The spooky life of the money and the arrival of attention concomity

The money loses important

Recently, the desire for financial wealth seems to have experienced a new upswing. In the US, Internet shares are the way to a quick education and one ensures the effects of your value growth in the whole money concomity. Everyone in the Silicon Valley and apparently throughout America, visions of a simple and unlimited wealth, is likely to pay the millions, waiting for them to transform themselves in billions, or admires what is more likely, the richness of another person. There are jobs for almost everyone and only a small or no inflation, sometimes at least because the temptations of stock options and art securities are strong enough to keep the leaning low. The equity values and generally the investment plants are growing overdies quickly, while the greed spreads the new rich.

The perception of the new wealth on the horizon is so strong that in some start-up companies in the Silicon Valley, the lands have renounced the millions of dollars that they had received from the shares when they remained a little more long in their old companies was. The wave of Bill Gates had absorbed the brand of $ 100 billion and reports in Silicon Valley now 250000 Securities Millionare. Every day comes 64 new ones. (A disadvantage is when you live in Silicon Valley that you have to pay almost a million dollars for a usual house. But of course you just have to make a deposit. With the view of a fast growing wealth, the pay rates are not deterrent.To)

Is all a sign for the luminous future of money than the blood and oxygen of the economic life? On the contrary, in my opinion. All this is more of a sign that the money as such quickly loses its central importance and its real usability. Just because the money has so little meaning, it can lead its new dream life. What really pays is how I maintained in my columns, attention: the amount of attention you can give others, and the amount of attention you can get. If you get a rough amount of attention, you are a star, and traditionally stars will be caused by their devoted fans with everything they want, which is of course also involving money.

This is not different today, only the internet demanded the emergence of a new class at Stars, behind Amazon.com, yahoo, e-bay, e-trade etc. stand. Because those who are online, so much attention to the online stars either direct or mediated by their products, they seem to be willing to get away from them. Of course, this is a circular process. In these last days of money, as at the end of feudalism, the external signs of the old wealth — back then rusts, locksmiths and similar, today only the dollar bearings — take a new splendor.

Money is no longer counted in gold bars and not in dollar bills, but only in pure numbers pay. While you can not buy any attention with money, the numbers are flossed, if you are rough enough, so much reverence that there are also websites that calculate the wealth of gates every second. Meanwhile, Yahoo and other portals are immediately informed about their own wealth and cash, if one has entered the basic data. Many users monitor their numbers obsessive.

In order to be able to guess the fate of the money in the near future, it may be helpful to look at the earlier properties of the money. Archaological finds of money in the form of munzen rich historically a few millennia back, but since then the money has passed through high and depths. The Romische Empire was about a sudden high point. Then came the economy of the Middle Ages in Western and Central Europe, in which, as well as many other times, the money only has little importance in everyday life of a normal person. The most important majority carried out only a few times in her life monetary transactions, and only the few people in the city used it Operter.

In western history, the money played his real role again with the increase in the trade and especially since then standardized, manufactured in factories in the 19. Century. Only standardized goods are really predictable or measurable, and consequently only such goods were easily obtained a certain price that is printed by a standardized money. Prices or goods like a pound of sugar or nail, a meter canvas or 100 watt pears win or lose value by supply and demand as long as there is no monopolies. Likewise, there is only a standardized wage for work under standardized conditions, which is also directed by supply of and demand for workers.

However, supply and demand have no significance if material scarcity is hardly a problem, which is increasingly the case today. An example of this is the widespread T-shirt, whose price is directed after the designer logo. The rearing the designer is, the more expensive it is, even if it is actually the same as a much cheaper T-shirt. Intrinsic manufacturing costs are so low that they hardly affect the price. Internet services or software where the offer is infinitely rough, will be likely to be awarded at a similar way, so the cost between zero and hundreds of dollars for subscription ranges.

Although we now have a global economy, the production is of vital good on an ever smaller percentage of the population. Consequently, the leaning is no longer based on a meaningful mabboat of the work time done with a certain intensity, but are stronger associated with attention that one can win if one is a strong lawyer, a star broker or a star professor — or this is not.

All this means that we left the material economy behind us and are increasingly dominated by a new kind of scarcity that can not be dissolved: the scarcity of one’s attention or the other.

How does this new situation influence the expiration of the continued existing cash concomity? As long as more money was put into the stock market as being extracted, the invested money circulates between the shares and, in principle, endlessly increases the value of a company after the other. Money releases the market only in the form of commissions of stock handlers or then when investors take out their money to buy normal good. For low online commission transactions, the number of transactions continues to increase before the money invested is upset, so that the value of the shares are increasing. If this situation is added that more and more Americans are automatically deducted from their wages and invested in the market, then one understands why the value rises and will continue to do so, at least until the baby boom generation, now between 35 and 55 years old is starting to enter the retirement age.

All those who appear to have the Internet seems to have shed out of nothing, tell us that we have unlimited funds for shopping, which is why we apparently support continuous growth in the production of genres and in the offer of services, which alleges the money concomity allegedly and justifies the rising values of corporate shares. However, what we do not own is an unlimited attention capacity that is necessary for the removal of meaningful buying. If you buy something, you need attention for the selection, for the transport home, for unpacking, for use, for the maintenance and the hub, as well as to find the goods again, if you want to use them again.

The Internet has helped to shorten some of these requirements for attention. With the online shopping, sometimes you can not only seek what you want, but it also creates new goods that you can not take home, stow or even use it, but, of course with a credit card, only needs to pay. Examples of this are web services that you subscribe to, for which one pays a monthly fee and in which you can never log in. Other services send many emails, but you only need to filter out them in mail folders that you never update.

Nevertheless, this seemingly finish-style shopping has mental advantages. You can win the impression, made something meaningful if what you’ve purchased, as it looks like it’s good, usual or interesting, even if you never use it. One can relate to a conversation, causing the impression that one stands on the high of knowledge. And in contrast to a subscription to newspapers or magazines, where you do not come to read them, the electronic services are not stacking storing in the house and you have no guilty conscience when you do not throw away, which you have not read and used. Apart from a small and easy-to-look reminder on the bill of credit card, which you can pay without reading them, you need virtually no attention to the purchase of online services if you do not use them.

Although you may not remember it, the online services continue to exist, people will be set, stars will be well-paid and the subspecies list can be long. A lot of usage "production" seems to go. This is the reason for the paradox, as the money economy can boom exactly in time in which it becomes old-fashioned.

But even if virtually the whole money concomity with the new and old sectors obviously boomes, finds, measured at capital formation with securities, a comprehensive shift of the old wealth to money to the new class of the stars. Companies like America Online, Amazon.COM and Microsoft are most important on the stock market, irrespective of whether they have ever provided profits and whether their "Balance sheet values", So the value of the buildings, machines and other things to sell at an auction, only a fraction of those of companies like General Motors, which are now rated much lower with regard to the borse.

This means that the new companies can now easily buy the old ones by simply give a corresponding share of shares. If, for example, Microsoft or America’s online decide to buy Ford or GM, then cars were used as gifts to add an incentive to subscribe to online services.

This relocation of wealth and meanings arouses the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as the nobility, which was a lot of land and many titles, but financially poor, to the members of the new class of the rich handlers and entrepreneurs who were mistakenly believed that these knight rusts and need title, his owners sold and his daughter married. Stars already own the attention that is really paying and more important than access to power through money and old industries.

So what is the future of money concomity? Again, there is a reference to the comparison with the decline of the feudal system. Although the feudalism insignia of power was even more visible and taken seriously by some generations, they lost their importance. Today you donate your life only as a proud little "de", "van" or "from" in family names, as tourist places and in a few traditions such as the openation of the British Parliament, surviving the outside.

Money is likely to survive in the form of munz collections, as a remedy for those who live too far on the edge of attention concomity to carry out transactions for material things, and as more or less meaningless numbers that occasionally appear in the midst of the active attention loss. If this time comes, the stock market may already be used. However, he could continue to grow so well, with high fictitious prizes that are so weightless as the ghosts they have turned into.