User:ØverLørd/Thesis outline

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In this thesis I will explore how people interact with the future in prediction economies. First we will unpack how modern financial systems operate and how they came to be. Then we will look at some examples of how predictions for the future are communicated visually (and textually). Lastly we will look at some communities that embrace and engage with prediction economical logics in the form of stocks (and other forms of securities) and pokémon trading cards.

Wreading and Riting

A specualative history of price(tags) and money

This text was used as a way of contextualizing a colloquium, where we attempted to hack some digital price-tags.

Pricetags are techno-social interfaces that inform the consumer with the price of a certain product/service.

Price

A price is the (usually not negative) quantity of payment or compensation expected, required, or given by one party to another in return for goods or services.

Prices are influenced by production costs, supply of the desired product, and demand for the product. A price may be determined by a monopolist or may be imposed on the firm by market conditions.

One may think that the price of something should reflect its value, this is not necessarly true. Value could be understood as something inherent, whilst price is something that occurs in the framework of a transaction.

Marxists assert that value derives from the volume of socially necessary labour time exerted in the creation of an object. This value does not relate to price in a simple manner, and the difficulty of the conversion of the mass of values into the actual prices is known as the transformation problem.

another paradox of price is the so-called diamond – water paradox: diamonds command a higher price than water, yet water is essential for life and diamonds are merely ornamentation. described by Adam smith the founder of captialism (or atleast the author of The wealth of nations).

Price tags in a late capitalist society rely on a universally accepted form of payment, so to further understand what a price is, we also have to talk a bit about money, as this is the most common form of payment.

Money

We live in a society where we have to think about money all the time. some say money is good some say it's bad. Like it or not, it makes our world go 'round, and it is very hard to ignore.

so where does it come from? We can maybe all agree that its nice to be able to not have to acquire everything in life from the fibers in your toilet paper to the Europium and neodymium in our smart-phones all by yourself? Therefore it is very convenient that we have a universal good, something everyone wants, that you always know will allow you to barter for other stuff.

Way back people used a various of things like shells, nuts, seeds and livestock to trade in. Then at some point people became obsessed with metals, as they could be remade over and over to different tools. A common theme seems that useful things with long shelf-life, and maybe not too abundant so you wouldn't have to deal with massive quantities when shopping, makes good currecny. At a later point gold became the craze, and it became the meta when it came to making deals.

This offered new challenges, as it was sketchy and unpractical to carry around large quantities of gold, and people decided to instead give each other promises of amounts of gold on pieces of paper or leather or whatever they could write on. and at some point people decided that it would be better to have all the gold in one place, so all the gold exchanges could happen behind bars and thick walls. This lead to a system of banks around the world that would issue people pieces paper and (less valuable) metals, and promised that these could be exchanged for their denoted value in gold.

For a long time people liked the gold standard, as it made it so no one could just mint loads of cash for no reason, regulating the amount of money in circulation. The gold acted as a security making people trust the bank and that their money actually had value, as it was tied to the gold in the bank.

Then more time passed, and people were so extatic about beeing able to spend their hard earned cash on all sorts of exciting fruits and garments (Not to forget rent, food, and taxes++), that they didn't really care about the gold in the bank anymore. Besides everyone around you seemed to appreciate the money as much as you, so you forgot about the gold. And in the early 1900s (war was a common trigger) banks started disbandoning their promise to give people gold for their metal and paper pieces.

This marks a shift of where the value of the money came from. Where it before had an exchangeable intrinsic value equivalent in gold. Now the value of the money was derrived from the state. And implicitly peoples trust in the state.

This is what we call fiat-currency, A kind of fantasy money, that governments and banks can just issue out of thin air.

So what can we take away from this? Prices are dubious and elusive, and so is money, and they can seemingly change all the time for no particularly clear reason, but just because of "market conditions". This volatility and the hunger to have the most competitive prices, has lead to the invention digital price tags. Rather than the cumbersome opertions of printing new price tags, the price can be changed all digitally! so how do they work?

CAPS LOCK

According to Caps Lock (Pater, 2021) the arrival of industrialization marked the beginning of professional design. Production of "designed" objects was up to this point mainly produced by skilled workers, (or people at home making stuff for themselves). Implicitly the arrival of mass production meant lower quality goods, but at a discount so people didn't mind. Some people DID mind, like the "revolutionary design schools of Europe, in particular the Bauhaus in Germany and VKhUTEMAS in Russia" (p. 322), and thus looking to unify art and industry whilst also stressing the social necessity of mass production. In other words the professional designer has to be concerned with market conditions, as these regulate the feasibility of mass production.

This means that the field of design as we know it today, in educational institutions, trade asociatiations and commercial In other words the western design hegemony was founded on something that balanced between industrial production (deployed on societal scale) and "art".