In 2021, many asked what would happen if finance colonized everything.

The fear was hypothetical: a world where relationships, expression, even desire itself would be packaged and priced. That future was always framed as something ahead of us, a horizon we might still divert. But the more honest answer is simpler in that, it had already happened. Social became capital in that a follower is collateral, attention is yield, expression is indistinguishable from advertising. Platforms trained us to live as instruments of exchange. Every gesture compounds. Every post is a derivative.

From there, inevitability takes hold. You can’t opt out without disappearing, and disappearance is a kind of bankruptcy. The question is no longer whether to participate, but what form of participation you choose. Many choose to sell themselves directly on these “social” platforms,  or can sell something else, a product, a skill, an abstraction. But even then the self bleeds into it. Selling the product means selling the maker. The line between who you are and what you market dissolves in these digital worlds.

The implications are heavier than economics in that identity becomes strategy and value systems reorganize around what can be tallied, not what can be lived. The same liquidity that animates markets floods into intimacy, friendship, trust. A few capture the flows, the rest tread water. 

Which leaves us here. We’re not debating what might be lost, but asking whether anything remains that cannot be priced. Finance didn’t just eat the world. It ate meaning. And what’s left is the uneasy work of remembering what once stood outside the market, before we all boarded the train that had already left.

In 2021, many asked what would happen if finance colonized everything.

The fear was hypothetical: a world where relationships, expression, even desire itself would be packaged and priced. That future was always framed as something ahead of us, a horizon we might still divert. But the more honest answer is simpler in that, it had already happened. Social became capital in that a follower is collateral, attention is yield, expression is indistinguishable from advertising. Platforms trained us to live as instruments of exchange. Every gesture compounds. Every post is a derivative.

From there, inevitability takes hold. You can’t opt out without disappearing, and disappearance is a kind of bankruptcy. The question is no longer whether to participate, but what form of participation you choose. Many choose to sell themselves directly on these “social” platforms,  or can sell something else, a product, a skill, an abstraction. But even then the self bleeds into it. Selling the product means selling the maker. The line between who you are and what you market dissolves in these digital worlds.

The implications are heavier than economics in that identity becomes strategy and value systems reorganize around what can be tallied, not what can be lived. The same liquidity that animates markets floods into intimacy, friendship, trust. A few capture the flows, the rest tread water. 

Which leaves us here. We’re not debating what might be lost, but asking whether anything remains that cannot be priced. Finance didn’t just eat the world. It ate meaning. And what’s left is the uneasy work of remembering what once stood outside the market, before we all boarded the train that had already left.