Musical Airline Seats

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We've all found ourselves stuck in an undesirable seat on an airplane and wished we could switch. Startup Seateroo has found a way to circumvent that without forcing you to walk up and down the aisles asking if someone might want your middle seat.The app lets you pay to switch seats on a flight. First you list what you're looking for, then you find someone interested in switching. Payment made; deal done. There's even a way for someone in a different class of seat to decide they want to make a little extra cash to go back to coach.Seateroo works, according to a spokeperson, because while airline tickets and boarding passes are not transferable, “there are no government rules that prohibit seat swaps.”Seateroo is but one of many examples of what we call UnMoney, a new way of looking at value outside of the traditional monetary system.These emerging economies, of which Seateroo's micro transaction is but one example, have a few things in common. They cut out the middle men as "authority." And they share and transfer ownership of assets beyond what we’d consider currencies today — rides, homes, and in Seateroo's case, one's "ownership" of an airplane seat for the duration of a flight. This is a paradigm shift in how we think of value, and in the future, this sort of frictionless exchange of assets will become commonplace.

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