Re: <nettime> what does monetary value indicate?

I can't answer the second question, but as to the first I believe that there are three distinct forms of money that currently operate in a hierarchy:

-- Infinite money which is produced and deregulated in the financial markets through the manipulation of information

-- Institutional money which is produced and regulated within national frames by governments seeking to stabilize social reproduction

-- Sweat money which is produced on the ground through the exploitation of labor paid at the bear minimum of survivability

The last form of money is the most extensive one, it's the most common coin, the basis of most livelihoods on earth. Institutional money, however, has been carefully decoupled from sweat money; and infinite money has been decoupled from institutional money in its turn. Institutional money began to be produced through Keynesian management of national economies from the 30s onward, it's inseparable from social democracy. Infinite money started up after the postwar gold standard was abandoned in 1971, and became what it is today with the introduction of computerized trading.

What does infinite money mean to its owners? Financial capital is power when it is applied to institutions or labor processes. However it can also be used for status displays, what Veblen called "conspicuous consumption." So you have to bring art back in. For better and mostly worse, "high" culture remains the noisy ghost at the top of the capitalist pyramid.

best, Brian

On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 10:47 AM Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote:

I'm sure many have followed the NFT art saga over the last couple of
months and seen today's headline that somebody just paid $ 69,346,250
for a NFT on a blockchain, meta-data to claim ownership of the
"originalcopy" of a digital art work.

https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/first-open-beeple/beeple-b-1981-1/112924

I don't want to start a discussion on the revolutionary vs reactionary
character of this emerging art market. All of that has already been
said. If you want a close approximation of my perspective, I refer you
to this:

https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3

What I'm more interested in here is to ask two things.

What -- after a decade of quantitative easing and crypto-currencies
rising into the stratosphere -- monetary value is indicating for the
segment that profited the most from these developments and what does
that mean for the rest of us?

And, assuming that this is not a cartoon version of a potlatch where
wasting resources serves to put rivals to shame, how many different
scams -- money laundering would be an obvious contender -- are being
layered on top of one other to create this?

Quite puzzled. Felix

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