The Implacability of Things

The subject line is the title of what I read at this website:

http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/10/03/the-implacability-of-things/

"Jonathan Lamb explores the genre of ‘it-narratives’ – stories told from the point of view of an object, often as it travels in circulation through human hands."

In grade school I wrote a story about a coin passing from hand to hand.  The different places it went, what it bought, lost and found again.  The sorrow of the loser the joy of the finder.  Once it was swallowed.  The nun did not like that part of the story.

Money used to go from hand to hand.  Coins and dollar bills still do.  The story of their travels would be interesting.  Only 3 percent of our money travels this way now.  Everything else is on the digital express.

Now digital money travels from account to account.  Hardly interesting since there is no real travel, the adventures of where it accompanied someone from the time it was acquired for something, maybe nothing, and the time it was paid for something, or nothing, and what those things may have been.  The value of those things relative to the value of the money depending on time and place.

Money moves digitally in the modern world.  Moves everywhere, sometimes transforming itself into different currency domains.  As quick and as ephemeral as it may move it is just a quicker more efficient model of the old had to hand mode of travel and exchange.  Used to be it was in the owner's pocket or under the mattress now it is in an account.

Stop all the money!  Just like when the music stops playing everyone sits in a chair and stays there as the music plays on.

Instead of going from account to account where money in the account is just an aggregate total number of dollars, make the system operate by accounts going from dollar to dollar.

Novel idea.

When digital money goes into an account it is not uniquely identified at the unit one dollar level.  Only totals of dollars are added. 

If each individual digital dollar was uniquely serialized and became a static record, theoretically residing forever in one safe computer computer space then the only thing that would change when money is received or expended is the account number of the current owner of that digital dollar.

Accounts, manually maintained by hand and then digital were a more convenient container into which to put money.  They existed for the same reason that money denominations were put on paper dollar bills.  It was simply a more efficient way of handling aggregate amounts of transactions made in dollar units.

The concluding statement of the website: (I thought I could do long sentences!)

"Whether it is owing to its origin and terminus in the narratives of slaves, or to its coincidence with the financial revolution and the growing unaccountability of mass human behaviour, or to the growing appetite for print ephemera, or to the end of feudal tenures and the resulting anomalies of personal portable property, or to the irreversible metamorphoses precipitated by the holocaust, ordinary things situated in banal circumstances develop a salience that has nothing to do with symbolism or hidden meaning. They are just there, eying their human adversaries, implacable and meditating affronts."



Computers can now process immense volumes of numbers and transactions.  It is not unreasonable to propose making money a static record and the owner account the variable entry.  What is fixed and what is variable makes a big difference in the operation and efficiency of an information system.

If (and I would like to say the inevitable when) we go to 100% real money, 100% real reserve banking then the "It" story would not be about the interesting travel of money itself but the accounts, the associated people and the purpose of the transaction associated with the changing of the account temporarily owning the dollar while plays host to owner.