hey if anyone on my friends list feels like it and has sum good knowledge i will venmo u 5$ to explain to me the way that tumblr talks about DID/multiples systems n stuff? this seems important to a lot of younger queer n trans folks and i wanna understand it (and also pay u for yr labor lmao)
I keep seeing this “pay you for your labor” thing and like … what is the goal? replace all non-financial transactions with financial ones? like I get that people think women do more ~emotional labor~ in families/relationships and that’s unfair but this is just a person asking if any friends (not necessarily female or members of any oppressed group) want to volunteer to do them a favor? and not even an onerous favor, it’s “talk about something interesting with me for a little while”
idk how I feel about this. I do think money is really great and maybe people should use it more in friendships, but otoh something about nonfinancial transactions building trust and social cohesion? also a society in which you’re expected to pay for friends to do you a favor seems uh, unfortunate for those who lack class privilege
This is kind of interesting. One intuition says that this is not an aesthetically appealing way of dealing with these things, while another thinks normalizing micro-tipping even in friendships could be useful, at least if implemented with a modicum of class awareness; even if one enjoys thinking of and discussing the ideas, making them into a more widely shareable post is more work than simply doing some rough and vague chat-style explaining and being able to incentivize the former with a small monetary reward to compensate for the effort would create more value in total.
I suspect that some of this could be related to an equilibrium of norms where friendships and money are supposed to be kept separate from each other and anyone trying to unilaterally break it ends up worse even if allowing the right kind of commodification could be a better equilibrium overall. It would be undesirable if such things were totally commodified so that anyone asking for favors would need to pay the market rate, but I do think establishing a norm of tipping for effort, possibly at levels comparable to generic western minimum wages when asking a specific person to do a specific thing so that people making such money could do favors to friends instead of working without losing sorely needed money as a result but asking for a lot more would be considered at the very least exceptional so the system wouldn’t degenerate to a complete money-market, would be at least worth considering.
All in all, I think the (seemingly pretty common) norms of keeping money and friendships completely separate do contribute to class segregation by making it difficult to socialize across class lines.
If we take the classic example of a poor person and a rich person going for lunch together, expectations of both paying for themselves result in staggeringly sub-optimal outcomes as either the poor one has to pay way more than they can afford, or the rich one will have to settle for a place that might not meet their standards. If the poor one tries to change this, they will be perceived as a moocher, while the rich one might be seen as condescending and/or flaunting their money if they offer to pay. As a result, people will inevitably feel a pressure to only socialize within their class on pain of social disapproval or material constraints.
In my experience this is a big problem in Finland where it’s very popular to keep up a socialdemocratic facade of pretend equality in which even acknowledging that people don’t all make the same amount of money is at best gauche; if done from below it makes people uncomfortable and if done from above it creates resentment at how does this nouveau riche asshole dare to violate the sacred law of Jante. Naturally, this doesn’t work very well when there never has been a situation where such claims would’ve been at all substantiated outside a quite narrow space of comfortable post-ww2 suburban segregationism.*
Pretending not to see race leads to greater racial discrimination, pretending not to see gender leads to sexism remaining unchallenged, so I’d be very surprised if pretending not to see class wouldn’t make undermining classism more difficult.
As a result I’ve been trying to personally chip away at these norms by using a different standard whenever possible: in friendships it should be totally normal and acceptable for people to share material things in reasonable proportion to their material wealth, without the need to match the absolute financial values of contributions. In practice this means I’ll never say no if someone with more money than me offers to pay for something, and I’ll similarly offer to pay things for people poorer than me (right now that seems to mean only @sinesalvatorem but growth mindset!), if I trust that the person I’m dealing with is able to understand, and okay with, it.
The practical results of normalizing such things would be expected to be: a certain degree of redistribution as some de facto commodification of friendships shifts costs of social interaction from poorer people to richer people; a consequent undermining of illusions when people whose company isn’t worth the price of a lunch discover it**; and hopefully a certain degree of adaptation for possible higher-inequality futures, because if only a few people hold most of the material income in the world, everyone else’s jobs being automated away, I’d very much prefer such people to live with norms that expect them to share.
The last part ties to a bigger pattern of incomplete and asymmetrical commodification in a money economy, which creates and maintains some significant inequalities. When only certain types of work are paid labor and others are kept out of the money economy by moral censure, it isn’t surprising that doers of the paid kinds of labor get privileged over others. Sex, housework, child care, friendships, emotional labor, military service (in countries with conscription), etc. are treated as sacred moral duties which must not be defiled with money, which very conveniently ensures that middle-aged men have a disproportionate control over money and other groups, who tend to do more of the uncompensated types of work, have lower power in society.
One could propose removing money altogether as a solution, instead of subjecting everything to monetary markets, but I think these alternatives aren’t as diametrically opposed as most people would be liable to believe. The artificial distinction into profane (men’s, paid) work and sacred (women’s, unpaid) duties*** seems to maintain a situation in which money-work can be treated rigidly while a community which doesn’t make such distinctions could be less of a straw libertarian dystopia in which everything has an exact price, and more of a comparatively relaxed gift-economy-ish sharing culture (at least if the general level of material scarcity is sufficienly low) with a closer resemblance to open-source than to YA literature. People would create value to each other, recognize their unequal material situations, and consequently optimize the allocation of the surplus value their interactions create in a way which integrates material sharing (money being simply one form of it, not the psychologically hijack-y high score to counterproductively measure and optimize for it’s now treated as) into the social fabric, instead of segregating the social and the material into altogether separate magisteria and ensuring a certain material hierarchy tied to one’s position in markets which are artificially restricted to disproportionately favor some groups over others.
Yes, it’s possible to object that this would be impossible, but my prior for such objections is that they’re in the same category as claims that Sweden can’t exist without inevitably turning into Stalin. At the very least, it hasn’t been demonstrated that our current division of paid and unpaid labor is an optimum no amount of skilled memetic engineering could overcome, while there are a lot of reasons to believe that it would be an accidental artefact of cultural and material conditions to a relatively large degree. I’d predict the strongest argument against it to be that I’m generalizing from myself and a set of other rather exceptional people when evaluating the viability of such norms and that more median individuals wouldn’t be psychologically capable of what it takes, but then one could reasonably expect that at least such exceptional people should be able to live by them.****
* I suspect such middle-class sensibilities would be common in most western countries, at least among the middle class; a working-class pride of never accepting help from others seems slightly related but noticeably different.
** This could be considered a good or a bad thing; I personally think it’s good and it also lets people who do get the paid lunches from better-off people feel a bit more comfortable in how their company is indeed actually valued.
*** Of course, it isn’t anywhere near this clear-cut, but on a statistical level the effect is strong; also this sounds very much like the exact same mechanism as is behind “benevolent” sexism, with prisons disguised as pedestals. Conscription is an interesting case because the arguments for it sound exactly the same as arguments against sex work, in favor of domestic slavery, etc. but directed at men instead of women. This is easy to understand as an instance of ageist oppression modulated by gender though, as it’s mostly young men (and people mistaken for them) whom it exploits without compensation.
**** Slightly unrelated but possibly illuminating: I’m always kind of weirded out by how many of the same people who insist that money shouldn’t be a measure of a person’s worth as a human being also insist very strongly on people having the exact same amount of it, with arguments that really sound like they think money indeed is a measure of a person’s worth as a human being. I do intellectually understand where they’re coming from but on a different level make up your goddamn minds please. If the median person treats money as literally serious business it suggests that the median person might not be able to adjust to the norms I want to live by, but damnit I want these norms and I already have polyamory, I’m not going to let the median person’s failings prevent me from having casual money too.
I have a feeling that the norms you proposed would be far more effective in casual interaction between acquaintances, colleges, etc. For example, if you don’t own a car and want to borrow the neighbor’s second car for a weekend, you might offer them some compensation for it. So you don’t need to buy a car you’ll use once or twice a year, while the neighbor gets to make some money in exchange for having to drop their partner off at their weekend poker night or whatever. Or if, like OP, you want someone to explain something fairly complicated to you, you might pay them a bit. This might work something like commissions do: since it’s socially acceptable for people to promote “please pay me for my art”, it seems like the leap to “please pay me for my knowledge” might be fairly easy to make. However, I think that within close friendships, this might not be the best system.
Anecdotal data: I have a few friends with whom I almost always meet over coffee or lunch. I’m the only one of us with a job, and the only one who regularly has cash with me, so I usually pay for food. On one hand, this seems to match pretty well the the model you described above: I have a greater ability to pay, so I do, since the pleasure of my friends’ company is worth buying them coffee once in a while. On the other hand, this is a completely informal arrangement which we never discussed, and I’m not sure if they even notice it. We just usually ask around if anyone has money on them, and it ends up being me most of the time. I’ve been feeling rather resentful about this recently, and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m expected to pay for them, because it’s not recognized that I pay for them, or because I’m spending money that could be used for something else important to me. I’m not sure if this is a data point for or against your the norms you suggested, but have it anyway.
One glaring flaw with this system seems to be that while the poorer people might discover if their company is “worth the price of lunch”, the rich would attract even more moochers (on top of the considerable social capital they already posses), while the poor would have a strong incentive to make friends with as many rich people as possible and ignore those with as less money. You could argue that a free lunch in exchange for company is a fair trade, but this doesn’t seem like a good environment to foster genuine friendships between different classes.
A possible way to test the viability of this might be to look at how different societies treat money vs friendship, unpaid labor, socioeconomic differences, etc., see which come closest to the standards you set out and see how that affects their culture, morals, economy, etc. I’m not sure how far this would go or how effective it would be, but it sounds like it might be worth a try. Anyone who actually knows history or economics want to chime in?
((please tell me if I missed/misinterpreted something you said))
Data points is best! So is criticism because good ideas don’t come out fully formed from a frictionless vacuum of mystical wisdom! In fact I suspect most cognitively formidable people are just really good at outsourcing brain functions and connecting some key dots others don’t. I definitely outsource my thinking a lot because it produces way better results.
“Pay me for my knowledge” is best ever. Artists (or so I’ve heard them constantly complain) suffer from people thinking they’ll do things out of the goodness of their hearts because True Art Must Not Be Defiled By Money and creating explicit norms of “yes, it is work and I will be compensated for it at my own rates” and telling non-artists to just deal with it helps, so philosophers, sages, and jesters should be able to have the same thing too.
If I tried to model that anecdote on my own brain I’d suspect being taken for granted would be the key problem, but I’m notoriously horrible at modeling others with my own brain instead of just treating them as black boxes that can be investigated empirically so this one could probably be just ignored.
The glaring flaw sounds more like a caveat or a qualifier but (…simulates…) the issue of the oversupply of sycophants pushing prices of company down is a real one. Focken moochers, people. The opportunity of predictably creates incentives for people to do fraudulent signaling of friendship by increasing the rewards of doing it successfully, therefore turning rejection of material favors into a hard-to-fake signal and damnit I knew there had to be a reason for why that focken fence was in such a silly place to begin with. (However, the markets would probably settle as the higher rewards from pleasing rich people would be balanced by more competition creating higher risks thus making the risk-aversion-adjusted expected returns for different socioeconomic strata not too mismatched. Then again, far more people waste money gambling instead of founding a startup so this speculation of people being anywhere near economically rational-resembling-ish must be discounted really hard.)
Okay: plan B: how to filter out the moochers and sycophants so that at least the exceptional ones can have casual money. It can be done at least in a limited sense because I definitely have done it successfully quite a lot without turning into a cynical moocher but my brain kind of has an obsession with sincere one-sided reciprocity in the vein of “I observe you have created value for me; let me create value to you too, fellow value-creating person”.
In some ways I fail to see what’s the bad thing in exchanging company for material favors voluntarily but this is probably why nobody should trust my brain in such things. A world where some people are players and others are pieces is unfair and manipulative, but there’s something aesthetically appealing about having a situation where all people are in on the game and know and understand the rules and just play with a sincerity that arises only from the abolition of pretenses of sincerity. That’s definitely casual acquiantance-level stuff only though, because Real True Friendships need to be possible so it might be necessary to have some secret or otherwise unfakeable protocol for “graduating” from “we’re playing games without pretending we’re not” to “we’re actually not playing games”.
So one possible solution could be to make it socially acceptable to play games and exchange social favors for material favors. Then the outcome would be casual money for exceptional friends, and mutually acknowledged games for a select category of casual acquiantances. At least players who know what’s going on are more entertaining company than clueless people (tfw you notice you just reinvented the MacLeod classification with gameplayers as the sociopaths, true friends as the losers, and uninteresting ones as the clueless) and sycophanty is harder to fall for when one starts with a prior of a knowing wink in one’s eye.
Also, overthinking is the best thing ever! Nothing interesting ever came out of never overthinking anything.
4 months ago · tagged #promethea's empiricism fetish #in which they discover they're either starry-eyed or a sociopath #troll desperately wants to say #why not both #also brain needs to learn eclipse phase is fiction not evidence · 30 notes · source: worldoptimization · .permalink
socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from rusalkii and added:The obvious solution would be to make casual money a mutually opt-in-only culture (which in fact is kind of exactly what...
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rusalkii reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:The reason I called the problem with moochers and sycophants a glaring flaw might, on reflection, be me typical-minding...
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wanderingwhore reblogged this from worldoptimization and added:That, or poor people who need the money will suddenly be doing people a lot of favors.The point is to establish a norm...
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