One of my many guilty pleasures is I like to look at teenagers’ Tumblrs.
I don’t follow them. That would probably be weird.
They’re flippin’ brilliant. A lot of them have sections titled ‘My GIFs’. Supporting gay marriage is a thing.
They do this thing where they say stuff like, “Reblog if you’re up to no good!”. And they send round these little questionnaires where they answer 20 questions about their favourite music and their star sign and shit like that.
Today I saw one that asked the question, “What was your first URL?”
What was YOUR first URL?
My Tumblr is here. It’s called TL81, which is a bit rubbish.
I might have to rename it fuckyeahthallium or something.
If the expansion was incremental, it still happened awfully fast. In the poetry of Pound, the revolutionary who now looks merely transitional because he was so far outstripped by what he started . . .
Some snips of some snips—Yves Smith (mentioned here earlier, in much less positive light) posts an interview between Philip Pilkington and David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. The link comes to me via the ever-essential Simoleon Sense Newsletter — which I can’t recommend highly enough.
I’ve done a bit of blockquoting for those in a rush, but I’d recommend just clicking straight through.
Barter is skeuomorphic behaviour?
So really, rather than the standard story – first there’s barter, then money, then finally credit comes out of that – if anything its precisely the other way around. Credit and debt comes first, then coinage emerges thousands of years later and then, when you do find “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow” type of barter systems, it’s usually when there used to be cash markets, but for some reason – as in Russia, for example, in 1998 – the currency collapses or disappears.
Of ‘antiquity’?
This was the great social evil of antiquity – families would have to start pawning off their flocks, fields and before long, their wives and children would be taken off into debt peonage. Often people would start abandoning the cities entirely, joining semi-nomadic bands, threatening to come back in force and overturn the existing order entirely. Rulers would regularly conclude the only way to prevent complete social breakdown was to declare a clean slate or ‘washing of the tablets,’ they’d cancel all consumer debt and just start over. In fact, the first recorded word for ‘freedom’ in any human language is the Sumerian amargi, a word for debt-freedom, and by extension freedom more generally, which literally means ‘return to mother,’ since when they declared a clean slate, all the debt peons would get to go home.
Debt and morality really are the same thing:
Taxes are also key to creating the first markets that operate on cash, since coinage seems to be invented or at least widely popularized to pay soldiers – more or less simultaneously in China, India, and the Mediterranean, where governments find the easiest way to provision the troops is to issue them standard-issue bits of gold or silver and then demand everyone else in the kingdom give them one of those coins back again. Thus we find that the language of debt and the language of morality start to merge.
In Sanskrit, Hebrew, Aramaic, ‘debt,’ ‘guilt,’ and ‘sin’ are actually the same word. Much of the language of the great religious movements – reckoning, redemption, karmic accounting and the like – are drawn from the language of ancient finance. But that language is always found wanting and inadequate and twisted around into something completely different. It’s as if the great prophets and religious teachers had no choice but to start with that kind of language because it’s the language that existed at the time, but they only adopted it so as to turn it into its opposite: as a way of saying debts are not sacred, but forgiveness of debt, or the ability to wipe out debt, or to realize that debts aren’t real – these are the acts that are truly sacred.
How did this happen? Well, remember I said that the big question in the origins of money is how a sense of obligation – an ‘I owe you one’ – turns into something that can be precisely quantified? Well, the answer seems to be: when there is a potential for violence. If you give someone a pig and they give you a few chickens back you might think they’re a cheapskate, and mock them, but you’re unlikely to come up with a mathematical formula for exactly how cheap you think they are. If someone pokes out your eye in a fight, or kills your brother, that’s when you start saying, “traditional compensation is exactly twenty-seven heifers of the finest quality and if they’re not of the finest quality, this means war!”
Money, in the sense of exact equivalents, seems to emerge from situations like that, but also, war and plunder, the disposal of loot, slavery. In early Medieval Ireland, for example, slave-girls were the highest denomination of currency. And you could specify the exact value of everything in a typical house even though very few of those items were available for sale anywhere because they were used to pay fines or damages if someone broke them.
But once you understand that taxes and money largely begin with war it becomes easier to see what really happened. After all, every Mafiosi understands this. If you want to take a relation of violent extortion, sheer power, and turn it into something moral, and most of all, make it seem like the victims are to blame, you turn it into a relation of debt. “You owe me, but I’ll cut you a break for now…” Most human beings in history have probably been told this by their debtors. And the crucial thing is: what possible reply can you make but, “wait a minute, who owes what to who here?” And of course for thousands of years, that’s what the victims have said, but the moment you do, you are using the rulers’ language, you’re admitting that debt and morality really are the same thing. That’s the situation the religious thinkers were stuck with, so they started with the language of debt, and then they tried to turn it around and make it into something else.
Commodity money vs credit money:
The last time we saw a broad shift from commodity money to credit money it wasn’t a very pretty sight. To name a few we had the fall of the Roman Empire, the Kali Age in India and the breakdown of the Han dynasty… There was a lot of death, catastrophe and mayhem. The final outcome was in many ways profoundly libratory for the bulk of those who lived through it – chattel slavery, for example, was largely eliminated from the great civilizations. This was a remarkable historical achievement. The decline of cities actually meant most people worked far less. But still, one does rather hope the dislocation won’t be quite so epic in its scale this time around. Especially since the actual means of destruction are so much greater this time around.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but there are cycles:
Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.
Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.
The underlying reality of ‘credit money’:
When thousands of people begin assembling in squares in Greece and Spain calling for real democracy what they are effectively saying is: “Look, in 2008 you let the cat out of the bag. If money really is just a social construct now, a promise, a set of IOUs and even trillions of debts can be made to vanish if sufficiently powerful players demand it then, if democracy is to mean anything, it means that everyone gets to weigh in on the process of how these promises are made and renegotiated.” I find this extraordinarily hopeful.
Sometimes things just take you by surprise. Haircuts by Children is one of those things. I’ve no idea why, it just grabbed me as one of those, “OMG, that’s so metaphorical and sums up the entire human condition!” things.
I think it’s a project by Mammalian Diving Reflex who create work that ‘is at once furious, riotous and rigorous’, ‘smashing ideas together at high speed to see what pops out, inadvertently producing ideal entertainment for the end of the world’.
And I found it via Agency of Coney, who are an ‘agency of adventure and play’. You can find their proper website here.
As designers it is often our responsibility to imagine the future possibilities of things. We rarely get to design independent of social and cultural contexts, and we never get to design independent of the perceptual capabilities of our users. You could design a marvelous interface that makes terrific use of “color” outside of the visible spectrum, but it is unlikely that a human would be able to see it. It would be rare indeed to find a visual designer who bemoans the shackles of human perception, which unfairly force her to work entirely within the visible light spectrum.
A neat analogy; early adopters always assume their Futurism is driven by a desire for betterment. But they’re as often unreasonable men asking us to look outside the visible light spectrum.
While this sentence makes sense today, in a scant few years it will probably be obsolete. It’s highly likely that the next generation of Augmented Reality-influenced designers will, indeed, make terrific use of colour outside the visible spectrum.
