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- Money begins as a fable, told to explain discrepancies in the course of barter-exchange. It begins as an explanatory principle — like dark matter or God. An invisible essence, X, that binds the universe together.
- The origin of money is aesthetic: in exchange for goods, we offer glittering things, mysterious substances, bourn up from the earth.
- Money — from gold to bitcoin — has always been either mined or printed. Money is either incredibly difficult to acquire, or incredibly easy to conjure. There is no middle ground. Value seems to arise in the middle of these two tensions, which balance the scale.
- We cannot pay with our own goodwill — we cannot pay with our own good hearts: that is the human tragedy.
- Marxism is really just the very mystical awareness that money is merciless, a demon.
- Money is current-cy: its value is predicated on the present and the future; it has no use for the past. You have value when you have money, or will have some soon.
- It is a mistake to posit ourselves as the only intelligent agents on this planet, brains as the only substances which think. The ‘market place’ for example, is not just a metaphor for the circulation of currency and goods, it too is a thinking, acting substance: a God, which hurls money as Zeus hurled thunderbolts.
