Marginalia: Optimization, Free Money & Half of Something
The Optimization Sinkhole
So what happened? Stuff got cheaper, and cheaper stuff breaks more, and planned obsolescence (of technology or couches or clothes) is essential to an ever-expanding economy. Social media made it possible for us to not just compete with the Jones next door, but every Jones we’ve ever met or followed on Instagram. I’ve always found the influence of social competition to be overblown, or at least imprecise. Instead, like Cacacas, I think the ultimate driver is the possibility of perfection, exemplified by the curated and omnipresent feed, filled with normies theoretically just like you.
The scroll doesn’t make you feel jealous, per se. I don’t even think it makes you feel shame, at least not in the way we usually think of it. It’s aspirational: it makes you feel like if you could just find the capital and discipline, you could touch perfection too.
Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study
What If Money Expired?
Gesell believed that the most-rewarded impulse in our present economy is to give as little as possible and to receive as much as possible, in every transaction. In doing so, he thought, we grow materially, morally and socially poorer. “The exploitation of our neighbor’s need, mutual plundering conducted with all the wiles of salesmanship, is the foundation of our economic life,” he lamented.
To correct these economic and social ills, Gesell recommended we change the nature of money so it better reflects the goods for which it is exchanged. “We must make money worse as a commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of exchange,” he wrote.
Jacob Baynham, Noēma
Lacfadio Hearn: Global Before Globalization
Unlike Odysseus, Hearn wandered all his life and ever father afield, seeking fortune in Cincinnati, the warm weather and music of New Orleans, and the racial mélange of the Caribbean. And it was this pursuit of the racial Other that eventually brought him to Japan, where he settled in middle age, so far away geographically from Lefkada and Dublin and culturally from Ohio and Louisiana. Few individuals have tried to bring together such divergence of place and fewer still could claim to have encountered or been affected by five empires: the Ottoman, British, French, American, and Japanese.
His life, therefore, is not just a study of nomadism, but also represents a case of how mixed heritage can predispose someone to be more receptive to national, ethnic and racial dissimilarity.
Gregory Jusdanis, Berfrois