The experience of money as no object

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Lately, I have noticed a few posts from people talking about, looking at, or buying new cars and most of them are looking electric or hybrid, something that I have been interested in for about 30-odd years now. While not ready to purchase yet, I am really planning that my next car is going to be something that I consider better for the environment, at least for the future when energy gets cleaner, as I expect it will.

However, I was thinking about if money was not a factor, what car would I purchase and without doing much research on it, I would likely get an all electric, something like a Tesla. It needn't be a Tesla per se, but I think that at least from the technological advancement side, they are doing relatively well and I reckon that 10 years from now, a Tesla of today will still be relevant in the marketplace.

But if, "money was now object", would your decisions change on what kind of car you would buy?

When it comes to items like cars and houses, we often fantasize about what we would do if we didn't have to consider the financial costs, but we don't necessarily do the same when it comes to every day consumables. For example, I am writing this in a supermarket cafe and I wonder, if *money was no object, would my purchase decisions change? Most likely, because while I could purchase what I want from a supermarket, I don't because I would rather spend the difference on something I value more. I still have opportunity cost to consider, as we all likely do.

However, this leads me to think of what I consider an important factor for Steem moving forward with SMTs and the way they could influence already developed communities. A lot of people talk about Facebook or Reddit integrating a token, but what they tend not to consider is the impact economic tokenization would do to that same community. As I see it, just like an unlimited amount of financial resource availability would change our purchase decisions, a community that currently has no economic incentive involved will be affected by including one.

We saw in the last hardfork (or two) how quickly economic incentive affects behavior as people shifted to the new code very quickly, and even those who fought against it came into the fold as the disincentive cost became larger than the gains to be made from change. Disincentive is just a negative incentive after all, and while people can argue over what is what, people acting upon disincentive are still acting in their own best interest.

Steem is an ecosystem where pretty much 100% of people who take part do so under the express understanding that this environment is economically incentivized and whether they care about it or not, they have implicitly agreed that it is going to have an effect on their experience, because it is going to affect the decisions and behavior of others. Remember, this is a community and if one doesn't consider that the behaviors of others have effects on themselves, they likely don't have a great deal of experience in a community. Maybe, they don't realise that their behavior affects others.

Regardless, it is general knowledge that Steem has a semi-working economy integrated into some form of social environment, something that other popular mass platforms do not have, or at least, do not explicitly focus upon. While monetization might be possible on YouTube for example, the average user does not join to take part in the monetary economy, they are an end user leveraging the service itself.

If suddenly an effectively non-user-monetized platform integrated something like an SMT into its platform, behaviors of users are likely to significantly change, meaning that the usage data up until that point could very well be irrelevant as the integration would have such a fundamental impact on decisions, and therefore experience. What would happen on Reddit if Karma points were suddenly worth 1 cent?

Would these people change behavior? What about all of the rest? What happens if there is the potential for the price to increase from there - or go down? Would people look for alternative ways to gather more Karma? Would there be spam issues? KarmaFarms (which sounds like a Facebook app for the woke)? How would the user experience change? Would the people who currently use the platform enjoy those changes once 50,000,000 people from the poorest nations on earth join in an attempt to add some revenue to their lives?

It is all well and good to compare Steem to other social platforms, but once monetization is actually available for all users, things get immensely more complicated and the incentives and disincentives that drove user behavior before the change suddenly loses relevancy. I think people underestimate how much impact economic incentive can have on people and as we see on Steem, this happens at even relatively low levels where people from the richest nations on earth are squabbling over amounts that are literally less than a cup of coffee or a chocolate bar in their own countries.

This is actually a good sign in my opinion, as it shows that there is a paradigm shift happening that disconnects Steem from fiat happening, and those who are taking into consideration the Steem aspect of earnings are making the mental shift. Those who are still looking at the dollar value however, are stuck in the "old economic world" or at least, a world that is hopefully getting replaced by better practices.

It is this process that adds value to the unvalued like Steem, and it is this that would shift any community that tries to do the same in what would be relatively familiar ways to us as Steem users, but not for those who are currently oblivious to the possibility that what they are doing could carry economic weighting. While it would be highly disruptive for users, for the new digital economies to be built, this shift has to take place where people change their behaviors to affect what they value.

Just like unlimited resources change our purchase decisions, adding a value creates the sense of a limited resource and that means, scarcity mindset moves in and affects behavior. We see it on Steem, we see it everywhere as for all of us in this world, economic availability is always limited, no matter what one has, it is just at which level of purchase it is limited to. While one might be limited to which brand of cereal they buy, another is limited to which car, plane or island. There are still limitations.

But, once things go digital, the limitations of the physical world disappear, though our paradigm shift at individual and community levels can take a long time to catch up with the availability of the limitless. SMTs are going to play what I consider a vital role in reeducating what value means and, what can be valued, and once they start to spread, there will be no chance to shut down the mental shift that the average person has begun, the one where centralization and restriction of opportunity through it, falters.

As they say, buy experience.
Money is just a concept we objectify.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

Onboarding



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4 comments
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Well if you're able to afford groceries at all aside from buying more "extras" outside of your staples that you might not normally buy I think people take that kind of thing for granted XD

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I think I would buy better cheese, as the cheese in Finland is both expensive and crappy :D

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