Fungible
Interchangeable unit for unit. One barrel of the same grade of oil is as good as any other. Money is the purest case.
The thesis
A solvent dissolves difference
A solvent is a liquid that makes distinct things lose their edges and run together. Money is the universal one. Drop almost anything into it for long enough and the particular dissolves: the forest becomes board feet, the song becomes a stream count, the afternoon with your child becomes an hour of foregone wages. What is left is a number, and numbers are interchangeable. That interchangeability has a name. Economists call it fungibility, and treat it as a virtue.
It is a virtue, for the things that were made to be traded. A dollar is useful precisely because any dollar will do. The danger begins when the solvent is poured over things that were never commodities to begin with, and dissolves the very qualities that made them matter.
Markets do not only allocate. They translate. And translation into price is never neutral, because it throws away everything that does not fit in the number.
This is an old observation. In 1900 the sociologist Georg Simmel called money the most terrible leveller, the tool that hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their incomparable value, by reducing quality to quantity. In 1944 Karl Polanyi gave the dangerous cases a name: land, labour, and money are fictitious commodities, things treated as if produced for sale that were not, and a society that lets the market govern them ends up governed by it. This page is a short demonstration of the solvent at work, and an argument about where to keep it out.
The solvent move
Reduce a thing to a measurement, the measurement to a price, the price to money. Each step discards what does not fit the number.
The residue
What the number cannot hold: meaning, place, relationship, the sacred, the irreplaceable. The market reports it as zero.
The demonstration
The solvent bath
Below are six things people care about, each with its own particular qualities. Raise the concentration of the solvent and watch what the market keeps. The colour is the difference. The grey is the price.
Solvent concentration0%
Pure waterFully priced
A forest is a forest. A song is a song. Nothing has been dissolved yet.
At full concentration, six different things become one interchangeable thing: a quantity of money. That is the trick, and the loss.
Markets expand by turning difference into sameness
The specimens, named
What the solvent dissolves
Six commons being turned into commodities, each paired with the thinker who named the move, and the felineunion edition that documents it in the field. Read the old hand, then read what it became.
Also on the press
Sister editions running off the same felineunion plates. Different subjects, one instinct: show the structure, let the reader draw the conclusion.