Facebook Will Make the Money Now

Money is a technology. This is true, first of all, in a grand abstract sense: The human capacity to generate collective fictions is our most powerful and general technology, the thing that distinguishes us from other animals and enables long-term cooperation and complex societies, and money is one of the most important collective fictions.1 Humans were collectively able to decide that discs of shiny metal or sheets of engraved paper could be used as substitutes for all other goods and services, not because they were equivalents of those goods and services but just because we wanted them to be, and this decision created vast new possibilities for storing wealth and planning for the future and motivating human behavior and all the rest.

But most of us don’t walk around with a lot of gold coins or even all that much paper money, and the main actual technology of modern money is a bit more prosaic. It is the list. For most people who have money, most of their money consists of an entry in a list at a bank. Each bank has a list of its customers, and next to each customer there’s a number, and that number is the number of dollars that that customer has. It doesn’t, like, correspond to the number of dollars that the customer has; it is not a handy reminder that the bank has a box somewhere with a bunch of gold coins that belong to that customer. There’s no box. The dollars consist solely of the ledger entries at the bank.