From a Bobby Pin to a House in 28 Trades

This story from WaPo is supposed to make me feel good.  It doesn’t. 

It tells the story of Demi Skipper, a 30-year old TikTok enthusiast who works at Cash App, a mobile payment service.  She was quarantined during the pandemic and watched aTed Talk about a guy who had traded up from a paperclip to a house in 14 trades.  She set out to replicate his accomplishment and managed to buy a house for $80,000 in 28 trades.  

Now, she claims that her plan is to renovate the house (the expenses will be covered by a sponsor) and trade it for a bobby pin.  Her goal: to be the first person to trade up from a bobby pin to a house TWICE.

It’s a nice story. It should make me happy.  I always start my contracts course by telling students that contracts are mutually beneficial transactions.  As a result, they make the world a better place.  If you want to make the world a better place, I implore, maybe you can work for a human rights organization, but you can also be a transactional lawyer.  Bring people together and let the hedonistic calculus do the rest.

Why doesn’t the story make me happy?  Admittedly, this says much more about me than it does about the story:

• It feeds into my crypto/NFT/SPAC/no-name deli in New Jersey-fueled anxiety that our global valuation system is a house of cards that could collapse at any time;
• That anxiety taps into a deeper anxiety that we have entered a Felix Krull fantasy world in which the schein/sein distinction has been so thoroughly blurred that people no longer can tell or no longer care whether we can distinguish truth from lies, science from hokum, data from anecdote;*
• I don’t like the commercialization of celebrity for celebrity’s sake;
• I don’t like the aspiration of doing something for the sake of doing it and then monetizing it so that an unhealthy obsession becomes a lifestyle, an occupation, and an inspirational story designed to provoke both misguided emulation and self-lacerating envy;
• The stunt tells a hokey American message (even though a Canadian did it first) about how one can, through pluck, charm, and perseverance, accomplish the seemingly impossible, and that message creates false hope and a culture of aspiration that feeds into the false meritocracy that underlies so much of our economic disparity;
• Ms. Skipper’s penultimate trade was for a solar-powered mini-trailer, which was pretty sweet, but which she advertised for trade by calling it a great location for off-the-grid bitcoin mining — which is both misleading and a terrible, irresponsible idea, and as I result, I don’t like her.

Sorry about the rant. I’m grading.  It makes me grumpy.

* Those who know me well know that I am an un-reconstructed post-structuralist, with Derridean, Foucaultian, and Bourdieuvian modes of thought coursing through my veins.  Do I contradict myself?  Not really, but that’s a long story, so for now I’ll just say I am large; I contain multitudes.