A Demonetized Hospitality?
Hospitality predates Money, according to History but also common sense, therefore the notion of a Hospitality that does not involve a monetary transaction, let's call it demonetized, is not utopian. But, back to the present, how could a Demonetized Hospitality pay the bills? Let's have a look at these bills. Electricity? Go off-grid. Water? Use a bore hole, a stream, a lake, or -soon- even the sea. Maintenance? Repairs? The guests can lend a hand. Furniture? The guests can bring second-hand unwanted items or, if they have the skills, create the furniture from locally available materials. Wages? No employees, guests volunteer, in shifts, or they become part-owners. The general idea is: Sharing. Do we dare to share? It seems sharing is the greatest taboo, not just in hospitality but in general, for everything considered 'property', which, as Proudhon pointed out, is at the same time theft and freedom. But property in terms of the means of production, of tourism production in this case, is, if you think about it, an artificial and rather absurd idea and a complete twist of the notion of genuine hospitality. If only we did not have 10,000 years of human civilization, built on divisions, hierarchies, power monopolies and violence, against us, along with the powerful hospitality multinationals, the monopolizing OTAs, the airlines, and the military-industrial-financial complex that owns all this. But there is nothing, apart from laws, really stopping those who would like to experiment. Once we have many successful experiments, it will be the time to change those laws. In a way, it is a sort of reverse-engineering Airbnb, going from a global corporate empire back to people offering an air-matress in their living room. Surely, there must be something that can replace *money*?
