His mother shrugged impatiently. “I don’t know, Wes. Probably not. We couldn’t get our hands on a bottle of wine like that now if we tried.”
“So—wow!—that’s another variable, relating to cost but not overlapping perfectly with it. Something to do with exclusivity, accessibility.” He was glowing now with good cheer, nodding vigorously over his notations. He hooked his thumbnail on his bottom front teeth, chomping down hard to catch his racing thoughts, and his mother swatted at his elbow to make him stop. “For some reason, the Duncans can get a hold of something you can’t.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” his father said.
“OK. What we’re dealing with here, then, is a situation in which Cost, Rarity, and Exclusivity on the Duncans’ side is, if I’m hearing you two correctly, getting balanced on your side by factors that aren’t individually as valuable but that, in combination, eventually add up to comparable value, like the fact that Mom’s going to use time and skill to make the fresh ravioli, and she’s going to go to a local merchant for the cheese. So another factor seems to be not value but the extent to which the purchase adheres to Values, in the moral sense, though—fascinating—that only means anything if the Duncans happen to share your middle-class liberal values, or if you can at least make them feel, for the space of a dinner, that your liberal values are superior to theirs, whatever they are.” Under “Societal Values,” he listed Environmental, Civic, Economic, and Nutritional.
“What’s totally crazy to me is how you’re able to keep all of these different kinds of values in your head at once—how you can even value all of these things at the same time. If the farmer’s cheese contributes to the meal’s Societal Values, because the cheese is organic, and therefore healthier, and local, therefore better for the community and the environment, why would you even want to drink an Argentinean wine that has to be shipped thousands of miles?”
“Oh, Wes,” his mother said miserably.
“And for that matter, if you’re a person who cares about Societal Values in a liberal, middle-class way, why does it even matter to you if your meal is equal with the Duncans’ meal? Why not just enjoy your friendships?”
His parents were glaring at him.
He hit Save on the sketch pad of lists and equations, filed them, and shrugged. “Anyway, I’m going to go play some Land of Shadows before dinner,” he said, his mind, for now, already on to the next thing, which was whether or not he would be able to assemble enough Coin of the Realm to advance his clan to Level Sixteen before the coming Catastrophe that was being advertised in all of the LoS feeds.
But in the coming weeks, those equations he’d jotted down for his parents started to nag at him. This certainly had much to do with playing Land of Shadows and analyzing his own desire to accumulate Coin of the Realm, and how that Coin, the quantity of which was visible to any player who wanted to check his stats, affected his influence in that virtual world, granting him powers (spell casting, life after death, speed, swordsmanship) as he played. He watched his mother and father carefully, listening to their desires and complaints, noting that so much of what seemed to aggrieve them in life was tied to money: how there was never enough of it to live as they wished, and how the culture of its use was abstract and unspoken, with rules that everyone was expected to follow without ever having been taught them. Why? Why did people live like this when they could just live like the Land of Shadows players? The LoS feeds reported to Wes, usefully, information such as “Clansman Zor Greatship acquired 5,000 Coin of the Realm by battling Clansman Dagon Quicksilver” and “Clan Leader Mero Redfinch spent 250 Coin of the Realm to acquire a Lifeforce Restoration Spell.” It helped Wes strategize, knowing that it might be useless for him to battle Mero Redfinch if Mero could just cast the Lifeforce Spell if he lost. And that time he let Lissa Pollywog borrow 500 Coin to purchase a Silver Shield, he set his feeds to alert him when Lissa had gone on to acquire enough Coin to repay him along with the 10 percent interest he’d charged. At that point, he could either retrieve the money from her account or negotiate new terms. Why did the real world not work like this? One day, he overheard his mother complaining about her sister, his aunt Meg, and how Meg had still not returned to her the eight hundred credits his mother had loaned her for a rent payment, even though she (his mother) knew that Meg had since gone on a clothes shopping spree and come home with, among other things, a very expensive pair of suede riding boots. If the real world were more like Land of Shadows, Wes thought, then his mother could have simply collected the credits as soon as Meg had earned them rather than muttering about Meg behind her back and all the while acting to her face like things between them were hunky-dory.
Programming was a bit of a hobby for him, and he had to submit an honors dissertation to be approved for early graduation, so in the next year he created the architecture for what would essentially become Pocketz Beta. The system was based on two core ideas: transparency, so that conspicuous consumption became regulated and systematized; and nearly fail-safe accountability, meaning that credit exchanges could happen person to person, without a lending institution acting as a go-between. Money was entirely virtual now, had been since well before Wes was even born, and so what point did banks serve, anyway? A credit was not a dollar. It was not substantiated, however arbitrarily, by some gold reserve in a vault. It was, he had learned that day of his parents’ conversation about the Duncans, an abstraction, an emotion, potent as love and as impossible to harness or define. So why not create a system that made apparent those abstract qualities that gave a credit its power, that made plain who had the most Coin of the Realm and how they were willing to spend it? Why not make the unspoken rules spoken, and reveal rather than obscure the power dynamics driving value exchanges? If the child is spending the parent’s money, the parent knows on what. If the debtor has the funds to repay the lender, the lender can reclaim what is owed. If more participants in the feed are spending credits on BoostJoose than Rola Cola, let that determine the relative credit value of energy sodas, at least until the trends shift. By the time Wes submitted his honors project, he had created, he believed, the framework for an economic utopia, an entirely self-regulated market system that resisted fraud and inflation and made apparent the true nature of Societal Values, however contradictory those values may prove to be.
“This is very inventive,” his honors advisor, Professor McGregor, said. Her voice was brittle and nasal, her tone patronizing. “It’s a clever idea, though perhaps a cynical one. You’ve taken the relationships out of social networking and left the ads.”
“I think that’s a gross simplification,” Wes said.