Excerpt

The Inflation of the Self

Anecdote of the Jar
By Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

It begins with the act of placement. A single object, introduced into chaos, becomes a principle of order. Meaning radiates outward from the imposition of form. Structure ignores the wilderness; it requires the assertion of a boundary. All that follows, the interpretations, the systems, the selves are the aftermath of that gesture. To put something down and call it central is to invent a world around it. Our understanding of value, identity, and even truth proceeds the same way. Satoshi (we’ll get to him later), by naming a protocol, placed his own jar upon the digital hill. He created meaning from nothing Ex Nihilo Creatio. He defined the circumference within which meaning could unfold. In this sense, the axioms of this book belong at the end, not the beginning, allowing you to enjoy the wilderness while you can.

The jar, gray and bare organized the wilderness. It gave the sprawling, slovenly world a center, a point of reference. The act of naming a new identity, of placing a label upon the chaotic landscape of the self takes the raw, undifferentiated material of feeling and impulse and gives it a form. It makes the wilderness of inner life surround it, no longer wild. A diagnosis, a subculture, a political affiliation, a personal brand, these are the jars we place upon the hills of our own consciousness. They take dominion everywhere. They create order, but they are themselves empty, gray, and bare. They do not give of bird or bush. We gravitate towards these organizing principles aimed at comprehensibility.

Where once the jars were placed for us by church, state, and tradition, we each now hold the sovereign power to place our own. The promise of the twentieth century’s great liberations was that you are not bound by the jars of your fathers. The cultural machinery that enabled this was, at first, slow and analog. The human potential movement of the 1960s and 70s was the first great central bank of the modern self, teaching that identity was a creation. The language of “self-actualization” and “finding yourself” was a subtle misdirection; the real project was one of self-construction. You were a printer running the presses of your own identity. It was once said that spirituality is the phantom limb that America developed in lieu of culture.

As the monetary world embraced the dizzying possibilities of fiat finance, the psychological world kept pace. The 1980s and 90s saw the rise of the therapeutic culture, which provided the technical vocabulary for this self-printing. Where once one might have confessed the sin of sloth, one now managed the symptoms of ADHD. Where once one struggled with a lack of piety, one now cultivated self-esteem. This was a change in the underlying metaphysics of the self. The new categories were tools to be used, narratives to be deployed. They were instruments of self-definition, and their value was in their utility. Did a label help you organize your wilderness? Did it make your life more legible to yourself and others? Then it had value.

The internet, when it arrived, was the high-speed printing press for this new currency of the self. It provided an infinite wilderness in need of jars. The early web, with its forums and blogs, allowed for the creation of the first digital micro-tribes. But it was the advent of social media, with its demand for continuous self-performance, that triggered the great inflation. The logic of the platform is the logic of the central bank in a crisis. It must incentivize the constant creation and circulation of identity units to keep the system from seizing up. Every new profile, every new post, is a small issuance of social currency.

This is how we arrived at the Weimar Republic of meaning. In the early 21st century, the minting of identities accelerated beyond any stable measure of value. On platforms like Tumblr and later TikTok, the proliferation of micro-labels, aesthetic categories, and diagnostic self-identifications became a kind of hyperinflation of spirit. The creation of a new identity "otherkin," "demisexual," "neurotypical" was once a significant act, a substantial jar placed carefully on a high hill. As the rate of issuance increased, the value of each individual label began to plummet. When anyone can, with a few keystrokes, declare a new category of being, the sheer quantity of declared categories ensures that each one carries less and less existential weight. The wilderness, flooded with jars, becomes a junkyard. The center cannot hold because there are too many centers, each one gray, bare, and demanding dominion. Rube Goldberg machines of perpetual motion.

In this economy, attention becomes the only peg. Just as a fiat currency’s value is ultimately pegged to the credibility and power of the state that issues it, the value of a fiat self is pegged to the quantity and quality of attention it can attract. Attention is the gold of the 21st century, the scarce resource in an economy of infinite meaning. It is the backing. An identity, no matter how meticulously crafted, is deemed worthless if no one is looking at it. Its value is determined by the market’s belief, and belief is measured in clicks, likes, shares, and follows. This is the brutal logic of the social feed. What we see is a real-time ticker of the credibility of our self-declarations.

This system creates a perverse form of liquidity. In monetary terms, liquidity refers to the ease with which an asset can be converted into cash. In the identity economy, liquidity refers to the ease with which an aspect of the self can be converted into attention. The most liquid assets are those that are most easily traded. To name but a few, outrage, vulnerability, aesthetic conformity, moral certainty and physical beauty. The illiquid assets are those that are slow to mature and hard to display. These are deep character, private integrity, quiet conviction. The market, therefore, incentivizes the production of liquid selves. We are encouraged to perform the parts of ourselves that can be immediately understood and valued by the crowd, to keep our identity circulating at all costs.

To understand the imperatives of liquidity in the fiat identity, we must first recall the moral parables of the gold standard era, where value was tethered to scarcity, and the hoarding of that scarce resource was the cardinal sin. In those tales, the wilderness was not flooded with infinite jars but constrained by the finite weight of metal, and the stories warned against those who would lock it away, starving the system of its lifeblood. J.R.R. Tolkien's Smaug, the great dragon of The Hobbit, embodies this archetype of villainy. Perched atop his mountain of pilfered gold in the Lonely Mountain, Smaug does not spend, trade, or invest his hoard, he sleeps upon it, his scales encrusted with gems, his breath a furnace of possessive fury. The treasure, wrested from the dwarves of Erebor, represents the very substance of their civilization, gold as the backing of dwarven identity, forged through labour and lineage. Smaug, by removing this finite resource from circulation, desolates Lake-town and the surrounding lands, creating economic barrenness where prosperity once flowed. In the gold standard morality era, hoarding is an act of cosmic imbalance, a dragon's greed that withers the world. The gold, meant to underpin exchange and growth, becomes inert under his bulk, a sterile monument to isolation. Tolkien, drawing from Norse myths and the medieval ethos where wealth was tied to communal honour, paints Smaug as the ultimate antagonist. His downfall, pierced by Bard's arrow, unleashes the hoard back into the market, sparking renewal, as the redistributed gold rebuilds communities and forges alliances.

This theme echoes in the folklore of Robin Hood, the outlaw archer of Sherwood Forest, who emerges as the heroic counterpoint to the hoarder. Robin hood is a redistributor in a world of rigid scarcity. In the ballads and legends that span from the 14th century onward, Robin reclaims ill-gotten gains from corrupt sheriffs and abbots, agents of a tyrannical state that hoards taxes and tithes under the guise of divine or royal right. The gold standard of medieval England, where coinage was backed by precious metal and debasement was a crime against the crown. Robin, with his merry men, operates as a shadow economy, ambushing convoys of gold-laden mules and returning the spoils to the dispossessed serfs and yeomen. His is a virtue of equilibrium, restoring the natural flow of value in a system where hoarding by the few (the Prince Johns and Sheriff of Nottingham’s) disrupts the social order. Far from anarchy, Robin's code is chivalric, loyal to the absent King Richard. In this gold-backed parable, the moral weight lies in circulation through justice. Gold hidden in vaults or extorted from the land loses its lustre, becoming a curse, while gold returned to the hands of the productive, who are in this case the farmers, craftsmen it revitalizes the commons. Robin Hood, then, is the gardener of scarcity, pruning the overgrowth of avarice to let the wilderness flourish anew. The irony that a modern trading app bears his name is almost too perfect. Robinhood Markets Inc. gamified stock trading for retail investors while routing their orders through high-frequency trading firms, extracting value from the very flow it claimed to democratize. When amateur traders organized to squeeze hedge funds during the GameStop saga, Robinhood halted trading, protecting institutional wealth at the expense of its users. The app invoked the outlaw's mythos while serving the Sheriff's interests, a fiat-age perversion where the symbol of redistribution became the mechanism of extraction.

Charles Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge, the miserly countinghouse keeper of A Christmas Carol, crystallizes this condemnation of hoarding into the figure of the Victorian capitalist strangling the life from Industrial Revolution London. Scrooge clutches his gold in ledgers and locked coffers, his warehouse of wealth sterile as Smaug's hoard, yet more insidious for its legality. Scrooge's underpays Bob Cratchit, denies coal for the office fire, and spurns the charitable collectors who plead for the destitute freezing in the streets. In Dickens' 1843 England, still tethered to the gold standard's discipline, Scrooge embodies the pathology of liquidity withheld. His sovereigns and guineas, hoarded against spectral anxieties of poverty, are removed from the circulatory system of community, a tourniquet on the economic body. The ghosts who haunt him on Christmas Eve reveal the wages of this sin. The Ghost of Christmas Present shows him the Cratchits' meagre feast, their joy throttled by his parsimony, while the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come unveils his own death, unmourned, his wealth scavenged by servants and dealers, circulating at last but too late to redeem his name. Scrooge's conversion, his frenzied generosity on Christmas morning, the prize turkey sent to the Cratchits, the raise for Bob, the donations to the poor, is Dickens' moral corrective. The hoard, once released, becomes a torrent of vitality. In the gold standard era parable, Scrooge's redemption is both spiritual and economic, the recognition that gold sequestered is gold dead, and that the true measure of wealth lies in its velocity through the hands of the living.

These gold standard era moralities, with their emphasis on the perils of hoarding and the heroism of redistribution always struck me as odd because I was not born to this age. They highlight, by contrast, the psychological and economic shift that has taken place.

To discover where your own Fiat Identity is valued in the attention economy, take the Identity Matrix Quiz now.

Back to Overview