In 1994, the electronic pop band KLF burned a million pounds — money they had earned by following instructions laid out in a book they wrote called “The Manual”. To this day, they deny having a conscious justification for that powerful act. One possible interpretation is to see The Manual & the Burning as two sides of a single central thesis: a rejection of the connection between labor-value and price-value implied by money, through a violation of expectations of transactionality.
The Manual is a get-rich-quick scheme — one that worked brilliantly for the KLF. Burning a million pounds, on the other hand, was harrowing and difficult, and yet not only decreased their personal wealth but decreased the total amount of money in circulation. Money is expected to be exchanged, and while we accept slack (the term, from The Church of the SubGenius, for ‘getting something for nothing’), we do not accept anti-slack (getting nothing for something). Getting rich quick implies getting poor quick in a system with a relatively-static or slowly-growing store of value, but we accept the idea that we can consitently earn profits while considering the kind of sudden disappearance of price-value that comes with market corrections (bubbles popping) as an anomaly — and so, intentionally destroying price-value comes off as a very radical act.
However, in a gift economy, the destruction of value of any kind is not only not radical but actually fundamental to the creation of norms. Free software was once this kind of…