Comment by duncan-donuts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duncan-donuts | Hacker News Reader

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This is nonsense. Money is very real because it’s an abstraction for materials, goods, services, etc. If governments fail and currencies collapse yeah sure that money can’t do anything for you, but idk about you but my USD is good just about anywhere and it does a lot for me.

You might make arguments that when the world falls apart you’ll be glad you outsmarted us by buying gold or some other thing society decided has value. But if the world falls apart I wouldn’t bet on gold being the best thing to trade with. I’d rather have a stockpile of medicine, ammunition, livestock, and a seed bank. Those things are hard to store until you need them for an apocalypse. I can assure you that if you tried to give me gold for ammunition in this scenario you’d be leaving with gold.

You could also argue that gold/silver would and is a good currency abstraction and I’d agree with you. In the absurd scenario that the world falls apart I wouldn’t count on merchants coming around that actually want gold/silver. So many useful things become useless in an end of the world scenario that it’s not worth worrying about.

>This is nonsense. Money is very real because it’s an abstraction for materials, goods, services, etc.

Abstractions are by definition not real.

What's real about the money is the political and legal power (enforced by actual people) that allows you to exchange it with goods.

Money is an abstraction for other people owing you a favour. If the world falls apart, more than a stockpile of any particular good, what I'd want is neighbours who were willing to help me out. And for that purpose, "stockpiling" social relationships - attention - seems like a better bet than stockpiling gold or USD.

Money is definitely an intersubjective reality - valuable only because people believe it to be so.

It might be a very stable concept in most instances, but various very real and extreme edge cases exist. (Regular inflation, Hyperinflation, local disaster, global disaster, bank runs, etc)

I quite liked the description of the invention of currency and beaurocracy in "Sapiens".

If the world falls apart your net worth will be composed only of things you can actually protect and defend, because everything else will just be taken away from you. The rule of law isn’t around to save you.

But that’s why if the world falls apart, the most valuable resource will be attention. If you have a lot of true followers, and they believe you know what you’re doing and that life could be better if they follow you rather than go it alone, then you will have many people to protect you and bring you resources, and in this way you can build your dominion in the post apocalyptic world.

If you’re a true prepper, you should be hoarding influence and attention. This will give you the best life possible at the end of the world.

So basically a bunch of acting, speech and leadership classes and a ham radio?

Maybe start your own cultish religion where you are the central figure or the only conduit to higher powers.

I thought 'apocalypse world' had very good archetypes for the types of people who'd do okay in such a setting. 'cult leader' is one of the standard types.

When all this started going down I bought industrial engineering technologies I wanted to teach myself to use better - and got to work doing useful things with them. I'm unsurprised that these tools keep climbing in value. I feel like we are entering a world thats going to separate those who use technology to their advantage and those who are just being used by it - and it does not look good for the latter.

Instead of calling it "unreal", which is pretty vague, how about calling it "dreamstuff" or "dream artifact".

It exists in this consensual story.

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