The Non Olet System, 2020–2035: A Fecal Economy from First Sketch to Contemporary

Distinguished delegates:

What a great pleasure it is to welcome you all to this conference about the past, present, and future of the "Non Olet System of Banking and Sanitation." The image here represents the past and it is our first simple sketch for the system. It was drawn by me and other members of the Non Olet Group way back in 2020.

As you all know, our idea was to build a system of public toilets where everybody would get paid for their shit. We saw it as a proposal for a new economy designed to redeem us from an old and exhausted economic system, a system we felt had grown destructive and harmful to the human community that had developed it.

This became especially apparent to us during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, where "the economy" even seemed to become an argument against saving lives. Many people were concerned, at the time, that a collapse of the economy could potentially kill even more people than the disease itself, and for some, this concern made it seem more important to save this economy than to save the lives in front of us. It seemed thus that "the economy" of 2020 was generally seen as a malevolent and mythical force that would have us sacrifice human lives in order to preserve it.

We understood these concerns to an extent, but when we thought about it closely, the idea of saving a malevolent economy that was out to kill us seemed absurd. Rather than saving the economy, therefore, we came up with a proposal to replace it with a new economy based instead on the value of shit.

Figure 1.

Image courtesy of the artist.

In human shit we found a resource that many people did not think much about at the time, and, indeed, most of us were even willing to pay to have our shit removed so as never to think of it again. It turned out that in 2020 there was already an existing fecal economy; let us pause to reflect on this for a moment, since it is worthwhile to think a bit about how we had once been accustomed to paying someone to dispose of our sewergold. Sewer-processing and recycling was in fact a multibillion-dollar industry in 2020, and some of the companies paid to process our shit were also able to derive a secondary source of profit from that same shit by recycling and reselling it as fertilizer, for energy production, and more.

The Non Olet group proposed to tap into this economy and improve it both technologically and ethically—and to create a system through which we could improve and share the value of shit between those who actually produce it. Because everybody must defecate, this meant that potentially everyone could profit from the system; we believed, therefore, that this shit could become a means for financing a new system of Universal Basic Income. We believed, in fact, that such a system could make the old humanist claim that every person is valuable become a practical and economic truth as well.

Such were our initial ideas and dreams; and with a lot of help from progressive bankers, scientists, farmers, and plumbers, we were able to implement the first one thousand Non Olet units and open the first Non Olet Bank in the early months of 2023.

Soon after we installed those first toilets, things really took off. I feel it makes sense to say, if you'll excuse the expression, that "the shit hit the fan," because this fecal economy soon spread out uncontrollably to all corners of the world, for better and for worse, and in ways we could never fully have anticipated.

During our next three days together, we will talk a lot more about what actually happened in the ensuing decade. We will evaluate our successes, failures, and controversies, and discuss how we propose to move forward in the coming fiscal year.

So welcome again, and thank you...