Rethinking the Spacetime-Distributed Dissolution of Money: Evolving Production Relations and Infrastructural Conditions

This discussion paper reconsiders the possible formation, persistence, migration, and partial dissolution of monetary mediation within evolving relations of production and exchange. Its starting point is the heterogeneous need for others: access to persons and communities, productive capacities, labour, knowledge, relations, and outputs can motivate exchange while leaving the institutional formation of monetary claims contingent. The analysis distinguishes needs, value circulation, monetary obligations, payment instruments, and the continued reproduction of productive conditions. It examines the conditional transformation of human–human, human–AI, and AI–AI monetary relations as artificial intelligence increasingly participates in production. A principal hypothesis is that monetary reliance may diminish locally through direct provision, multilateral commitments, admissible cyclic clearing, and institutionally supported coordination, while remaining present or re-emerging elsewhere. The proposed spacetime-distributed view uses explicitly interpreted events, dependencies, and where justified partial orderings, without presupposing a universal temporal coordinate or an economy-wide instantaneous transition. It distinguishes cancellation of compatible obligations from broader substitution of monetary functions, and identifies unresolved questions concerning heterogeneous valuations, correlated circuit failure, long-path approximation, power, and ecological burdens. Finally, it outlines technological, institutional, relational, and public-infrastructure conditions for subsequent investigation. The account develops a comparative philosophical foundation for analyzing monetary mediation as a historically variable social and institutional form, while preserving open formal and empirical questions concerning its possible transformation.