Last week I spent 24 hours around Hemel Hempstead.
Waiting for the World to Catch Up (video 1hour, 34minutes and 44seconds)
Living in our power — in spite of the system we must still, from time to time, treat withA talk by Clive Menzies · 8 July 2026 in Kings Langley
I was invited by Tara to talk to a group in Kings Langley about the work — fifteen years of it now, in one form or another. Mark hosted me while I was there and introduced the talk, then facilitated the Q&A that followed.
What I tried to lay out was the pattern I keep finding wherever I look: enclosure of the commons, institutionalised hierarchy and money, three flaws that aren’t separate problems but one structure wearing different clothes depending on the domain. I talked about what an economy without money already looks like in practice — not as theory, but as something visibly operating in places I’ve seen and people I’ve met, this last 24 hours included. And about the shift underway from a system built on scarcity and proxies to one that doesn’t need them.
None of this is a prediction. It’s a description of what’s already there for anyone willing to look past the framing we were handed. The Q&A afterwards was, as usual, where the real thinking happened — people testing the pattern against their own experience, pushing back where it didn’t fit, which is exactly how it should go.
I can’t do justice in words to where I stayed, who I met, or the co-creative environments I saw operating without money anywhere in the equation. It was a full 24 hours, and a good reminder of how much is already being built quietly, outside the structure, by people who simply got on with it.
It was a magical 24 hours within my charmed and joyful life.