Crypto, Money, and Desire

In my book I put basically all my thoughts about money into some pre-history of monetization work. The book is spendy so look at it on a library website. Given the situation with the crypto crash, it seems relevant to return to that section of my book to get your key arguments:

1. Stories about the origins of money are all wrong, they tell you about the ideology of the person telling them, not the history. Money was likely created multiple times in human history for various reasons, the seamless story of money replacing barter is just a way of explaining a way a lot of cool stuff about money in a very boring way. Archeology about money is well beyond my zone, so I was comfortable in the book resolving the deep history of money with the key point that it is a really rich field and that any single historical thrust for money is silly.
2. Social agreement theories of money are naive. The social agreement that money is worth something fluctuates in ways that make no sense if it is a simple social agreement, especially in the context of fetishistic attachments to money which are leveraged for critique. Slowing that down, if money only had value because of social agreement we would do a lot of other interesting things to manage the economy, there is a lot more stuff going on their than just an agreement that some pieces of paper mean something, the feelings are much deeper. Add some historical depth here, Aristotle wrote about fetishization and money, the King Midas story is a way of warning folks about the dangers of disarticualting value from the world. Noam Yuran’s What Money Wants is a great book about the social functions of money. If we read the desire for money alongside a set of cultural practices of what the money ostensibly wants we can get a really rich, Veblen infused take. Basically, people have lots of weird and complicated feelings about money and they act like money is something really special and weird.
3. The ways you use money change how you feel about money and its value. Viviana Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money, is a must read here. WE have the idea of dirty money — nothing changed about the money except how you got it. Would it be good to give dirty money to a charity? Does this make the money good or bad? There are so many different things we do with money that all send social signals.
4. Most things people call money do money stuff. Whatever you call money also needs to fulfill structural-functional conditions, it needs to store value and moderate transactions with due speed.

What does this mean? Two turns of phrase in the book: A. that which is subject to monetization becomes money. Thus money is not a historically determined thing, but a set of cultural and technical practices. If monetized in a particular way data could become money, so could toilet paper. B. you are how you pay for. If the ways money is made and transferred changes your feelings about it and yourself then your payment method is a key part of you. An NFL player would prove his elite status by requesting payment in bitcoin. Buying a Veblen good, a Tessy as they say in the popular music, with a Bitcoin would be a mark of triple prestige.

Long term, Elon while seemingly hitting the Peter Principle hard in the last week, is making a really important point about monetization. If the thing you are using for money doesn’t go through the monetization process, it is not money. While some beanie babies had high speculative value and were decidedly portable, they were not money, neither are vintage Burger King gift certificates. The crash today was decidedly unmoney like. Diamond hands may be the most absurd part of this entire scene. Money needs to circulate. If you are buying a thing to not use it as money, then it isn’t money. Money works because the need for more that is intrinsic to money accumulation is hedged with some other cultural logic of desire. Bitcoin has some intense affective dimensions, but it has some serious shortcomings in the social and technical dimensions. An important part of the crypto story going forward is not its future as a meme stonk analog, but in the ways that actual transactions will be fulfilled with them.

Source: https://danfaltesek.medium.com/crypto-money-and-desire-c8f6d1653cf7?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency