We tend to think of money as something tangible and, once you have it, it can be used interchangeably anywhere it’s used for procuring goods and services. But this is not really true.
From Matt Levine in Money Stuff:
But the response to the 2008 global financial crisis, and to its later European aftershocks, made it clear that something else was going on. Who has money and what they can do with it can be adjusted by the actions of central banks and national treasuries; banks can be bailed out; costs can be socialized. The fiscal response to Covid-19 reinforced this point: Money is a tool of social decision-making, not an objective thing that you get through abstract merit.
Besides the value of money being ascribed by people (e.g. one day we collectively decided Bitcoin was worth something) it behaves more like an instrument that can be used and tuned dynamically. This has some potentially powerful effects like deterring war with sanctions (as is being attempted on a massive scale on Russia’s war with Ukraine).
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The predominant system for managing data today pushes it far away from the people it represents. This is bad for the world because data is the primary way identity is represented (census, social profile, certification) and creates the grounds for exploitation (theft, ads, terrorism).