Just musing aloud:
The community dynamics discourse around the social media is also about pushing the Dollar/Pound currency to the background and bring out the alternative currency( that the community constituents care) to the forefront.

In the good old days when digital computing was non-existent or expensive, Money served as (representational) object model for manipulation. Just like the highly manipulatable bits of the Information Age. It is no coincidence that Money was one of the first objects to be digitized.

Now with falling computing costs (representational) digitization of other trivial/non-trivial objects is possible. This direct representation can offer much better Liquefaction than Money. And interestingly bypass Money as we know it!

As Stephen points out, we need better metaphors to understand/accelerate the shifting of Money to the fringes. Lest the lack of metaphor create captain Keens for UnMoney.

BTW, JP, I loovvee TiddlyWiki for its Live-Code-Is-The-API and Rewrite-as-you-may-Here-and-Now approach. If you accept API as plumbing, then TiddlyWiki is indeed an example of Information Liquidity on steroids with a sugar coating. It is a landmark in democratization of opensource.

So your liquidity isn’t some original primordial soup of meaning, cut safely adrift from the metaphors of your tokens by virtual of it’s own metaphoricity (is there such a word?) – it’s part of a chain of metaphor in its own right. To refer to the last comment – there actually isn’t anything beyond metaphor and what metaphor wishes it could point to. An aside on liquidity – the idea of dissolution, of washing everything away, of erasing meaning is something that is seemingly set up in opposition to the idea of a token, of something definitively representative. So you have the token representing the unrepresentable or representation representing the wiping out of representation.

What does that leave you with? The responsibility to follow your metaphors as far as they go or as far as you wish to negotiate an accommodation with them . In this case, the nature of your metaphor makes me think about the similarities between money and what money represents or tries to tidy out of sight. Or information once passed into the digital stream and a set of copyrights in a safe.

Or maybe I’ve just been out in the sun with my 3yo too long today! Sorry for blathering on!

To some extent this also reflects on your observation about records. The idea that a memory leaves some kind of tangible “trace” can be found as far back as Aristotle. By the twentieth century it had been given the more technical-sounding term, “engram.” Karl Lashley spent the better part of his career trying to find engrams and wrote a great paper towards the end of his life on his failure to do so. These days we have “wet brain” theorists like Gerald Edelman who have pretty much dispensed with looking for records and take a more verb-based approach to trying to understand brain processes; and that kind of approach is now reflecting on advancing our understanding of the nature of memory. Perhaps you should think of your wallet as nothing more than memories of your past activities!

By the way, the scope of metaphor goes way beyond rehearsal. I believe we cannot EXPRESS our ideas WITHOUT metaphor (not to mention all the other tropes). Lots of people claim they learned this from George Lakoff; but, at least in the history of modern linguistics, the idea goes all the way back to Roman Jakobson!

It was the liquidity bit that most intrigued me, the liquidity of information. And something more, something to do with how information changes in form and structure, how the liquefaction changes the cohesion and rigidity of the original substance.

Something else also intrigued me. When I liquidate an asset and turn it into money, all I have is a record, a token, of what my asset is “worth”. But by then it is already part of trillions of bits.

I will wait for more comments from others, I am sure that I can improve on the metaphor and get to some place where things are clearer. But the only way I can do it is to stick the unwieldy metaphor up as a target, so that people cut it down to size.

Metaphors are just ways of rehearsing ideas.

P. S. I cannot remember if, in Herrick’s time, the term liquefaction was being used by the natural philosophers to describe the process of rotting!