutions, but to get ideas out of our heads and into shared space. We’ll map what people know, what’s worked before, what resources already exist, and where there’s energy to revive something that’s gone dormant.

Think less “brainstorm” and more ecosystem sketch.

That’s how we move from conversation to coordination.

Why We’re Starting with Skills, Not Stuff

As I followed up on ideas from our last meetings, one thread led almost immediately to paperwork.

On the surface, a local goods barter board sounds wholesome. Ancient. Very village-square. In practice, it runs straight into legal and tax constraints that make early momentum fragile and participation risky; especially for people just trying to help one another without turning their kitchen tables into accounting desks.

Those constraints are real, and they’re structural. I’ll explain them fully later.

What matters here is how they shape sequencing.

Early-stage community projects fail more often from friction than from lack of interest. Loading a new effort with compliance risk right out of the gate is an excellent way to stall it before it finds its footing.

That’s why I’m proposing a small but important shift: the original Goods team folds into a broader Skills, Services & Repair team.

This reflects how value already moves locally. Repair clinics, skill-sharing, mutual aid, and time-banking extend the life of goods without forcing every interaction into formal exchange. The emphasis moves from trading objects to sharing capacity.

A repaired toaster quietly returns to service.
No tax receipts are summoned.

I did speak with the Commissioner of Revenue for City of Staunton about the idea of pop-up markets and it is viable if we host less than four per year.

This isn’t a rejection of barter. It’s sequencing.

We’re starting where the ground is most stable, participation is easiest, and the signal-to-friction ratio is highest.

Keeping Time, Locally

Any time a community gets serious about repair, skill-sharing, and mutual aid, it eventually runs into the same question:

How do we keep time?

After meeting with the longtime stewards of Staunton’s hOUR Economy, that question is no longer abstract.

They are fully on board with transferring stewardship forward and supportive of reviving the hOUR Economy as a living local system. They’ve also offered use of the houreconomy.org domain, which currently routes to a now-quiet Facebook group that once anchored the network.

They still retain access to TimeBanksUSA, the platform the hOUR Economy eventually migrated to. This remains a viable near-term option. It works, it’s familiar, and it lowers coordination costs while momentum rebuilds. The tradeoff is familiar too: centralization, potential future fees or policy changes, and growing fatigue with logging into yet another platform to participate in community life.

That opens a second, lighter-weight possibility, one that feels especially well-suited to Staunton.

Instead of a full platform, we could explore printing a physical local hOUR token paired with a simple website where people can post ways to earn hOURs and request help. Think less “app,” more community bulletin board + local Angie’s List, without ads, data harvesting, or attention extraction. Just a shared clock and shared trust.

There is also a third path, not as an immediate replacement, but as a future-ready foundation.

We are actively exploring Nostr-based freedom-tech options for time-keeping and coordination. These decentralized, open-source systems let communities own their data, avoid single points of failure, and remain interoperable without being locked into any one provider.

Practically, this could mean:

time-bank ledgers not tied to a single website
portable identities and reputations that stay with the user
community tools that persist even if a company disappears

This path comes with more responsibility and learning, but offers long-term durability and sovereignty. A member of the Nostr developer community will be joining us to demo what already exists: real tools, not theory.

The goal isn’t to rush toward complexity or cling to tools that no longer serve us.

We have local experience, a name people recognize, and hard-earned lessons about what didn’t work. The opportunity now is to rebuild deliberately: starting simple, staying local, and keeping the door open to more resilient systems as the community is ready.

Time is the shared resource underneath all of this.
The work ahead isn’t about choosing the perfect clock.

It’s about keeping time together, in ways that make sense now and still make sense later.

Building Below the Cloud Line

If the services conversation is about exchange, the Tech & Communication lane is about infrastructure: who owns it, who runs it, and what shapes our attention in the first place.

In recent conversations, a pattern came up that feels important to name. Staunton used to be much more oriented toward local problem-solving. Somewhere around the mid-2010s, that shifted toward reacting to national narratives and distant crises. I don’t think that change was accidental. It closely tracks the rise of engagement-driven social media algorithms: systems designed to maximize outrage, velocity, and abstraction rather than context or care.

When attention is constantly pulled toward national drama, local capacity quietly erodes. People burn out, feel ineffective, and disengage from the very places where their effort could matter most. That’s why reducing dependence on algorithmic platforms isn’t just a tech preference for me: it’s a civic one.

This is where alternative communication tools matter. I’m drawn to networks like Nostr because they remove algorithmic attention-shaping entirely: no feeds tuned for outrage, no opaque ranking systems deciding what deserves to be seen. People can discover, communicate, and even reward useful contributions directly. Nostr isn’t the only option, but it’s a strong example of a broader direction. Tools that support participation without addiction.

The long-term vision is simple. When possible, local tools should run on local infrastructure: hosting our own services, running our own nodes, and maintaining communication channels that don’t disappear when centralized platforms hiccup or incentives shift.

Then I ran into hardware reality.

Over the last month, prices for core components—especially RAM and motherboards—have spiked sharply. Not because communities suddenly decided to become sovereign, but because the AI industry pre-purchased large shares of future production. A speculative squeeze made it expensive to be a hobbyist, a tinkerer, or a small group trying to host its own tools.

Much of that demand is for systems that don’t even exist yet. Meanwhile, people trying to keep their data local are priced out of the infrastructure that would let them opt out of extraction-based platforms.

That makes me angry.
It also clarifies strategy.

A lot of what we’re discussing can run on older or donated hardware: refurbished desktops, retired office machines, low-power devices that would otherwise become e-waste. They’re not glamorous, but they’re understandable, repairable, and owned by the people using them.

If the cloud is heavy, we build lower to the ground.

Money, Control, and the Narrow Corridor of Permission

At some point, all alternative-economy conversations run into the same wall: the United States tightly polices what counts as money.

During the Great Depression, hundreds of communities issued panic scrip: locally created notes that kept wages paid and food moving when banks failed. These were pragmatic responses to a monetary vacuum.

The federal government treated them as a problem.

The Constitution restricts states from issuing legal tender or fiat paper money, and federal law has long constrained private actors from issuing instruments intended to circulate as money, especially if denominated in U.S. dollars. Over time, courts focused on intent. If something looked like money, acted like money, or performed money’s core functions, it risked suppression.

This forced innovators into narrow legal channels.

Courts sometimes permitted instruments if they could be framed as:

evidence of debt rather than payment, or
redeemable in goods or services rather than dollars

The distinction mattered enormously. The goal was not flexibility, but containment.

Why Barter Isn’t an Escape Hatch

Barter is often imagined as a way around monetary control. Legally, it isn’t.

In the United States, barter is fully taxable. Since the early 1980s, the IRS has required barter transactions to be reported at fair market value, just like cash income. Organized exchanges must issue tax forms, and individuals are technically required to self-report even informal exchanges.

This creates a quiet but decisive constraint.

Barter is allowed only so long as it remains:

legible to the tax system
priced in dollar equivalents
administratively manageable

At small, occasional scales, people often ignore this. At community scale, the compliance burden overwhelms participation.

What’s striking is the asymmetry.

Large technology companies extract enormous economic value from data people give freely. That value is aggregated, monetized, and capitalized: but it does not trigger the same immediate tax visibility for the individuals who generated it. Small, human-scale exchanges face scrutiny; large, automated extraction largely does not.

This makes me angry, but this isn’t a rant.
It’s a systems observation.

Within these constraints, time banking and Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) emerged in the 1980s and 1990s.

Time banks fixed value at one hour of labor, prioritizing reciprocity and inclusion over efficiency. LETS systems used local credits inspired by commercial barter networks and spread rapidly across North America and Europe.

Both worked, temporarily.

Time banks proved socially resilient but economically limited. LETS systems scaled faster but accumulated internal imbalances that hollowed them out over time. Credits couldn’t be converted, debts piled up, and participation waned.

Overlaying all of this were legal and tax frictions that never disappeared.

By the 2000s, most U.S. community currency experiments had faded. Only about 20% last longer than five years. The lesson wasn’t lack of goodwill. It was hostile terrain.

One idea that surfaced in recent conversations is a local Staunton token that could supplement nonprofit salaries and circulate among participating local businesses. This is not a simple undertaking, but with careful design it could become another way to keep value moving locally.

When the Line Is Crossed: The Liberty Dollar

The Liberty Dollar made the boundary explicit.

Unlike time banks or LETS, it openly functioned as money: privately minted precious-metal coins meant to circulate alongside—or instead of—U.S. currency.

The federal response was unambiguous: raids, seizures, prosecutions, warnings.

The signal was clear.

Small, socially framed systems may persist.
Monetary alternatives at scale will not.

The SHEN: A Local Coin and a Counterfactual

Staunton once had its own silver currency: the SHEN.

It was locally rooted, commodity-backed, and framed as independent of the Federal Reserve system. It commemorated regional agriculture and distinguished asset-backed money from fiat.

It didn’t fail because it lacked merit.
It failed because it existed in a narrow corridor.

Now imagine a counterfactual.

Imagine local adoption.
Imagine merchants pricing in SHEN.
Imagine two decades of silver appreciation accruing to residents.
Imagine regional wealth compounding quietly.

Imagine further that the SHEN became widely held beyond the region, then internationally recognized, then treated as a legitimate reserve asset by nations and recommended as a part of a responsibly diversified portfolio by banks.

This sounds unrealistic: until it doesn’t.

Bitcoin as a Reference Case

This is, in effect, what happened with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin succeeded where earlier experiments failed not because it was local or social, but because it was permissionless, global, and structurally resistant to suppression. It didn’t require issuers, courts, or administrative discretion. It didn’t promise to stay small.

That makes it categorically different.

To be explicit: this is not an argument that communities must adopt Bitcoin, nor that it should replace local exchange systems. I support the idea of a Staunton-based complementary currency, time banking systems, and there are strong social reasons to want these.

But history matters.

Bitcoin is the first monetary experiment that survived sustained pressure from the modern state. That fact alone makes it a serious reference point: not an ideology, not a mandate, but evidence.

If we’re going to design resilient local economies, we need to understand not just what has been tried, but why some paths were tolerated, others collapsed under friction, and one escaped the corridor entirely.

With emerging social media alternatives like Nostr, participation doesn’t require prior investment in Bitcoin. People can earn bitcoin by contributing valuable content rather than freely giving their attention and data to technocrats. This approach aligns well with local, community-oriented efforts and weakens reliance on data-harvesting platforms.

That’s a conversation worth having.