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Understanding McLuhan
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06734_Field_TCUM T299.txt
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1996-04-10
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Primitive commodity money, like the magical words of
non-literate society, can be a storehouse of power, and has
often become the occasion of feverish economic activity. The
natives of the South Seas, when they are so engaged, seek no
economic advantage. Furious application to production may be
followed by deliberate destruction of the products in order to
achieve moral prestige. Even in these “potlatch” cultures,
however, the effect of the currencies was to expedite and to
accelerate human energies in a way that had become universal
in the ancient world with the technology of the phonetic
alphabet. Money, like writing, has the power to specialize and to
rechannel human energies and to separate functions, just as it
translates and reduces one kind of work to another. Even in the
electronic age it has lost none of this power.
Potlatch is very widespread, especially where there is