Status Games: Engineering Scarcity in a World of Abundance

My fear is that the structure of the individual as profile based around quantified status games, has eroded our ability to recognize the intrinsic value of interaction — and in this loss we enable a path towards commodified consumption and transaction around what was previously everyday interaction.

With information effortlessly transferable at zero marginal cost and social platforms that blast content to the top of everyone’s feed, it’s difficult to for an ethics based on scarcity to sustain itself.

If we can democratize access to a veblen good, status becomes about being a part of something, rather than how much money you have. We already see this in products like Fractional and PartyBid, which enable collective ownership of highly sought-after NFTs, as well as in products like RabbitHole, which allow users to earn crypto by using the latest

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Life, put simply, is all about status. I recently read W. David Marx’s book Status and Culture —thanks Bryce Ferguson for the rec—and that fact was my clear takeaway. The book subtly changed how I look at the world; when you start to pay attention, status dictates nearly everything in our lives.

In the book, Marx argues that:

1. There is no human soci

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