There's something, well I don't think I'm in any position to pinpoint what it is, but the way we think about economy- at least inflation, and whether anything is even comparable like that- is kind of, off. We measure against the gold standard, and that works, but our economic model would completely break down if we gauged economy against technology instead. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, right, there's something that has to be said for that. No amount of money in the world just 10 or 20 years ago would be able to purchase something that we can go down to Radio Shack nowadays and pick up for a couple hundred buck tops (Radio Shack, they're still in business, right?)
Introduce Moore's Law into the economic system, have some kind of "transistor standard," and you'll see that the net wealth of the whole world is increasing, rapidly, exponentially. At rate that's more-or-less even across the world, too- go to any given village in Africa and the kids there may be starving and the adults there may have AIDS, but the level of technology won't be more than four or five generations behind what you can find at the same time in, say, Shibuya district Tokyo. Of course, universal increase in economy is the same thing as zero increase in the economy (the whole model of economic theory is based around inequality after all) and teensy weensy microprocessing units don't really do much in themselves the way of putting food on the table, so, Big Mac index works there too.
I know I'm overlooking some corollaries there, like Rock's Law (Moore's Second Law, "yeah, but the cost to make all those semiconductor chips also doubles every two years") and things like obsolescence, but this is really getting away from me, and I only wanted to use all this as background to my real point (ooh, here's a fun law, Bonini's Paradox. Which is really one of my dearest enemies and direst friends, and may or may not be related.)
And so. There's a wealth of information at our fingertips all there-- power that would have taken generations and kingdoms to attain-- and we use it for entertainment.
Which brings me, at last, to my point. The ancient Greeks thought of theatre as something direly religiously essential. I'm not sure if that's just modern impositions reading things into happenings and actions that the performers of those actions didn't see there originally, but there's enough literature from the time period extant that we can say, yes, drama as we know it got its start during competitions during yearly celebrations of the god Dionysus, and it was pretty serious stuff.
I notice this yesterday, how my brother was watching a YouTube video and reading the comments at the same time. We are generation multitask text and drive at the same time, then watch 8 hour videos of repetition straight through (I have nothing first hand of anyone actually going through with this in real life, but it's a big world and I wouldn't be surprised.)
People invest vast amounts of money into projects, funding things. Investments, right? With the thought being ideally you pull in more money net than what you'd put into it to begin with. i was thinking about funding films, in bed, the night before last (saw Collapse for the first time yesterday) what do we do we who don't have this money for investment. We can start out small, the fundamentals of investment remain the same, but... there has to be something grander I can kick into right now...
Everyone's a world record holder, over something very very specific at least. And there's an idea there, that that can be their currency. Everyone's got an abundance of something. What do I have?
"I have time." I said it out loud when I realized it.
People can invest in the use of my time, I figured, and I can make money, and do something with that time, like they're making a genuine investment, it's so brilliant...
But then I realized, no wait that already exists and is called an occupation.
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