Notes on Sign Value
Some thoughts on the internet, social media, the devil of money, and World of Warcraft; Baudrillard Lives in the Metaverse
The Values We Share
There are a number of kinds of value that explain why commodities are deemed valuable by people. Among these kinds of value, of which there are many, we will be discussing three of them today. These three values being, use value, exchange value, and sign value.
Use value is the tangible, physical, characteristics of a commodity that allow it to satisfy human needs, wants, requirements, or desires. For example, a car has use value since it fulfills the human want of transportation and in some cases, fulfills other wants for transportation. Use value is represented with the question “What can I use it for?”
Exchange value is not to be confused with the price of a commodity. Money-based prices are a reflection of exchange value, and approximate in measurable terms, what the exchange value of a commodity is. To return to our car example, some of the lowest pricing of a vehicle comes out of the used car market, where one is buying a vehicle purely for the use value, and as such, shitboxes are much cheaper than new cars, since they are more geared for the use value remaining in them. Even if a commodity has no use value for one individual, it still retains it’s exchange value, since another person can fulfill the use value of a commodity. So if you don’t like your current shitbox, that doesn’t dispel the fact that the shitbox still moves and provides some use. Exchange value is represented with the question “What can I sell it for?”
Finally we come to sign value. Sign value, in short, is clout. One does not buy a Ferrari for example purely because of its use value as displayed in the used car example. That is, for transport. If one was buying a car for use-value alone, one would probably buy the first shitbox that runs off of Kijiji or some other classifieds or used car dealership. Sign value is represented with the question “What does it say about me?”
Value in the 21st Century
Given the popularity of social media, cryptocurrency, cell phones, and everything on a screen in general, its no surprise that the material conditions of the 21st century have driven huge swathes of people to preferring sign value over use value. The use value of things is frankly, expensive for the vast majority of people living off of minimum and low wages and in a high expense environment where housing, utilities, and utility-adjacent (internet access) costs have become all that many in the West can afford. Those who could afford things of use value, those old school hobbies like woodworking, sculpting, golf, tennis, etc. you name it, are slowly disappearing as these hobbies and interests become more expensive to commit to and maintain the equipment of. In the 2020’s, if it involves labour and a bunch of equipment, it’s probably expensive.
In pre-computerized times, these hobbies you did held both sign and use values. Just having the equipment to play golf or hockey for example was a sign that you could afford to do that. Then just having the equipment became the “sign” that you were into that stuff, but only needed to own the stuff to convey that you’re a hobbyist in that field, rather than doing the activity. This has reached it’s modern form where instead of even owning a set of real clubs or hockey gear, you just buy the NFT because you thought they looked cool and maybe they’re somehow attached to this or that sports brand. Not only that, but a “used” NFT might be exchangeable for a profit, rather than at a loss, like real commodities with use value, since they suffer from wear and tear and other damage and so on. NFTs do not suffer this damage, since they are electronic and by extension, make for excellent signs.
This is the slow creep of sign value becoming prioritized over use value. It is not that use value stopped being useful, rather, it became too expensive for its use which is leisure. The hobbyists that came before will be slowly disappearing. In fact, hobbies are now also used for sign value and this sign value can earn you a lot of money if you can get enough people watching that sign. An example of this is those Azerbaijani cooking videos you see every so often on Facebook. The woman in the video is simply doing her chores, but the sign value of her lifestyle is where the value lies for her Western audience. The escape from the narcissistic culture that created this obsession with sign value to begin with, an escape from working for the ultra-rich. Just working a historic, traditional lifestyle that’s so distant it feels like fiction in the West is more desirable than the 9-5 grind that the people of the West were promised would make them happy under the most successful economic system in the world.
So why is the Azerbaijani cooking video valuable? Well because of all the ad revenue it has generated. It is a frequently viewed sign, having over 3 million views at this time of writing. Wherever there is a frequently viewed or visited place, so too are there ads. Advertisements derive their use value from being in places of high visibility. The internet is a highly visible place, especially given the amount of traffic all over the place. The advertisers don’t really care what the sign has on it, as long as it’s not grossly offensive since they do not want to be associated with grossly offensive things.
That is the crux of the meta-game of the tech-driven, internet economy, is the manipulation and control over where the traffic goes, since you can then control what the traffic sees and hears in their internet experience. If the traffic is all going on the same main “roads” to just a handful of places (facebook, youtube, google) then it is far easier for advertisers to manage their distribution. Ad distribution matters a lot, since they are the root source of a lot of cash flow online. Advertisers and marketing companies are willing to shell out a lot of money to make sure whatever it is they are advertising and/or marketing is seen by millions of people, if only once or twice. The bad thing about this method of ad distribution, is that it is very top-down, which flies in the face of how, like many things, the internet was founded in the first place: by a subculture(s) coming together.
Ads and the Internet
Advertisement has been around for much longer than the internet and even television so it’s no surprise that the more “lindy” format of advertisement won out, especially given that it was targeting the disorganized nature of the early internet. Before we had Youtube, all we had was America’s Funniest Home Videos (AFV), and AFV is controlled by a council of ancient arch-lector boomers that aren’t really that funny. The same arch-lector boomers come for the boardrooms of all half way interesting tech companies to soil them with the most milquetoast, sensible, rational, and utterly boring content possible so they could convince advertisers to come aboard and pump up the exchange value of these signs.
A sizable portion of millennials and now zoomers recall what the “old internet” was like, and that “old internet” in this case refers to the internet when it was run by hobbyists of their respective communities. Back when E-bay was about as big as any sales platform got and the level of trust was questionable. Back when among the most active forums was the massive array of shitty Geocities webpages. Back when the people running Geocities and a lot of these websites people were using had no clue at all about the nature of their users, why they used the website, and the rest of the wide sweeping data collection that is done today was not yet common practice.
“Hobbyists of their Respective Communities”
This massive array of forums is what the internet had instead of Reddit. Instead of subreddits, there was instead a small micro-forum for various sections and sub-sections of hobbyists, historians, roleplayers, gamers, or whatever it was a given community did in it’s online space. You went to the forum for information about a given topic and it wasn’t necessarily all sorted conveniently in wiki-format. Instead, it was all tribal knowledge that had to be extracted by slow-moving forum conversations. This kind of decentralized environment is what allowed for so many of these communities propping up instead of centralizing as they have now in the form of Reddit and various Wiki-style websites. Admittedly, Reddit is still basically just a forum with some fancy features and a more comfortable UI than Geocities pages and other websites used. However, what allowed Reddit to win out over all the rest wasn’t the quality of its website, Reddit didn’t out-use-value its competition. Rather it was the presence of its website on search engines as a quick result when searching for given topics. It was sign value that put Reddit into the spot it has taken in the wake of Web 2.0.
There’s a lot of sign value in being on the first page of somebody’s Google search results, or other search engine, but it is this position that advertisers are after. By extension, web developers also covet this position since they need the money advertisers hold. They can get this money by being in the first page of Google search results. Once both web developers and advertisers figured this aspect of algorithmic sorting out, it was an easy competition against all the communities that only had user passion doing the work on their website, without the first regard for something like search engine optimization (SEO) This pursuit of SEO is what killed a lot of the smaller communities and thus centralized much of the internet. By extension, advertisers’ desire to be as inoffensive as possible appeals to a large enough population of internet users who are so anxious that they are offended by the nature of reality itself, which is probably a part of why they’re on the internet to begin with.
Sign Value and Virtual Worlds
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a great example of this entire phenomenon. The game itself is almost purely sign value, there’s no tangible use to anything WoW has ever offered apart from keyboarding skills and for the particularly patient; conflict resolution skills. However, this sign value of WoW bears enough exchange value that the in-game currency, gold, has maintained an exchange rate to the USD, and other currencies for several years. While gold farming has been a problem for the game (and for the IRS) throughout it’s entire lifetime, it is now egregiously bad. Word of mouth has spread far and wide, WoW itself has become a gaming institution among hardcore gaming subcultures and communities. Having had a long and rich WoW career, especially on the classic version of the game (deemed as more difficult and higher quality gameplay by a sizable section of the WoW community) has some high prestige associated with it. Especially for nostalgic former players, of which there are millions. At it’s peak, WoW had a playerbase the size of Belgium (roughly 12 million subscribers). It is this prestigious sign value that players flock to the game for. Competition is high, the grind is long and arduous, but now it is the 2020’s and the internet is far more trusted now than it was in 2004.
A number of things changed the environment in classic WoW compared to its first release, but there are two main culprits. The first is the expansion of the internet since 2004. The second is all of the social norms that have changed alongside it.
2004 was prior to Web 2.0, so online communities were very decentralized, a lot of people still thought the internet was dumb (justifiably so), and in general, the internet was still “uncharted territory” for a huge number of people. I recall fondly my mother’s hesitancy to purchase anything from anybody on the internet around this time and now she’s a regular Amazon customer.
Buying things on the internet was very much weird, and it was only acceptable if you were buying off of an auction site like E-Bay or something because you were getting a tangible good with some use value and not just the latest and greatest in sparkle pony mount technology on World of Warcraft. And even then E-Bay was still seen as sketchy and untrustworthy.
Like that set of golf clubs collecting dust in the corner, a tricked out WoW character has the same kind of value: sign value. WoW might not be as popular as golf, but it certainly has a large following out-of-game.
Streaming, Gold Farming, and the Federal Reserve
In the present day, online transactions are totally normal, even for silly digital things like sparkle horses, in-game currency (even if it is against terms of service), and “boosted” characters. Outside of WoW digital purchases are also normalized in the form of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and the huge volume of other video games that have implemented microtransactions.
The fanatic pursuit of status, the pursuit of sign value in World of Warcraft, has pushed the game, at least in it’s classic version, into the realm of a metaverse business that revolves around the social norms of what remains of the WoW subculture. World of Warcraft Classic is not a game past a certain level of play, it is very much a job, especially if your job is to farm gold so some teenager can pay someone at max level with a bunch of high-tier gear to take him through this or that raid so he can get some proof of having completed that raid to enter a guild (basically an in-game company or group of friends). The fetish for credentials and measurement, this product of a narcissistic culture is so pervasive and tenacious, that it even invades the realm of gaming and pastimes.
While a number of players were nostalgic over the time-consuming grind featured in the classic version of WoW, a sizeable number of players rediscovered that it is an awfully big waste of time, which is crucial if you and your guild want to be among the first to clear new in-game content. Once GDKPs became the dominant method of organization, then gold became the hottest resource to collect and hoard, especially since its production is not regulated by the central authorities; The WoW development team.
Once transactions were introduced to the game that reduced the amount of time one had to invest to gain the sign value of certain achievements or possessing certain items (completing certain raids for example, even more sign value can be earned by completing the raid on hard mode) it would take only one more ingredient to make the puzzle complete, and that was changed social norms.
Streaming video games is a subculture within a subculture if you wanted to get right down to it, and streaming video games has been possible for many years. So why was it only relatively recently that it’s been making any dent at all? Well for the same reason the gold farmers are changing the nature of WoW; Because money is involved with it. The gold farmer makes their real world money (USD) by saving players time. Instead of wasting the time collecting gold in-game, the player pays USD to a gold farmer to give him in-game gold. In this case, gold farmers aren’t unlike the Federal Reserve system, giving each player who has regular access to gold farmers the power of printing money, basically. This power is very important in the current WoW meta. The reason being, that with online purchases being normalized and safe, users can buy gold without fear of risk. Gold is used in-game to bid on loot dropped
There’s a lot more players shooting for that sign value, that clout of being a good player, because now there is streaming services available that allow users to make money off of being a good player of video games. World of Warcraft is a hot ticket game for viewers to watch, and viewers do not want to watch unskilled players play the game. So in order to even attempt to build a following of viewers which can allow one to earn ad revenue and be remembered by their subculture as an influential player and streamer, there’s more incentive than ever before to have these achievements, items, and gold because it can not only be turned into fame in the WoW subculture, it can be turned into real world money and broader scale fame of being a famous streamer, which allows one to branch out beyond WoW. A good equivalent would be a musician who starts as a rapper, but then branches out into other fields of music.
The Looting of the Temples
The moral of the story about World of Warcraft above, is that the nostalgic good times memories of MMORPGs without microtransactions are going to be left as just that: memories. The sign value in something as popularized as World of Warcraft is too lucrative for a limping video game company facing legal pressure from various sexual assault and harassment allegations to pass up.
While a lot of the heavier handed metaverse content is unlikely to produce any noteworthy fruit, the “metaverse” that has existed before cryptocurrency will likely remain the same metaverse where the money is made. A lot of what made WoW successful, was the fact that you couldn’t just buy your way through everything the game could throw at you. It forced its players to work and struggle for a lot of what they had. A lot of the problems visible in the community now were visible before, but they weren’t problems when there was a culture of simply playing the game instead of sign value collection either just for the clout, which is entirely respectable, or in the foolish hopes of hitting it big as a streamer or something, which is entirely worthy of contempt.
Not that it’s impossible to continue enjoying the game the way it was meant to be enjoyed, however, the flood of players chasing the sign value that is clout, or the flood of gold farmers and bots following them eager for the opportunity to sell them in-game gold have altered the game for better or for worse. The MMORPG temples will be looted, as they are lowest hanging fruit. The same will likely be true for the DotA clones like League of Legends as well. It happened to WoW, it could happen to a sign value system near you!