🌱 Money Strips An Interaction Of Spiritual Value

Assumed Audience: Intrigued by the impact technology and business have on our relationships and society. May use this piece to give language to or further improve or support your own theories and opinions. Likely enjoys theorizing their agreement or disagreement with this piece.

Note: Here, spiritual means the aspect of the self we perceive as being metaphysical. Things like belonging, happiness, satisfaction, etc which have physical components but don’t feel physical in source.

The internet, digital payments, and the gig economy have enabled us to pay for interactions that were otherwise relational. This improves our lives by increasing convenience and reliability. Got a flight at 3am? Uber will definitely be available, even if your friends are not. However, the commodification of favors has a downside: money strips an interaction of spiritual value.

When that Uber driver picks you up, your relationship with that person has not deepened. You agreed to pay them for their service and you have, relationship over. When a friend picks you up from the airport, however, your relationship improves. Giving and asking for favors deepens our relationship with others, increases our compassion, and improves our sense of belonging. The impact a favor has on us is very easily shown by the way customers treat grocery store workers compared to how those same customers would treat their neighbor when asking to borrow sugar.

Again, the convenience is real and valuable. I’m not suggesting that every taxi ride you take negatively impacts your compassion. There is always a time and place to pay for goods and services. The issue comes when people assume that convenience and compensation are the only two values worth optimizing for.

I talk about this in 🌰 tokenization could commoditize every aspect of our relationship with others. We already see extreme distillations of relationship commodification. Look no further than the Shoji Morimoto, who gets paid to hang out with people, and Robert Samuels, who gets paid to wait in line. And while there is a time and place for both of these services, I see blockchain proponents and thinkers taking this to even more extreme conclusion: paying people minuscule amounts of money for every action that impacts you.

As Dror Poleg puts it in The Token Society:

Imagine paying a monthly fee to ensure everyone you see says hello to you. Or letting your neighbor earn a fixed amount every time he keeps the volume down and lets you sleep well at night (your sleep tracker will automatically trigger a smart contract that compensates the neighbor each morning; there’s no need to actually speak to him or say thank you). I’ll leave it to your imagination to come up with other possibilities.

Every act of kindness will become an act of commerce. Is this a nightmare or a dream society?

I’m not sure.

Paying someone to smile at your cheapens their smiles and decreases the positive impact of their smiles on you. A smile no longer fuels a sense of belonging, it is something you are owed, something you’d paid for. You no longer smile freely at others, after all, you’re not getting paid for it.

Micro-payments are a tool. Smart-contracts are a tool. A society is healthiest when it optimizes for human satisfaction, happiness, and health. Wealth can be a proxy for some of these things, but optimizing for wealth and compensation will not achieve all societal goals. Sometimes, what you really need is a friendly face at the baggage claim.

Inspired by: The Token Society Related to:

commonplace booklet

A place to collect relevant quotes and ideas:

From Progressive Ownership: A Model for Application Tokens:

We think the primary lesson from the airdrop era is that the pursuit of sufficient decentralization guided many projects away from product-market fit. Instead, token distributions should be more thoughtfully targeted with a heavier weighting to power users, after early product-market fit is validated

Studies have shown that experiencing losses as a shareholder can induce lower customer satisfaction and loyalty toward the company

Progressive ownership shifts token distributions from an opt-out to an opt-in model, which has the potential to engender stronger loyalty and network effects due to more skin in the game. As committed users level up into ownership, they are more economically aligned with the success of a network and incentivized to encourage others to join, which creates a virtuous growth loop. Users or developers who opt into ownership are more likely to skew long-term, as is the case with startup employees with stock options.

Finally, the most loyal power users can opt into ownership via tokens that comprise both economic and governance rights. This transition is not automatic and passive, but something users choose. For example, the most valuable users as measured by revenue generated could be given an option to either 1) earn revenue share in the form of ETH/stablecoins, or 2) take a proportional token distribution in the project’s native token.

In choosing the latter, a user is trading some of their individual income for a portion of the community’s total income. If the network grows, the community’s income will grow, and the token should enable them to participate proportionally. Further, the token might offer governance over key protocol parameters, such as fee or revenue share variables, to ensure long-term alignment.

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.

🌱 Money Strips An Interaction Of Spiritual Value

commonplace booklet

From Progressive Ownership: A Model for Application Tokens:

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