Over 220,000 sales to a market of about 4-5 million potential customers (only active WoW players can use the minipet, and the pet does not appear to have been sold in China or Taiwan). Roughly 5% of potential customers spent $10 on an ostensibly useless vanity item: A small pet that follows you around, looking cute.

Like most virtual goods, the cost of making and selling this pet is marginal: Primarily some additional art and marketing time, all built on the back of existing systems (store, staff, world). The first 2 months of Pandaren Monk sales will have made contributions to Blizzard’s profits of about $1 million. That’s only around 1% of the business’s turnover in that 2-month period. But that 1% is “free money”. Blizzard (-Activision) would be doing a dis-service to its investors if it did anything other than continue to milk this virtual cash cow.

Apply a healthy bit of European cynicism, and it is easy to conclude a scam. Tobold’s:

“Send me $10, and I promise to send $5 of it to charity.”

Of course, Europeans fundamentally don’t understand US philanthropic culture: The idea that it’s fine to exploit your fellow human and make outrageous amounts of money, so long as you give some of it away in the end. Some philanthropy is able to take a somewhat rational, balanced view of what is good for the world. But there is a tendency to support visually appealing issues, such as charities servicing the needs of children.

The purpose of this article is not to argue that a European, government-centric re-distribution of wealth is preferable to an approach lead by personal responsibility. (I’m not sure it is.) The problem emerging here is more fundamental: That virtual goods are replacing trade-able value with non-trade-able value. Non-trade-able value that, by definition, can not offset inequality in (game) society. Donating part of the price of sales to charity is pure irony. In true Orwellian style, we’re sleep-walking into a potentially broken social structure with the best of intentions.

This article started as a box during my Adventures in the Invisible Tent, but has been expanded here in much greater detail. This article describes what a minipet is, highlights the role of money to balance inequality in society, and explains the problem with virtual goods. On this page:

• Isn’t it Cute?
• Trading Equality
• Wealth of Hypocrisy
• Shared Value
• Postscript: Small-Scale Altruism

Isn’t it Cute?

Minipets are small creatures that follow a player’s character around. Their (often) elaborate animations bring them to life, evoking many of the same emotions as a domestic pet or small child in the physical world. Unsurprisingly, since humans’ physical world desires tend to transfer directly into virtual environments, these creatures are especially popular with female players: WarCraftPets.com, Breanni’s community and database for minipet collectors is the only major WoW website where the majority of visitors are female (strong male biases are more typical).

The (programmed) game mechanics of minipets offer absolutely non advantage to a player. So while we can argue that “vanity” mounts have some utility (the benefit to the player of faster travel), minipets do nothing other than be seen. Yet they can hold significant monetary worth:

I suspect the most valuable single thing I own is Mini Tyrael. Mini Tyrael sells for between $500 and $1000, because only 8,000 (code cards) were originally printed: The pet is scarce, and therefore especially desirable for the minipet collector that “has (almost) everything”.

Sure, I have to discount the value (reduce the buy price to the likely resale price) of the computer I’m typing this on. And ignore future income from “inaccessible” assets like pension contributions. And even then, the revelation primarily reflects my hermit-like existence, which hasn’t deemed it necessary to own residential property, or, frankly, anything other than mundane items that are not practical to rent.

But it is important to show that there is real money involved here. And not just a few cents spent on throw-away items.

A wide range of pets are available, some sold for dollars, some available by completing activities. Sometimes the method by which people are able to gain a minipet is ethically questionable, as the box below describes.

Box: Lambs to the Slaughter
Blizzard occasionally holds Arena tournaments for World of Warcraft. The arena is a focused, player-vs-player combat environment in which small teams of players compete to “kill” each other. Tournaments are open to any player, for a modest (few dollars) entry fee. In practice the competition is global, and some of the most talented eSports stars are in the competition. Basic play skills aren’t going to be good enough to win many matches. But it would be a fairly boring, not to mention unprofitable for the organizers, if only a handful of elite veterans bothered to enter. There were certainly contestants that entered both because they enjoyed the tournament, and because they wanted the exclusive Murkimus the Gladiator given to serious competitors. But there were also teams that competed solely to obtain the minipet. Many could be seen in the WarcraftPets community comments at the time. The pet required contestants to complete 200 matches. Not win. Just enter the arena, and be slaughtered by the lions… 200 times.

Trading Equality

When William Pitt (the Younger) first introduced income tax in Britain, the levy scaled from roughly 1% to 10% of individual income. Now we consider a 10% to 50% range to be acceptable. Perhaps it is no accident that government continues to spend an ever-greater proportion of national income, in spite of apparent political pressure for “less government tax and spend”. For example, increasingly intangible, information-based economies are increasingly controlled by government because the (non-legislated) competitive market is increasingly dysfunctional as the knowledge sphere of the economy grows in importance.

Britain no longer needs to raise money to fight the French. Occasional “crusades” aside, a key (especially European) objective of taxation is the redistribution of wealth.

This stems from basic egalitarian motives in humans. At least among “people like us”. There’s a tendency to equalise wealth within a group, even if that means an individual has less wealth for themselves: “Happy societies” are often also societies with low income inequalities. Scandinavia is the best example, where standards of living are considered to be very high, yet inequalities are relatively low: The richest 10% of people only earn about 5 times more that the poorest 10%. “Only”, because in the United States the difference is 15…

The tax system works because money is exchangeable. It can be used both to trade goods and services, and to trade equalities within a society. Indeed, I argue that once government redistributes the majority of national income, the main reason for having money is to exchange of equality, not the purchase of goods and services.

Box: Robin Hood
In practice, most of the developed “first” world maintains moderately stable societies by “robbing from the rich and giving to the poor” – although bureaucrats replace folklore outlaws. In the United Kingdom, about half of all taxes are paid by the wealthiest 10%, and a half of that half (that is, a quarter of taxes) are paid by the top 1%. About a third of the money raised is then spent on social provision – a direct redistribution of income from the rich to the poor. Much of what remains benefits people equally, regardless of personal income – health, education, general affairs of state. (Equal in a very general sense – the rich tend to rent seek, while the dying poor tend clog up hospitals and social care services – the net winner is unclear.)

Wealth of Hypocrisy

In Paying for Points, I explored the role of altruism in virtual environments – specifically teen-orientated WeeWorld. Important is Raph Koster’s observation that, “a core philosophy of a world with transferable stuff is that you can help out anyone, anywhere.” Online games have their own currencies to allow players to offset inequalities between themselves and those they play with.

Secondary markets in “Real Money Trading” further allow players with wealth outside the game to transfer it into the game, gaining some form of in-game advantage or status in the process. And it was in response to that activity, that Blizzard, the designer of World of Warcraft, took to strong ethical position on player equality:

“Everyone starts off even [in WoW]. In the real world that’s not true, but in WoW everyone starts even, and the RMT stuff messes with that.”

The caveat that should have been added to that quote is “except for vanity items”. Vanity items can be sold for $10 or $1000 or… but that’s okay, because vanity items grant no in-game advantage to the player.

Except, I contend that WoW is a social game, where vanity is very important indeed. In Adventures in the Invisible Tent I presented evidence that the social, consumerist elements of the game had become as important as the original “kill 10 boars, raid dungeons in a group” MUD-style design. World of Warcraft increasingly resembles an exclusive gymnasium: There are lots of machines to help you keep fit. And you may even play on them from time to time. But the main reason you join a gym is to be seen by other people at the gym, not because that’s the only way to keep fit.

Consequently selling vanity for hard currency (both minipets and mounts) appears to be hypocrisy. Or perhaps ignorance. It allows players to bring their out-of-game wealth into the game environment, gaining (consumerist-style) status that does not necessarily reflect their accomplishments within the game itself. Yet hypocrisy isn’t the big problem.

Box: Vanity Inequality
This discussion raises the notion of vanity inequality. Which sounds like social security payments should include rations of fashionable clothing. Or something. But if we agree that vanity (consumerism, if you prefer) is important within modern social structures, and we wish to balance inequality, then seeking equality of vanity is perfectly logical. If a little paradoxical, because exclusive, valuable fashion is largely predicated on the fact that everyone else isn’t wearing the same thing. In practice, social security systems evolve: Victorian Britain was concern with the fairly basic human needs. Today sanitation, housing, and food tends to be assumed, while social isolation and related psychological issues are becoming more prevalent. Perhaps we already experience a form of vanity inequality?

Shared Value

Valuable virtual goods cannot generally be traded. Certainly not traded as easily as currency. WoW allows gifting of purchased minipets – either when buying the item in the store, or by transferring it prior to using it (many minipets are now bound to a character on use, partly to limit third-party scams, that claimed to offer players exclusive pets).

But the basic problem remains: These items cannot be split or redistributed between many people. My Mini Tyrael can only ever be attached to one player account. Its value and status can only ever be gained by one player. Consequently, it’s a lousy token with which to balance equality.

And hence we see the irony in selling a minipet and giving half the dollars to charity: Making the physical-world slightly more equal, while simultaneously fostering a less equal virtual world.

This is part of a wider trend for “worthwhile” things to not be purchased with in-game currency. For example, the most sought-after mounts (ridden creatures) tend to be those that most players don’t have. Most don’t have them because they are linked to activities that require a lot of player skill or time commitment or something unusual.

Reducing the need for in-game currency logically reduces demand for Real Money Trading, and hence reduces the volume of accounts hacked: Currency can be rapidly transferred away from a hacked character, and resold to another (unwitting) buyer. “Bound” items like mounts and minipets cannot. Fewer upset customers, less support staff time wasted, lower chance of money laundering and unwanted criminal involvement. You can see why less currency is attractive to a game operator.

Many of the old “gold farming” organisations that used to earn in-game currency (by playing continually and selling their earnings to other players), can now be paid (in dollars) to play your character and accumulate rare mounts, status symbols and other achievements with that character. So the secondary market by which players can transfer physical world status into the virtual still exists, with or without in-game currency.

What’s changed is that there are now fewer methods available to players to equalise wealth within the game itself. Evidence from wider (physical world) society suggests that a more unequal game environment will become a less happy place. Not a good attribute for a game that claims to be “fun”.

Postscript: Small-Scale Altruism

While humans have a need for altruism, that need can be focused on a relatively small number of people. A single (sharded) game realm may contain tens of thousands of players. But some players primarily play within much small groups of players – commonly a “guild”, with typically under 100 people. So equality within a guild structure could become far more important to players than equality of all players across a realm.

This would be a more robust argument if most players spent most of their time playing together. But players tend to play as individuals, with very loose interaction with others. And consequently the most important signs and symbols are those that are clearly apparent to people you don’t know. Focused, small-scale altruism genuinely does require a much more fragmented society than humans seem to enjoy.

Which is probably a good thing for the rest of us.

It would be easy for groups within national societies to become highly fragmented. And for those fragments to start using non-trade-able tokens as a form of motivation and status. If (for example) bankers started being primarily motivated by how many brightly colored virtual widgets appeared on their trading screens, rather than relative (million-dollar) differences in bonus payments, tax revenues would collapse, taking state social provision with them. Redistribution of wealth would fail because brightly colored virtual widgets are neither trade-able (and hence not readily taxable), nor particularly useful for those struggling with the basics of life.

The ideal is laughable for any established commercial industry. Yet the motivational logic is clear from social online games. Games which involve satisfying much the same humans that go out to work. The differences are not so different.

Unfortunately, our systems of taxation and income redistribution are built around money. Capital gains can be taxed, but the gain needs to be liquidated – converted into money. How exactly does one tax a single Mini Tyrael that I choose not to sell? Or, worse, am unable to sell by design? Remember, the only tangible asset is a numeric code. It’s utterly worthless out of context, and cannot be meaningfully divided.

The risk is that our structures for limiting inequality in society continue to be based on money, even when value-earning silently evolves to use non-monetary, non-trade-able forms.

• A Tangled Web
• Eyeballing the Economy
• State of Information
• Communities of Serendipity
• Virtual Consumerism
• Different or the Same?
• Multiplicity of Self
• Postscript: A Chronocentric Tale
• But…

Axiological Interlude
Axiology, from Greek, is the study of value. Definitions of “value” vary between disciplines, for example: Economists tend to reflect Adam Smith-era notions of value – benefit to the buyer when used, labor to produce, gains from exchange. Sociologists tend to examine value through cultural perception – both personal and communal ethical differences – such as the World Values Survey. Philosophers initially consider value in terms of whether something “is good” – value theory. In practice, references to value often encompass (or even confuse) all these things. There’s a reason that I have not defined value…

A Tangled Web

Transaction costs are the key flaw in almost every attempt to build a payment system for the internet. Originally conceived by Ronald Coase, the logic is best explained as a mental accounting barrier:

Take a website. The average revenue earned from advertising is (in my case) about 1 cent (0.01 US Dollar) per visitor. Even with the most efficient payment system in the world, no rational human will waste time trying to evaluate whether to spend 1 cent or not. Assume someone can earn $12 an hour by working. Rationally, if they took more than 3 seconds to decide, they’d be “wasting money”. Trivial example, but it demonstrates why the information economy is increasingly either priced “free” or “expensive”: Handling tiny payments isn’t worth anyone’s effort. (People like Mike Masnick and Chris Anderson have written much about the resulting pricing models.)

A visitor that generates 1 cent of advertising revenue reads the website for an average of 4 minutes. Assume the time they spent reading they could have been working, 4 minutes equals 80 cents. Yes, value of time is a rather abstract concept, with many flaws. But there is a huge difference between the value of information received (expressed in time), and the payment for that information (expressed in indirect advertising revenue). There’s a tendency to under-value. Why do we under-value information? Because information is inherently:

• non-rivalrous – the amount one person can consume does not influence the ability of others to consume,
• non-excludable – once produced, there is no way to stop anyone consuming it.

Economically, it’s a public good. Individualistic, selfish humans simply take these goods. It’s (Western) human nature.

My writing is saving readers a lot more than the 4 minutes they spend reading, because (in this case) the information gained avoids time-consuming trial and error. Which points to another truth: Often information cannot be accurately valued at the point in time it is first consumed. This is probably true of everything, but is more extreme for information, which is inherently re-usable in different or unforeseen circumstances, often alongside other information.

Eyeballing the Economy

This is all part of a wider problem. Our economies are increasingly built around information, knowledge, skills, and other similarly intangible things, rather than physical production, or before that, land. The diagram below is based on the work of Derek Halden.

There are 3 circles representing different phases of economic development, chronologically, from left to right. The original diagram showed transport market failure, where the “Production and Consumption” market economy caused environmental costs that were resolved within the knowledge sphere. For example, the original transport-orientated diagram shows aspects like workers, vehicles, infrastructure and speed within the production sphere. Noise and emissions are outside in the Knowledge and Experience sphere. Economically, noise and emissions are “externalities” – a market failure, often requiring government intervention. Externalities tend to treated like public goods.

The stark implication is that within microeconomic theory, the competitive market is increasingly dysfunctional as the knowledge sphere grows in importance.

State of Information

Creating a competitive market for public goods tends to require government intervention. For example, copyright or patent law can make a public good excludable. Rights can be allocated. In theory, government can even act to reduce transaction costs.

Unfortunately typical state interventions tend to scale poorly:

• They can’t be used to effectively monetarise or protect $1’s worth of information.
• They are constructed around single right-holders, when so much “content generation” is collaborative.

Failing to scale down to the smallest exchange creates an inequitable structure, which only allows the owners of the most valuable rights to make any money from them. Make rights perpetual (give the ability to transfer ownership, especially after death, or as property), and an almost feudal society eventually emerges.

As the vast majority of wealth-generation within the economy becomes information-based, government will effectively control the right to make income. Ultimately such a high proportion of commercial activity becomes government-influenced, that it becomes rational to re-evaluate the reasons for maintaining a free market-based process.

Ironically, political government isn’t good at dealing with intangible concepts. Prestige, evidence, action – all are difficult to convey without a physical component. The underlying reason is that people aren’t good at dealing with intangible concepts.

Much contemporary thought (re-)establishes links with tangible aspects of the world: Home grown food that doesn’t “come from the supermarket”. Holes in the ice-cap as proxies for rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. It’s backward. It implies a finite limit on the information economy, since everything needs to be cross-referenced with a physical concept. It often still fails to convey value meaningfully – for example, financial instruments secured against physical bricks and mortar property, routinely exceed the value of the bricks and mortar, creating a dangerous accounting illusion.

Yet it is possible to simulate the emotions behind physical concepts using intangible forms. The solution lies in people: Specifically, the ability of people to manipulate other people.

Communities of Serendipity

I disagree with William McKeen, who declared that the internet made it more difficult to make serendipitous discoveries. Serendipity, “making an unsought finding“, only entered popular English language in the last 50 years. We didn’t need the word until recently. Yet randomised discovery is increasingly the only sensible way to proceed:

• During the Age of Enlightenment, one could know almost everything worth knowing by drinking a lot of coffee. Now it’s impossible to even understand one broad subject entirely. The days just aren’t long enough.
• James Austin defined 4 causes of chance in (medical) research, only one of which was pure luck. Active curiosity, unusual background, and distinct hobbies are also important. Chance, and therefore creativity and discovery, already contains a significant chunk of serendipity.
• In a highly intangible economy, with perfect communication, duplication and automation, theoretically only one person is needed to perform any activity: Once first done, the activity can be duplicated by machines, as often as the rest of society needs. Clone workers, with identical skill-sets, belong in the age of industrial mass-production.

In an optimised information economy, everyone is slightly different. Information discovery still needs to be bounded: Understanding most subjects requires a degree of specialism. And without good tools for constraining serendipity, we might never get anything done!

Serendipity can be bounded by freeform communities – “Communities of Serendipity”. The internet already does this, with limited success – from “blogrolls” and pages of interesting links, through discovery services like Boing Boing and StumbleUpon, to shared bookmarking, like Delicious. The idea is simple: Find someone with some common interests to you, and then find what else they are interested in. They’ll probably be similar enough to you, for you to understand anything they link to, but sufficiently different to sometimes expose you to something new.

Communities of serendipity have flaws:

• They assume reciprocity – that each member of the community will give as much as they gain from others. Human nature disagrees, something seen in the balance of activity in internet-based collaborative projects – Wikipedia, a good example.
• That people want to be different, when the whole notion of community implies they want to be similar.

These flaws become critical when trying to apply a value system – any form of economy – to communities of serendipity.

Virtual Consumerism

Hot-Or-Not’s virtual flowers encompass 3 components – the image of a flower, the gesture of giving a flower, and the “trophy effect” of other people seeing that someone received a flower. The second 2 components are most important to the service’s success. A lot like the primarily emotional values of giving a physical flower, except there is no flower. And the virtual flower is only valuable within that community.

In many online games and other social virtual environments, an advanced form of consumerism is emerging. Jean Baudrillard’s System of Objects characterises the value of the intangible component of goods with “symbolic” or “sign” values – the value in relation to another subject or group. In traditional consumerism, signs and symbols are in addition to concepts such as “use value” and exchange value.

The virtual consumerism found in many “virtual goods” consists only of signs and symbols. No significant production or utility values. If correctly implemented, no possibility of subsequent exchange.

Critically, there is no requirement for production using scarce physical resources. And so the internet transpires to be much more than a resource-efficient transport network: It’s a sustainable form of consumerism. Broadly the same consumerism that seems fundamental to giving (post-) modern society an illusion of purpose.

Virtual possessions can be used to convey far less tangible accomplishments, because in the appropriate virtual environment, virtual goods convey status just like physical goods.

Virtual consumerism is a far more attractive idea than “virtual currency” because virtual goods can directly link action to status. Value is more closely aligned to accomplishment: A contemporary failing of exchangeable currency is that the value of money is not precisely the same as the value of value.

The artificial scarcity required for such an economy is self-regulating: Rare (and hence desirable) items are only attained by those that accomplish something unusual. Common feats reward items that “everyone” has, and are thus less desirable.

Key to understanding why virtual goods “are valuable” is community: The community of people that recognize their meaning. Owning an Amani War Bear is worth nothing on the streets of New York, but everything when idling in Dalaran. Unfortunately this requirement for community highlights a conundrum:

Different or the Same?

It’s a curious quirk of evolutionary psychology that we claim to value inventiveness and difference, but actually tend to value imitation and sameness. The evolutionary success of humans is based on their ability to learn to overcome new challenges. Yet social acceptance is based on similarity to others. The genius that overcomes society’s biggest problems is invariably not a “dedicated follower of fashion”. Remember serendipity: Difference is core to discovery.

Fortunately, similarity is measured relative to community. And humanity is already organised into many different communities. Some would argue it is best organised into many small communities.

Within defined communities, concepts like virtual consumerism and even serendipity are possible. The problem occurs at the edges, where communities overlap – and communities of serendipity are all about overlap.

What problem? Money: The value systems of distinct communities are required to use a currency which is interchangeable between systems, even though each community actually has its own distinct values. For example, within their respective professional communities, a banker’s (infamous) million-dollar bonus conveys much the same value as a box of chocolates to a teacher. It’s only the exchangeablity of money which consequently appears to value bankers far more than teachers.

Virtual consumerism sidesteps currency as a means of exchange. Money is simply required to offset inequality. Inequality is a community-based concern: We primarily seek to even the wealth of people like ourselves. (One might even argue that morality itself is community-based.) In small, self-contained communities, inequality becomes irrelevant: Everyone is doing broadly the same thing (so has broadly the same wealth), direct assistance with actions replace indirect exchange, and who cares about anyone outside?

Yet serendipity requires people to be in multiple communities, hence experience the inequality between those communities, and seek to try and balance that inequality. Back to square 1.

Well, maybe not. It depends how we regard ourselves:

Multiplicity of Self

The idea of multiplicity of self grew out of my attempt to reconcile the fact that my Gnomish persona was not only better known than my physical persona, but that “she” had started to attain a degree of phenomenal consciousness – in the minds of some of “her” readers. This isn’t simply a case of my own mind effectively acting through an alternative, virtual body. It’s that the degree of “existence” of this self is primarily defined by other minds, not by my own. It is the other people that validate “her” – give her a meaning beyond pixels.

This is a more extreme version of celebrity, where the image of the celebrity in the minds of their fans invariably differs from the reality of the celebrity in that celebrity’s own minds: Visually, “she” is not physically me. It’s different from acting, since “she” is merely acting out me, not impersonating anyone else’s mind. And far more interactive than a character in a work of fiction.

It follows that the same rules should be applied to the physical me, which makes this very interesting indeed. I’ve struggled to find a philosophical concept that specifically describes my observation. Perhaps, a sort-of inverted-existentialism (where existence is primarily defined by everyone else) mixed with relativism (in which understanding is relative to others), all integrated into a re-configured mind-body dichotomy? I don’t understand it, and consequently can’t start to rationalise or debate it.

Conceptually, the multiplicity of self is very useful. Simply: One mind, multiple community-specific persona. Basic actions, rewards and values remain in each community, but the mind transfers information between. The whole system of communities and participation within those is constantly evolving.

It’s the basis of human “dandelionhood” (to twist Cory Doctorow’s analogy slightly) – instead of being focused on one individual self, we can scatter ourselves to the 4 winds. A semi-emergent reality that retains a sense of the mind’s individuality, while gradually weakening the absolute notion of self. In turn weakening most established law and governance, up to and including the notion of sovereignty.

Scary stuff. At least for anyone that understood anything I just wrote.

Postscript: A Chronocentric Tale

Back in 1995, when the internet was new and exciting, a group of academics gathered in Teeside (North East England) to discuss The Governance of Cyberspace. Freshly inspired by the works of people like William Gibson and Howard Rheingold, cyberspace was to become a place where all sorts of utopian and libertarian concepts would challenge 20th century methods of political governance.

That it didn’t happen comes as no surprise to whose that have studied the history of communications technology. In his 1997 history of the telegraph, The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage concluded:

“The hype, scepticism and bewilderment associated with the internet – concerns about new forms of crime, adjustments in social mores, and redefinition of business practices – mirror precisely the hopes, fears and misunderstandings inspired by the telegraph.”

Perhaps those chronocentric revolutionaries of 1995 confused our use of technology to do something, with the deep underlying social drivers behind what we actually do? At a raw emotional level, technology changes very little. The correlation between anglers in the virtual world and people that fish in the physical world, is a simple example. Technically, the processes are very different. Emotionally, they are very similar.

I suspect that any proposal not built around what people already do, is likely to become a utopia, because people evolve slower than we might like to think. Likewise, any proposal which embraces peoples’ emotional desires may become a reality without anyone realizing.

But…

Unfortunately, this article is probably wrong. Almost certainly wrong. So much so, you might ask why I wrote it?

My attempt to write one compact text means that much of the supporting evidence and logic behind statements is missing. But I already know that much is contentious, and within many contentious issues lay further uncertainties. My normal method of analysis and problem solving considers a range of possibilities, and then a range of possibilities that influence the first set of possibilities, and continues this for several iterations. Eventually some themes recur. These themes tend to lead to the solution. In this case, the range of topics is too broad, and the number of iterations of thought too dense. The result is a sequence of ideas that I certainly keep thinking about, and vaguely seem to hang together, but yet remain utterly inconclusive.

In an essay on a similar topic to this article, Nick Szabo concluded:

“The measurement of value is one of the most intractable problems of civilization. Brilliant and highly non-obvious solutions to this problem – from markets to money to the time-wage to cost accounting – have constituted some of the most important steps from animal to civilization.”

Perhaps it is inevitable that I’m still searching for an answer to the question I can’t even define? Maybe I need the solution to reach the answer? Or is this simply too philosophical to ever reach the answer?