I'm set to be stabbed with my second dose of sore-arm-juice later
today. The first dose doesn't seem to have counted for very much
because as soon as I got it all the media started talking about
second-done requirements for this and that. Mind you I don't want
to do any of the things now restricted to vaccinated people anyway.
Also it's ridiculously cold and wet for the end of Spring. The
puddles outside are bigger than they were in Winter and they're
predicting more rain to come next weekend (not that it's stopped
yet). Which is a pain because I want to be working on the Jag,
which stranded me at the lonely site of a vanished 19th century
mining town a few weeks ago, with nobody to talk to except a couple
of cautious horses as night descended. The shed where I work on the
car floods, you see.
Anyway, I thought I'd have a quick, cold, ramble about Ebay. As a
company they annoy me a lot, but as a platform they offer a
facinating insight into society. You see I was thinking recently
how the value of objects, though often discussed in terms of
rational features, is really purely a construct of society. Not
just because money is the agreed representaion of value, but
because the value one attributes to a particular thing compared to
another is only relevent in a social context. Without consideration
of other people, those two 'things' are effectively already your
own.
The complexity of the interactions that determines value is
incredible. With new goods it is obviously skewed a very large
amount by both marketing and of course the raw cost of production.
However used items, an area of trade which has been reshaped by the
internet far more significantly than that of new wares, reveals a
much rawer and more chaotic environment.
Age and rarity are nowhere near the prime factors for the value of
collectables. For one book, published like thousands of nearly
worthless others, during the Second World War, a person paid me a
while ago more than ten times as much as the $20 I paid for an
original WWII radar set CRT. At the same time I recently saw a pair
of 18th century books (particularly unusual in Australia) about
science sell for $55. To those aware of the collectables market
this may not be especially surprising; plus details are key, the
book I sold was written by a famous Australian author, the radar
CRT is't particularly distinctive to non-technical people, and the
18th century books were in a foreign language. Still these
'reasons' are really summaries of some vast assortment of
determinating factors marterialising in assumptions which are
actually extremely hard to apply to estimating the value of
something that isn't already sold.
Collectables, and of course pracical objects as well, also rely on
awareness. Generally, though excluding many influences from other
special factors, things have to be common enough for people be
aware of them before they will attract a significant value. Today,
if an object doesn't have a presence somewhere on the internet,
even if that's because it's so rare and unique that nobody has had
the chance to document it, often and especially with regards to
technical objects like electronics, it might not find a buyer for
any price. At the same time the value of a Commodore 64 has
skyrocketed over the last few years even though as an object it's
more common than any other computer from the 80s.
As a compromise to avoid ending up with mountains of old junk, I
keep my own little archive of listing photos and descriptions from
Ebay, for those rare objects that aren't documented anywhere until
some poor sole wastes their time trying to sell them. It's truely
amazing the things that get comprehensively phtographed and
(sometimes) described, probably for the first time, on Ebay. Only
to end up as a "sorry, we can't find that page" after a few weeks.
That, and the value of those items that do sell, I think has a huge
historical value. The Internet Archive are concerned about the
difficulties of scraping social media sites like Facebook, but I
wonder if they consider sites like Ebay as well. Granted the amount
of duplicate data with all the photos of C64s and modern
smartphones would be immense, and Ebay no doubt would try to
prevent even the archiving of textual sales data, but what a
remarkable record it would be. What a remarkable record it is.
