this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
1289 points (93.6% liked)

A Boring Dystopia

9776 readers
188 users here now

Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.

Rules (Subject to Change)

--Be a Decent Human Being

--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title

--Posts must have something to do with the topic

--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.

--No NSFW content

--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

But what that money represents is a resource.

Quite the opposite. It's kind of a weird accident that money came to both represent wealth and currency, when money is actually meant to represent debt. It's the mechanism of mediation for an untrusty society. An artiluge to create common ground with strangers who you don't trust, replacing it with a concept, currency, that you know that someone you do trust will take. So create an anonymous common to bridge trade. Unfortunately most societies chose precious metals to trade with, and this conflated currency with wealth. So accumulating currency became a thing we haven't been able to shake, but it's not mandatory for currency to work.

Now none of that was rational or intentional, it just sort of happened that way. But in reality, money (specially fiat money) is worthless, you can come up with any number and any unit to represent resources. Valuing stuff on a monetary number is a fool's errand, what you're actually quantifying is collective trust on the monetary system. And we have plenty of examples in history of currencies that collapse in value even though the amount of resources in the society remains stable and sometimes even plentiful. But when trust on the institutions that uphold the currency collapses, they are barely useful as kindle to start fires.