A year or two ago, I was in the local Big Box Bookstore and, on pure whim, picked up Ancient Rome on Five Denari a Day. It's pure cultural history: There's very little in the way of chronology or the serialized biography that sometimes passes for history. The gimmick is that the book is written as a travel guide to the Rome of about the second century C.E. I need to read it again, because too many of the details have slipped already. (That, and the book just rocks.)
But one detail that has stuck with me is the fact that a traveler to ancient Rome had the option of what we would consider a traveler's check of sorts. You, the traveler, would go to a merchant known to have frequent and reputable trade with in Rome and pay him a given amount of money, for which you would receive a letter to his Roman connection, authorizing that person to give you a lesser sum on your arrival. That letter solved the very real--and to this day applicable--problem of having to carry significant amounts of cash while on the road.
By this time in history, the cash revolution was already passe, but it bears considering the full scope of that revolution nevertheless. Think about it: At some point, civilization collectively decided that bits of shiny metal possessed a value equivalent to far more tangible goods and services. That sheer level of abstraction, for a largely subsistence world, is pretty mind-blowing. The notion of a bit of parchment or papyrus having the same value as a bunch of shiny bits of metal that have the same value as a certain quantity of goods and services is merely another layer of abstraction because, well, the proverbial cows were already out of the barn at that point.
Fast-forward a couple of millennia, and mere bytes can represent a person's wealth, and some digits of those bytes can be traded for other bytes representing, say, the ownership of a web domain--something upon which entire companies have flourished (Google.com) or foundered (WebVan.com), depending upon their ability to deliver value in the real world. Or, perhaps less understandable, people pay people they know only through the internet for items that exist only in the context of multi-player online games such as "World of Warcraft" or "Eve." (In that light, the games that investment bankers play with default credit swaps and such shouldn't seem quite so ridiculous...except that they were passed off as real items of value, of course.)
In all scenarios, though--across this evolution in abstraction from barter to cash to handshake to bytes--there are two key components:
- At the bottom of the transaction, some equivalence in real-world quote-unquote value: Food, shelter, amusement, one-upping the neighbors, etc.
- The fundamental trust that quid pro quo is going down. Either all parties involved are on the up-and-up, or are sufficiently armed against a double-cross.
So far, I'm with all that. What I fail to understand is the "economy" that is lacking component #1. The example I'm thinking of is Facebook "gifts." Redneck gifts, Pagan gifts, Bellydancing gifts, Pirate gifts: I've been proffered them all and more, from folks I consider myself to trust. But I can't help but wonder whether I'm ignoring another shift in our concept of commerce as I ignore these purely digital "gifts" as silly. I honestly don't--and won't--claim to know. But I know that it can't hurt to keep that in mind: As a History buff, only think how embarrassed I'd feel to mix the next revolution! ;-)
