Chapter 2: Value

[Christian]

The chapter is strong on the utilitarian end, but is missing much of the ‘belief’ site of what humans value, and which ends up determining most of the normalization through a marketplace (price).

Beliefs are largely created via social engineering both paid and unpaid. While the former is offered by for-profit corporations, the latter is usually practiced by your parents, and relatives etc. (i.e. indoctrination into a ‘religion’ or any other delusion).

The largest (for-profit) belief creator (aside from Baidu) is Alphabet: Google is not a search engine, neither do they sell data or even advertising: the company is selling Social-Engineering-as-a-Service solutions (so does Facebook, of course), which starts when you enter a single letter into the query box.

A ten year old Toyota has much of the same utility as a brand new Mercedes, you pay ten-times more for the latter because you belief _______ (fill in whatever you think the more expensive car says about you).

In summary: What is value is a combination of believe plus utility in time and space (UTI).* – So, there’s many answers to that question. As (network) technology (language (of value)), USD is the undisputed market leader. It’s also great when you buy commodities with it that increase in price, and so on ..

*In my mind UTI is a better framing than ‘scarcity’.