Copies of Copies

Friends make fun of me for having a fireplace going on Netflix. And they're right, it is a bit ridiculous. But we do not deal with real things anyway, only copies. Candles, for example. Longtime chandler Yankee Candle has attempted to copy the smell of just about everything in the natural world, from Fresh Cut Roses to a mixture of Mandarin and Cranberry. Apparently, they can also smell like A Child's Wish and My Serenity. A Child's Wish, you guys. One wish of children is to become rich. They think that will happen through robbing a bank. Of course, there's no money there. In what some theorists refer to as a postmodern economy, we rarely deal in cash. Cash is already a stand-in, a tangible iteration of what it represents. We know that ancient societies actually traded the goods they valued, operating without the abstraction of cash. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau would assert in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality that societies began producing surplus, worthless without a cash money system. Cash therefore leads to inequality among individuals as it allows its possessor to obtain hierarchical distinction through the acquisition of unnecessary, "luxury" items. For a historical stretch, cash money was itself valuable, made as it was of precious materials, but it would eventually become but a copy of something valuable. Now we have developed credit, a conceptual stand-in, an intangible copy, for money. Some have even exchanged Bitcoins, digital assets, for real currency. C...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news