My on-going research into Revolution-era life lead me to a site with a bunch of collectible objects from the Hudson Bay Company. Aside from the fact that they are cool objects, it is interesting to me because most (if not all) of these objects were used as trade goods. That is, if you were a fur trapper or whatever, you would have x number of objects you carried with you. And if you met other trappers or Natives or whatever, you could trade with them objects you had for objects they had.

Maybe this doesn’t sound like a very big deal. But compare this to the way we treat objects nowadays - we just throw things into the trash and don’t think twice about them. The idea of “trade goods” represents a whole *other* system of valuing objects, one which would be sure to catapult back into the limelight should we ever face large scale economic catastrophe. Part of me wonders though: if we begin to re-value objects according to more classical or traditional standards, would that actually act as a hedge against economic catastrophe, because we aren’t storing all our value needlessly in functionally useless slips of paper currency?

On top of that, this idea of trade goods interests me from a future tech standpoint as well: I’m envisioning a future wherein we have digital devices and assistants which seek out files, data, etc on our behalf. The only way these agents would be able to find certain types of data for us would probably be through exchange. If you’ve ever used an old school FTP site for trading mp3’s or a BitTorrent site, you probably already know about download/upload ratios and words like “leeching“. These things interest me because they represent a step backwards to older systems of trade, while applying them in new technological contexts. This, to me, is where the future lies!