Money

Canonical definition

Money is the external instantiation of the Common-Currency Scalar: the capacity to discharge a later deficit, which exchange leaves in the hands of another party who releases an Object to correct the first party's deficit, and which can be held across time and passed between Individuals. Every exchangeable Object carries this capacity to some degree (Saleability), and Saleability is set by the acceptances of a particular population; Money is the substrate at the top of that gradient within a population, and no line separates it from the goods it is exchanged for. Where two populations have converged on different substrates, each holds its own Money and holds the other's as a good, and an exchange rate is the price of one population's Money in the other's. Its function is fixed by the architecture and its substrate is free to vary: shells, coin, ledger entries and signatures are substrates of one function, and barter is the same function discharged through a substrate that discharges it poorly. Money's proper purpose is bounded, since it is wanted up to the level that secures the Appetitive floor and equips the Intrinsic process. It is an Object constituted not by any Appetitive or Intrinsic use of its own but by convertibility into such use, which makes it the ideal host for Mimetic Desire under Object Parasitism; M attached to it converts Money into a generic Veblen good, wanted for the standing it signals rather than for what it converts into. Because the Scalar is tag-stripped before it leaves the body, Money carries no record of the sources whose demand it discharges, and the divergent accounts cultures give of what Money is are Confabulation at the scale of a population.