The fact about money
It’s all monopoly money anyway, it’s ALL imbued with value by custom alone, legal tender and scrip exactly alike, lately for the sake of facilitating the sale of labor-time more than the exchange of materials.
So let’s think about monopoly: the way the game is played according to the rules as they stand, is, one person will eventually accrue all the wealth and everyone else will be broke and/or in jail. And then the game ends.
Monopoly ends that way because it was designed as a cautionary tale about our economic system: almost everyone loses.
But if we wanted to keep the game going forever, we as players would simply agree to new rules, eg that redistributing the collected money, or EVEN photocopying whole new bankrolls of money and distributing it with the understanding that the players oblige by continuing to play the new money into the next successful monopolist’s hands, wouldn’t break the game at all. Because it’s ultimately just a pile of social contracts and conceits. People pretend that isn’t the case so hard they believe it, believe these “structures” have any kind of physical structure, like some kind of platonic beacon. Were the beacons, the rules come out of us. The rules about how the banker plays didn’t spring out of god’s omnipresent head and then go into the people jesus was mad at and then into the adults who taught you about the world and how to be just like someone the biblical jesus would hate while pledging allegiance to him, in word: “Dear jesus, ive been told everyone else prays to you so i think you must be the best at granting wishes, please make me a better banker and let me be richer and richer amen”. The rules started with people exactly like the romans and the acculturated economic collaborators that the bible praises jesus for being mad at. And then yeah, from them the rules subsequently end up–through the generations teaching what they were taught over and over–in your parents. And if your parents are like mine they say “well it’s the best system we’ve got” and “no one can imagine a better system” and they can’t understand what it even means when someone says otherwise, says that let alone imagining something better people are doing it, even places you’ve heard of like Nevada or Denmark or California or in the amazon (ah “the amazon”, old enemy of roman financial enclosure. Fitting, right? But then, ironic that a man like jeff bezos would name a marketplace of pulp paper toys after one of the last remaining stands of large forest on earth, itself named after matriarchs who wouldn’t be tamed by the patriarchs who carried metal coins with Latin sigils and rulers faces on them in the very same tradition we carry on today virtually unchanged); the words seem to lose all coherence to them and their ability to grasp meaning dissolves. The rules they know are the meaning they hold onto because it’s all that seems to have meaning. They have some kind of brainrot. But, it is said, those precious rules aren’t known to the Sentinel Islanders, and while a capitalist missionary will tell you that this makes them animals in the eyes of the projection of self these capitalists call god, their own uniquely patriarchal god of war and wealth, I suspect the opposite is true, that in God’s eyes they’re the truest humans, the least animal, because they’re the only ones not at least partway stuck in this fucking cage. [Well, it sounds very rhetorically well-calibrated, anyway; i actually dont think god cares which mortals are more or less “like animals” (member of the animal kingdom? Animal.) because i deeply suspect that god, the electron, doesnt actually prioritize the material world based on how special humans specifically are and then on how much everything else is or isnt like a human. We think we’re important because to us, we are. We look to be, from our own pov: we dominate our environment, some of us very vulgarly and unsustainably like we all as a group have severe brain damage because we’ve culturally enshrined giving eachother concussions–and we think god chose us to do all that rather than happenstance. As a species, as a culture–the matrix, slaves to the machines, our precious corporations. Thats the cage we’re in. Theyre legal persons didnt you know, the corporations; you can be convicted of terrorism against them, but not against a living and feeling fellow mammal, if its not your species… or maybe if it is, but youre at GITMO right now and there’s an oil war to win, or youre a nonindigenous demon and you “need” more resources that theyre sworn to defend for god who made them and on behalf of all future life. Its all very Godless, what the capitalists do but they feel like god is saying go go go by not killing them where they stand any time they do evil. God just doesn’t have much control over us, to a point. 2 seconds from now a supermassive black hole could wipe out everything you’ve ever even heard of. But, if youre walking into a regular randomly occuring everyday sinkhole on earth, god can only try to tell you, look out for that hole, she can’t make you listen fast enough to not fall in, let alone change the ongoing script of the entire natural history of wind on earth just to make a gust out of nothing strong enough to blow you to safety.]
Again, it’s a game. The rules are the rules because we agree to them.
People who are scared of fiat aren’t using their imaginations enough. They stop right after imagining that various metals or gems have innate trade value and that this is concretely meaningful across all humanity, present and future, and that fiat is therefore meaningless, simply because it is fictional, intangible, and that these qualities are frightening, despite being commonplace and truly inescapable without dying. And even mundane to most people, chicken little. Even mundane.
Capital as we know it–in the form of mainly electronic fiat tokens–is just a tool for organizing human activity, human time. Mostly the more successful monopolists waste the activity and time of others to keep humanity as a whole from leaving or changing the game they happen to be winning; this is achieved through things like the lulling spectacle of bureaucracy. The valuations and availability of currency are kept low, variably so according to who will put up with what. “My money is still worth twice as much as yours because the math says so”, “my labor is still worth twice as much as yours because patriarchy says so”
Rick and Morty was right about the whole “what if all the 1s in your computer-based global economic system, suddenly became 0s” thing. But just do it in your mind: so “who’s paying me to listen to you?”
Exactly.
The other fact about money is that there is actually nothing inherently wrong with giving someone a blowjob to get it. That’s the big gamertip. The boomers are sad and desperate and scared and confused and rapidly aging; they’re dying for sugarbabies with 2 drops of human sympathy, home-care workers are so bland and reserved. They’re always on about precious western civilization, arent they, the boomers, “greco-roman this and greco-roman that”, well lets bring back temple whores! Scared prostitution, as healthcare! Access to a bare modicum of sex at least, somewhere safe and appealing, even if you run out of workers willing to see you in person due to issues and you have to opt for a toy with a remote worker or just AI, should be a right. Globally. For like any adults, not just soldiers? Thats a real 77 virgins in heaven maneuver there.
Redistribute your own wealth; if you have it get rid of it and if you don’t have it dont feel bad about getting it in environmentally sustainable ways.
Stop cutting down trees just because losers want to buy “lumber” and imagine you looking like the brawney papertowel guy while they do it.
Stop killing and raping animals for people who would never do it themselves. We’re outsourcing these sins to you. Trying anyway.
If you want to say this is too simplistic and actually the economy doesn’t work like that, I need you to know that actually YOU’RE the naive one, weird huh.
It’s a bunch of fugazi. Everyone saw the big short, right? (C’monnnn, Ryan Gosling was in it, your favorite!) We can stop pretending this stuff has any power over us actually. We just have to agree.
And thats the fact about money
Plus i guess one major corollary about sex work being good honest work