Chucky Brings It: From The Faraway

Nate, I hope things are well and the whitewater in the canals is firing.

I am writing to discuss stickers as one of the last surviving instance of "distance-value"... and with sufficient distance stickers serve as a signaling connection to the faraway.

Let's split an object's worth 

• what it's useful for
• how far away you got it.

Mary Helms explains it cosmologically; distant places are and were understood as charged, closer to the origin of things, so goods from them carried that spirit. Knowledge of far places worked the same way; it was a possession, not just information.

The part i am stuck on is that the cosmological distance assumes what it should explain... why do humans seem to universally revere distant places?

"costly signaling"  is suggested as an alternative where a display is believable because it's expensive; cost to some is the guarantee of honesty. Consumers, especially the uninformed, often use cost as an indicator of quality (sound familiar?). 

Prestige goods (stickers) start as advertisements of skill and knowledge and advertise the quality of your external contacts and your mobility. The Kula Ring is a cool example, where a chief's standing rested partly on displaying valuables at home after the voyage. The object was proof of the trip...

What makes stickers a clean case is that the material value is near zero, which is to say it is not useful beyond what it signals. There is a largely uniform industry of production, limited artisanal craft, limited scarcity, and limited labor.

Peel all that away and the only cost left is the acquisition of stickers and the effort to display. The distance premium is isolated and arguably purer than goods and knowledge that are useful, because with goods with a use, you can never fully separate the utility from the distance value.

The obvious objection is that stickers are often purchasable, which should have killed the signal. I don't think it did, and the reason seems cultural: the best stickers aren't for sale. Free with purchase, or in the bin by the register. The only way to get one is to have been there, or know someone who was and collected said sticker for you. A sticker system that starts selling its stickers destroys its own currency.

The other thing I like is that stickers are mostly illegible to the uninformed. A sticker from some distant bike shop means nothing to almost anyone. That's not a failure of the signal, it's the design. The restricted legibility means the display screens for an audience that shares the knowledge. You're not broadcasting, you're waiting to be recognized.

Where I'm least sure on my thesis: "last" is doing a lot of work...

Passport stamps, race medals, park patches, tour shirts, geotags. these all still remain as distance signals. Maybe the claim is narrower... stickers are the distance valued item with no issuing authority. Nobody verifies them. There's no stamp, no chip, no timestamp. It's a pure honor system that somehow holds.

The internet and globalization have been steadily destroying distance-value for objects. Anything ships anywhere, so where a thing came from no longer says anything about who owns it. Stickers survived because what they certify was never the object... rather the associated knowledge and connectivity. Which makes stickers less a holdout than the form distance-value takes once objects themselves stop being unattainable.

school.rulebook