---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 9:06 AM Subject: Re: "We ignore the cultural meaning of money at our peril" from the same article , about data love https://medium.com/quinn-norton/f3db7e13e6e3 The things that are of infinite value and lie beyond scarcity, cannot be bought with money. They are love of mothers, the beauty of the sky, the affections of pets, furtive glances, touch, epiphanies, and singing songs. They are the endless service and sharing of human to human that makes life bearable. The Telecomix image for datalove: less-than-three, or ❤ On the internet, some activists have named the sharing of the networked non-scarce infinites: they call it datalove. Datalove is there when you create Open Source and Free Software, it’s there when you use it, it’s there when you share knowledge, especially knowledge that helps people use the internet better and more safely. More controversially, it’s there when you pirate movies, share books, and preserve that which others would like forgotten. These things lie beyond any form of money. Dogecoin as a combination of a mathematically generated, cryptographically protected form of money and the meme of the moment, Doge. This, along with Comic Sans, gives it the internet density of a large star. Amaze. Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin are some of the things collectively referred to as the cryptocurrencies. By far, the most important is Bitcoin, which has been mined the traded around the world for around five years. These currencies are the internet trying to invent a native form of money. Like everything the internet does, internet money is over-technical, over-engineered, probably not very well thought out, hilarious, profoundly male dominated, and eventually compared to Hitler. I love the internet, it's my home every bit as much as any geography is, but does it make sense for the internet to invent a money? What, exactly, is the internet's poverty? What is cyptocurrency better at sharing than the internet is? On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 5:52 AM, Dante-Gabryell Monson < [email protected]> wrote:
https://medium.com/quinn-norton/f3db7e13e6e3
Analysis of any money, including Bitcoin, tends to be mathematical, regulatory, or economic, for obvious historical reasons.
But, "We ignore the cultural meaning of money at our peril,"
said Lui Smyth. Digital Anthropologist and Bitcoin researcher at the University College of London. In a wonderful post called Bitcoin Is More Than Money (As Is Any Money)<http://simulacrum.cc/2013/06/17/bitcoin-cultural-values-and-identity/> Smyth starts to explore not the mere what Bitcoin is, but the much richer question of what it means.
For me, accepting Bitcoin contributions tangles it up with everything money has meant in my peripatetic life, with the ambivalence and suspicion I have always had with any kind of payment. This look at Bitcoin will be personal as well as cultural. It will be about what money means to humanity, the history of money, and how the network is making it even weirder.
...
In America, even relying on community is a source of shame. The long admired idea of the “self-made man” isn't self-made because he's built the strong and loyal social connections that will support him, defend him, and turn to him for wisdom and affection throughout his long and social life. The self-made man is defined as someone who has hoarded enough money that he can pay for those things even if he is universally reviled, because destitution and need drive others, even if they despise him, into servitude to him until he dies, presumably alone.
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