Fucks given

This post is an archive of Devon Eriksen's tweet here.

Money is a measure of fucks given.

Try thinking of the economy like this:

On the right side, you have a massive pile of everything people give a fuck about, tangible or not.

Eggs. Steel. Trucks. Bridges. GPUs. Tree trimming services. Novels. C++ smart pointer algorithms.

In the center, you have a pile of tokens. Each with the word "fuck" stamped on the side. Physical tokens, metaphorical tokens, virtual tokens. Doesn't matter.

They are supposed to represent fucks, and be tradable.

On the left side, you have the actual fucks people give, as contained in people's brains.

The center pile represents the left pile. It helps us measure. So we can move around and make the stuff of the right, in ways people actually want.

Every top-down economic plan, every socialist idea, every utopian scheme... they all just boil down to ways to rearrange the center pile.

But no matter how you rearrange the center pile, it won't magically make more of the pile on the right (what we have), nor will it change the pile on the left (what we care about).

It will only rearrange our representation of the relationship between the two. Which means distorting our understanding of that relationship.

When we tamper with currency, by printing more, or using force to move it from one hand to another, all that does is erase the information currency was supposed to give us... information like "what do people care about" and "what should I make".

Your database (of fucks) doesn't control reality, it only measures it. Trying to get what you want by tampering with it is cargo-cult thinking. It is an attempt to do magic, to manipulate the thing by manipulating the symbol, to kill the man by sticking pins in the doll.

The symbol-object distinction is a more advanced version of the breakfast test.