EBAY AS HISTORY

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.

 - The Free Thinker.