Let’s call it what it is—the gap. The distance between the sign and the value, between what’s real and what they tell you is real. You hold a dollar in your hand, crisp, clean, stamped with symbols and numbers. They say it has power. But the power isn’t in the dollar—it’s in the belief, the collective hallucination that this piece of paper, this sign, has value. And the farther we go, the bigger the gap becomes. More signs, less value. More noise, less meaning.
Finance is a hall of mirrors, reflecting back at you endless possibilities, none of them quite real. You think you’re making choices—invest here, buy there—but what you’re really doing is feeding the machine. You’re part of the spectacle, caught in the loop of generating signs—money, contracts, assets—that only exist to sustain themselves. It’s counterfeiting in the purest form, a conjuring trick that turns air into wealth and wealth into power. But where’s the value? Where’s the substance beneath the sign?
On the reactionary side they tell you Money used to be a stand-in for something real—gold, labor, land. Now it’s a stand-in for itself, a self-replicating loop of signs that point to nothing. And yet they do not seem to have a problem with the shapes it creates at the top. It shapes everything. It decides who eats and who starves, who drives a red Ferrari and who’s left with the scraps. Every dollar is a vote, they say, but it’s more than that—it’s the architecture of our reality. The economy bends to those who hold the most signs, and the rest of us? We’re left living in the gaps, in the spaces between the choices we never really had.
The Gap Between the Sign and the Value
Counterfeiting is the art of illusion. You’ve got the sign, all right—the dollar, the asset, the stock. You can print them by the truckload, flood the world with the symbol of wealth. But the value? It doesn’t materialize just because you’ve duplicated the sign. This is the gap, the rupture between the sign and what it’s supposed to represent. It’s not just about printing fake bills; the counterfeit runs deeper.
Look at financial services—aren’t they doing the same thing? They churn out new forms of money, securities, derivatives. They’re stacking signs upon signs, layers of abstraction that multiply like rabbits. But for all that multiplication, what’s being created? More signs, more indicators of wealth. Yet underneath it, there’s a hollow core—a failure to produce real value. This is counterfeiting in a suit and tie, wrapped in the language of economics.
Every time you trade a stock or bundle a loan, it’s another step removed from the ground. The asset becomes a symbol, then the symbol gets traded and turned into another symbol, and on it goes. Financial services turn the crank, generating signs of wealth without ever generating the wealth itself. It’s all valid, all legal, but it’s counterfeit in spirit. It’s the creation of something from nothing, without the labor or material that used to back those signs up.
And money—money isn’t just a tool of exchange. It’s a vote. Every dollar says what the economy will produce, where the resources will flow. You want red Ferraris? Then that’s what the economy will give you if you’ve got the signs to back it up. You want corn? Too bad if the guy with all the dollars wants something else. It’s not just currency; it’s a weaponized form of choice. The people holding the most signs get to dictate the landscape, what’s produced and what’s left to rot.
The real trick of the counterfeit economy is making us believe that it’s all real. That more signs mean more wealth, more value, more choice. But when the signs multiply and the value doesn’t? That’s when the gap widens, and we’re left chasing shadows, living in a world built on counterfeit choices.