Money is a Forever Chemical, AI is Forever Slop

I’ve been marveling lately at sheer size of the numbers associated with money these days. Colossal figures that feel like they’re dwarfing reality.

As I post this piece, US national debt has passed forty trillion dollars. A stack of pennies worth that much money would be 42 times the distance of the earth to the sun. Even in dollar bills stacked up, it would be high enough for around 6 trips between the earth and the moon. In money, it’s about $119,000 for every person in the United States.

Or think of the scale of America’s annual healthcare costs. It’s a way manageable cognitive load, at just $5.7 trillion annually. By far the most in the world, for not even close to the best care. And, don’t worry, that cost will go up if the administration’s policy doubling the price of generic drugs from overseas goes into effect.

When money is this big, when it is this many times bigger than any transactional reality it was meant to serve, things get weird. I just had a student asking me, confused, about why rising employment figures make the stock market go down. Shouldn’t good employment news be good for business, because people will have more money to spend?

You’d think so! But because money and capital matter so much more than real people, it kind of works the opposite way. The better off people are doing, the worse it is for the “money gods.” When unemployment goes down, it means more people have jobs. If companies are hiring people, it means their payrolls are going up. If they are spending money on employees, then there’s less to be siphoned off as profit for shareholders. Therefore, stock values—or at least stock prices—go down. Lay off a bunch of employees, and the stock market rewards you.

But even more insidiously, and systemically, if people are getting employed, it means that the working classes are starting to do better. They will have more money to spend, and start buying stuff. More demand. This could make prices go up, which in turn makes cash correspondingly less valuable. Get it? If the cost of this ring or a can of kumquats goes up from 5 to 10 bucks, that means each buck is less valuable.

The Federal Reserve hates that. Their primary job is to keep money valuable (and rich people rich). So when employment goes up, they raise interest rates, making money more expensive to borrow from the bank. That fights inflation, but it makes it harder for companies to borrow money to grow their operations. If it’s harder for companies to borrow, they can’t grow as fast, so their stock prices go down.

It’s all so counterintuitive, but that’s only because money and people are actually at odds. They’re from different universes. People are living, metabolizing, impermanent beings. Our health and flourishing is dependent on our ability to transmute and transform. We living beings turn food into waste into fertility. Attraction to love to mourning to rebirth. We are cyclic, ever-changing, temporary.

Money—at least the central currency that was chosen for us to use—is meant to last. It’s like a forever chemical. Once issued, it never goes away. It’s not real, mind you. It’s just a digit. A symbol. But that’s why it never dies. It has no form, nothing to decay, nothing to metabolize, no way to change.

As I’ve discussed before, we live in a pyramidal civilization, optimized for savings and growth. We resist being metabolized by climbing higher up the pyramid. The wealthier we are, the higher we go, the more insulated we are—or at least feel—from the realities of floods and storms and decay and competition.

In that kind of society, we want money to be as permanent as possible. Not like the moneys of the Muslims or those local currencies of Late Middle Ages Europeans who copied them. Those were moneys optimized for transactions between people. Their only purpose was to help promote exchange of goods and services. These moneys would usually expire at the end of the day, like poker chips after a game. Or, if they were based on a commodity like stored grain, they would lose value over time as the grain itself decayed. Money was built to support flow, respiration, exchange. It didn’t get stuck. People didn’t collect it, because it didn’t have any value other than as a temporary placeholder for them to trade.

Money for horizontal societies was more organic, and decayed just like people do. And because people couldn’t store it permanently to rise up above their peers, they didn’t optimize their work for savings and growth. They optimized their lives for leisure and meaning. Get your work done, exchange it for what you need, and then enjoy your life until you need to work again. It was like air you breathe in and breathe out. You don’t hold your breath to get more powerful. You exhale and inhale to become more alive.

Living moneys promoted life. The moneys we use now, starting with central currency? They promote death. Permanence over respiration. Monopolies over exchange. They pool and accumulate by design.

Let me explain really simply how they came to be this way. When kings and other elites saw people using local currencies and living in prosperity, they got really scared. How do you maintain authority over people—how do you hold onto your entitlement, your birthright to control others—if they’re all happy and prosperous? You can’t. So kings made all these local, temporary moneys illegal, and forced people to use central currency, or coin of the realm. This money wasn’t designed to promote exchange so much as to lock in the wealth of those who were already at the top of the pyramid.

People had to borrow money, at interest, simply to transact. No free trading or barter allowed. If you got caught trading with some other form of money, they’d kill you. Yes, Philip the Fair, King of France, sent the Knights Templar in there to kill anyone using any means of exchange other than coin of the realm. And the already-wealthy got even wealthier by maintaining exclusive power to lend money to people who just wanted a way to transact.

Central currency, our money, has always been about preservation of wealth, entrenchment of power, going up the pyramid, and staying there. The more you print, the more debt you have created, and the more power you have over anyone trying to do the real business of life. Instead of a society of exchange, we got a society based on growth. After all, if a king lends out money at interest, more money has to be paid back. Where does that new money come from? Growth.

So everybody out there is not just exchanging goods and services, but trying to earn enough money through their labor that they can pay interest on the money they’re using. This growth mandate supported, actually required, the colonial expansion of the European empires. Everything was denominated in coin of the realm—money that lasted forever, so that those holding it could maintain their wealth.

And like the forever chemicals now polluting our topsoil and oceans and bloodstreams and livers, forever money and its anti-respiratory bias has seeped into everything. It’s like a P-FAS, that chemical developed as a non-stick Teflon coating for pans, but then seeps into the everything else. And like college debt or medical bills, it never goes away. It cannot be metabolized.

Our money is also like Teflon in the way it’s made so nothing sticks to it. It’s not local, not personal. It’s anonymous. Generic. Its users are free of responsibility for the damage they create with it. It just slides off. Investors, shareholders, derivatives holders…increasingly removed from the externalities of their efforts. No residue.

And like PFAS, money is continually re-engineered to improve on itself, turning more matter and energy into itself - converting organic matter into dead symbol systems.

What is crypto, after all, but an excuse to build and run the servers required to store it? It’s a meaningless product that requires Nvidia chips, oil, cobalt and rare earth metals. Crypto is just the front-end on the fossil fuel and chip manufacturing industries. We burn planet to prove our faith in the digital tokens, again transforming matter and energy into tokens. The real living world of time and transformation and metabolism is converted into the dead world of tokens and permanence. Money for its own sake.

Of course a meme-coin of a president like Trump—a reality TV star hiring other reality TV stars into the spectacle of an administration now robbing the wealth of generations to come—of course he’d get into this game. Although he called crypto a “scam” in 2021, he now wants to make the US the crypto capital of the planet. He’s got his own tokens, stable coin, even his own exchange. Countries now bribe him simply by carrying out multi-billion dollar crypto transactions on his platform. But the real robbery here is getting hapless MAGA believers to buy Trump’s coins. Investors have lost 3.81 billion dollars on Trump’s memecoin alone, which lost 98% of its value. If you include Melania’s memecoin, American Bitcoin, and his governance token World Liberty Financial (just listen to these names), the tally of investor losses go up to $7 billion.

That’s over a million people who lost their savings, while Trump accumulated around $3 billion off them, and his family countless more.

Beyond the particular grift, what’s really happening here? Political energy, social dissatisfaction, cult celebrity, are all being converted into token. Real stuff into digital symbols. Movement into stasis. Life into death. All for tokens. Tokens. What colonialists and conquistadors gave to indigenous people for land. To reduce a living earth into static property, and ratchet power irreversibly up the pyramid.

When the crypto grift just gets too obvious, too blatant a rug pull with no practical or essential value, they add another front end—a new interface to hide its valuelessness from us. NFTs did that. We all knew crypto was worthless, and in 2018 the whole crypto market fell into a long winter of disinterest. That meant less mining, less energy expended, and fewer Nvidia chips sold. The ERC-721 protocol for NFTs on Ethereum was standardized that same year, OpenSea was launched, and NFTs became a new “front end” on crypto: a meme, 10,000 variations on a cartoon image, something almost like “art” sitting like a tag on a bunch of tokens, pretending to give them value. And the whole grift gave people the sensation that they were supporting artists, not just investing in another crypto pyramid scheme. The NFT art sales were really just a way to bolster the underlying crypto currencies. And the crypto currencies just an excuse to burn more oil, mine for more rare earth minerals, and produce more data centers and Nvidia chips. The tail wagging the tail wagging dog, Even art became the calling card for forever money and the deadly pyramid in which it accumulates.

And when that whole marketplace got so bloated it crashed, what happened? A new savior came in to justify the metals, the slavery, the energy, and the chips. That’s right: AI. Even without a demonstrated function, AI became the new space race. Its primary purpose was not to enable better thinking, but to keep the Nvidia chips in production, and even bigger processing centers than they needed to mine for bitcoin. AI is just the new face on crypto. Think about it: AI companies measure their quarterly results in what metric? Tokens! That’s what we spend when we use the stuff. We’re transforming our time, thought, electricity, groundwater into what? Tokens!

Yes, they’re tokens of code in the processing blocks of AI computers instead of tokens of coin in the processing blocks of crypto computers, but the metaphor holds. We’re turning more and more of the real living world into dead tokens. More human cognition into AI slop. Forever slop. While rotting our living brains in the process.

In order for AI companies to make money, we turn physical matter, human labor, and cognition itself, into tokens - while robbing the world of resources, people of liberty, and humanity of thought. And given the economic hole we’ve dug, we have to somehow have to create 40 trillion dollars worth of tokens in the process.

That’s going to be hard with China now offering free AI. Alibaba and others are out there, online, for free. Yes, China has put big filters on it to prevent users from learning about Chinese history or treatment of the Uighur people today. But unlike the filters on Grok, it doesn’t spew disinformation. It simply says “I cannot answer that question,” or that the output contains “inappropriate content.”

Anyway, their low cost versions of LLMs shows we’re pinning our economic hopes on a commodity that can be rug-pulled. Tokens. Tokens. Remember “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins? The old lady sitting on the bench, “Feed the birds, Tuppens a bag.” Tuppence. Two pence. Give the old lady two pence, and she’ll convert them back into seed or breadcrumbs or whatever real thing you get in the little bag to feed the birds. That’s the transformation we’re looking for. From token back to stuff. Figure back to ground. Money, back to life. (And Mary Poppins? That’s a movie about a magical goddess—Super Kali—who teaches a banker to make his life about his kids and his suffragette partner instead of about money.)

So what to do? You can’t get rid of money entirely, but you can live by a different metric. Such as: amount time spent with friends, depth of your conversations, number of insights, philosophers understood, music played… This was what we called “slacking” when we got out of college in the 1980s to a world with no jobs. We temped at coffee shops or grocery stores. I tutored SATs, waited tables at weddings, transcribed legal depositions, and played cocktail piano a few hours a week, and optimized for leisure time, conversations, intellectual freedom, and writing for no money. They called us lazy, but we were working—just not for money.

We can do that today. And as we learn to live more for these other metrics, we will be contributing less to the pyramid and instead finding lateral means of support such as offering our couches to people “between homes,” or making meals together. We reduce the need for the forever chemical money balance sheet.

And when we do use money, so be it. But let’s optimize for flow, regeneration, and life. Keep it in ram, not the hard drive. Moving, so it doesn’t leach into our flesh. It can’t be digested, only circulated. So let’s lean into those principles of flows and generosity and see how it comes back. Make money as soft and temporary and valueless as it really is, and maybe something better will come to replace it.