A NON FUNGIBLE MARKET
The success of money - its fluidity, its ability to facilitate complex economies - is an incredible demonstration of our capacity to make abstract the concept of value.
In my head, work feels a lot like playing the slots. I pour in fractured stretches of duration like quarters - hours, days, years - then pull the lever and receive my fate in the shape of an assortment of numbers in my bank. Some pulls get me more, others a lot less. But those numbers are everything, I bundle them up and give them away for a roof over my head and food on my plate.
Money went from in hand, to in mind and now that we’re online a new kind of market has arrived in the form of a commodity beyond time.
Nearly a decade ago I was part of a group that hosted a “Free Market” every two weeks in east Vancouver. Every second Sunday a gang of us would gather together clothes, things, books, and food, and pack it all into a sprinter van. We would then cruise down Commercial Drive, laden with irony, and deliver our payload like an erupting clown car to Grandview Park. When we arrived we were met by more singularly inspired ne'er-do-wells who would help unpack and set up our Market.
We were all volunteers and everything was free, you could give, you could take, skills were shared, poems were written, free advice was given.
In organizing this circus every two weeks during the spring season we paid each other in non fungible time. What I mean to say is we made / spent / shared irreplaceable moments and memories. Not just the “end product” of the Markets themselves but also the planning meetings, the errands, the baking and the collecting.
In comparison, at the same time I organized the Free Market I also worked as a delivery driver. I spent 32 hours a week dropping off and picking up bins of varying sizes and weights. In retrospect my memories of my many months of work have all melded together in my mind. Unlike the time I spent with friends my sense of my paid labours has been reduced to a singular clump of precious meta metal that I exchanged for 0s and 1s.
I transferred so much of my singular time for ubiquitous cash, but I always kept the Free Market memories for me.
Now, Non Fungible Tokens want a piece of that action. Through NFTs the meta-sphere is buying and selling the abstraction of uniqueness and in so doing we have unwound our collective conception of value one notch further.
The unspooling I’m feeling is the gravity of convention giving way - it leaves me dizzy but still standing, always still standing.
The tides of time bring only change, so says me, and so agrees the boiling frog.
