Text 10: Figments of Collective Imagination – Money (2021)

Money was a purely mental revolution. It involved the creation of a new inter-subjective reality that exists solely in people’s shared imagination – regarding the book Money by Yuval Noah Harari.  

Throughout the development of money I have seen from the book, from the age of hunter-gatherer society which life hugely relied on reciprocity, that of the Agricultural revolution the idea of barter and that of the complex commercial system – the money system we have been living today, money is one of the strongest inter-subjective imaginations human has trust. These arouse me to think about how does animation really work in human’s inners. As I always claim that animation is a medium working indispensably with human’s inter-subjective reality, but it has never seen obvious compared to the existence of money. Yet, at least, I would say I think animation works in a different function. It does not play aggressively as a concrete element in societies, but it has been in and also seeped through daily life human’s activities. The long-term network of political, social, economics and other relations which is very complex in societies has created the trust of money and the creation of this trust occurred by many exchanges of human’s shared imagination, a space of animation.  

In the present day, the new era of money – digital money: bitcoins, decentralised finance coins, and other digital currencies having been being exchanged in digital space is the next unimaginative and unforeseen figments of human’s collective imagination.  

For me, animation is not a material reality. It is a psychological, metaphorical, ideological construct. It works by converting matter into mind and mind into mind. So, the inter-subjective reality which is one main of the entities of animation is going to massively work in this world and the significance of the strong point of animation will be focused, rather than welly known by mostly on entertainment purpose hitherto.  

The Book: https://www.amazon.com/Money-Vintage-Y-N-Harari/dp/1784874027