late last night while i was talking to karl, a sense of amazement stirred in me just thinking about how many things we consider material are actually intangible. so he told me about technomancy. modern miracles, modern magic. you don't know how it works but you need it.
first of all, digital technology. paying for storage space and web hosting is like paying for real estate. but earth has limited space whereas the digital world can continue to manufacture endless emptiness that we just looovvve to fill. that's why there's still a premium on it. we're putting into hard drives, CDs, flash cards, online inboxes and blogs all our digitized memories and ideas. a little fluke of a virus, and boom, they're gone. which wrong move caused it or is it some kind of digital karma for too much downloading? we'll never know. we better pray to the digital gods.
then there's digital money. even karl's well-researched article left me scratching my head. even if it's just basically having a bank account full of real money backing up what you're putting out there online, i can't help but think someone's laundering my real money somewhere else in the guise of surcharges and the like. or that someone's making a digital payment with no real-world counterpart. options like digital cash (for anonymous transactions, non-trackable) are even more daunting.
come to think of it, ngc's megacities hongkong mentioned something quite disturbing about real money: that it's based on trust. because bills are just made of paper and coins aren't precious metals, it doesn't truly have any value until we assign it one. and even then, what does that mean? i know it's supposed to translate into gold, but how much gold? who's keeping it? whom do we all trust?!
can you imagine the gold rush in san fransisco during the turn of the century? i haven't finished reading about it but there's a bit that says you have to pay for a dingy little room in several ounces of gold coins. now that's wealth.
that's it, i'm raiding my mother's jewelry box.
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