10,000 Years Ago, Elon Musk Would Have Been Casting Spells Into Feathers, Rocks, and Shells
How the ‘Technoking’ imbues assets with value in the same way medieval kings would
Where does money come from, and how did it get that way?
Most people assume that it all started with bartering, but the barter theory, popularized by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations — which supposes that human societies traded goods for one another before developing currency — has been widely disproven. No example of a pre-currency barter economy has ever been discovered anywhere on Earth.
Quite the opposite, in fact. The late 19th-century European anthropologists and ethnographers who conducted field studies among what were then perceived to be the “primitive tribes” of Africa, Asia, Australia, and Oceania reported at length about the role that symbolic media played in a wide and complex variety of rites, rituals, ordeals, and ceremonial sequences such as exorcisms, gift-giving, inheritances, marriages, oath-taking, punishments, ransoms, rewards, entry fees for secret societies, and as payments for corpses on their journey to the land of the dead.
If the first anthropologists who set foot on the shores of New Guinea thought they were going to discover bilateral exchanges of…
