this be some Whole Earth Catalog bullshit "The currency" is always whatever allows you to live in peace. In a tribe it's friendship and family ties. In larger groups it's whatever the protectors want. Abstracted, "currency" is "whatever taxes are collected in." Taxes, after all, are what keeps the barbarians out, what ensures the seas are free of pirates. Sure, country-to-country you call them tariffs or whatever but fundamentally, the guys with the guns enforce a monopoly on violence in exchange for allowing the cash me outside girl to buy a six million dollar house in Florida. Now - Bhad Bhabie can argue that she trades in attention. The IRS would beg to differ and as they're the ones with the ability to summon punishment for crime, their opinion is the only one that matters. Gary Vaynerchuk can say he "daytrades attention" but what he monetizes is advertising dollars. Nothing new about that, advertising dates back to Pompei or before. Their economy ran on taxes, too. Fealty to the state you occupy is a prerequisite for trade and the state really and truly gives no fux who you are. How do I buy a sandwich? 404 sandwich not found But I only want a sandwich So... the internet is going to knit together a community of sandwich aficionados and we will have a venn diagram of interests that entitles me to a sandwich? I am not a fan of Bitcoin as a currency but goddamn the first thing anyone ever bought with it was pizza. this shit again No one thought that. No one. Serfs mostly lived communally and the royalty protected them from other royalty in exchange for taxes. Then the non-serfs got greedy and legislated the serfs away and those MFers are the ones who invented Victorian slumhouses. they also, I might add, paid their taxes. Still can't buy me a sandwich.Attention flows not only from fan to star, but in a hyperlinked way it can be passed from star to star, or fan to fan. A growing variety of attention types can bounce along through cyberspace: personal advice, suggestions, connections, editing, assistance in self-expression, responses, acclaim, or new software designed especially for your purposes.
But how exactly will a moneyless attention economy play out in the world of old-fashioned, but still-needed, material goods? How will attention get you, say, an automobile? Cars emanate from vast corporations. Can you really expect an entity like GM to pay you enough attention to build one for you? In truth, the process is not nearly so monolithic; no single company makes cars in isolation. Automobile designs are copied, reverse-engineered, or licensed, and parts are often made by smaller outside workshops. Much of the advice, planning, and management comes from outside consultants. The car is no longer assembled from parts on one long assembly line; rather, subassemblies are often put together in different locations first. At every stage, more and more tasks are automated; that means more of the attention required to make a car occurs upstream as part of design and production planning.
With most people involved in the entire process connected to each other and to the rest of the world through cyberspace, it is not difficult to foresee a time when corporations will pretty much disappear, and when it will make a lot more sense to speak of a complex carmaking community, made up mostly of entourages surrounding thousands of stars and microstars. As is common among entourages, much participation would be less than full time, and the majority of members would belong to other communities as well, and even to other entourages.
Thus many people in the broad car community will also share membership in some of the same communities of attention as anyone who might want a car. As long as the person in question gets enough attention, she would almost certainly be able to draw enough from overlaps between her primary communities and the car community to arrange to be put into the driver's seat she craves. Assuming automation keeps cutting the total amount of actual attention needed to make each individual car, less and less stardom will be required to end up with one.
History offers a parallel for understanding this radical notion of an attention economy superseding the use of money. At the height of the feudal order in Europe, everyone took for granted that tilling the soil would always be primary, and that wealth and property would always depend on possessing the right bloodlines to own title to land (which could never be sold). It was unimaginable to either serfs or nobles that nobility and titles could cease to be a means to wealth.
I think the idea is that you'll be so busy rolling around in sandwiches that other people bought for you, you'll no longer want to buy yourself a sandwich.
Oh, there's definitely a "we'll all love each other and capitalism will dissolve" vibe. Thing is? Humans developed money to facilitate trade with people we aren't friends with. So either (A) something needs to fill the sandwich gap or (B) there needs to be some sort of middleware to translate "unknown attention" into "known attention." Both (A) and (B) are going to belong to some sort of external system. You could do it with blockchain but blockchain has no ability to protect you from reavers so fundamentally, it's gonna be whatever the heavies wanna get paid in. If the heavies don't run the blockchain, you need a blockchain-to-heavybucks exchange rate which means we're right back where we started, paying taxes in money. If the heavies do run the blockchain, you're looking squarely at the Social Credit System. Which, frankly, is where they've always been. People hear "China invented paper money" and think "china invented coins made out of paper" when in fact, the value of Chinese currency was whatever the Emperor said it was which had the effect of entrenching their user class against all challenges short of foreign invasion (mongols, Brits) and brutally restricting their ability to trade. The Renaissance was created in no small part by Europeans taking the "money is whatever we say it is" insight of the Chinese and giving it to the banks, rather than feudal lords. Graeber might disagree, but answering the question "how do I pay strangers for stuff I can't afford" is how capitalism took over the world. The Babylonians ran pretty much everything internal on a social credit system. But when they needed external stuff, they used silver. Worked for like 2000 years, until the barbarians they traded with learned to write in a pidgin easier to transact with, went around the social credit system and out-innovated 'em. Seems to me a Tik Tok economy is not a step forward.
This was a great comment - more interesting than the Wired article, actually. Thanks for the discussion.
Allow me to recommend this book and also this book.
I'll add these to my ever expanding reading list.