🌰 Tokenization Could Commoditize Every Aspect Of Our Relationship With Others

In The Token Society, Poleg talks about how carpooling, picking someone up from the airport, crashing on someone’s couch. These all used to be purely relational favors. You needed to know someone to get help. If no one was available, you were stuck. But if someone was, it’s free help and an increased relational bond. The internet enabled us to pay for these favors, it commoditized them.
Now we even see the beginning of people being paid for nothing: like the Japanese man paid to hang out with people.
The internet and, with blockchain, tokenization, will allow us to pay for even smaller and smaller tasks and interactions. Poleg throws out the example of paying your neighbor automatically every night that their noise doesn’t wake you up. Paying people automatically for smiling to you or saying hello.
The risk here is that 🌱 money strips an interaction of spiritual value. Paying someone to smile at you cheapens their smiles. When someone picks you up in an Uber from the airport, your relationship with that person has not been deepened. In comparison, when a friend picks you up from the airport, your relationship improves.

Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.