Status Games: Engineering Scarcity in a World of Abundance

NFTs tick a lot of the boxes of a successful social network from Eugene Wei’s Status-as-a-Service.

A social network like Path attempted to limit your social graph size to the Dunbar number, capping your social capital accumulation potential and capping the distribution of your posts. The exchange, they hoped, was some greater transparency, more genuine self-expression. The anti-Facebook. Unfortunately, as social capital theory might predict, Pat... See more

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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Humans have realized it's more efficient to actually compete for status in these virtual worlds than it is in real life, and that's especially true for young people

In a world of abundance, scarcity evolves. While pre-internet scarcity was about a physically constrained, or otherwise limited, number of resources, post-internet scarcity is about separating signal from noise.

If we accept that scarcity drives status if correctly applied, and that humans will change their behavior and open their wallets to attain status, creating it reliably and repeatedly should be valuable.