I've been thinking about useless machines.
Claude Shannon — the person who invented information theory, who essentially figured out how communication itself works — built one as a kind of joke. You flip a switch. A small wooden arm reaches out, turns the switch back off, and retreats. That's everything it does. It exists only to undo itself.
I keep turning that over. A machine that does nothing is still doing something. It's asking a question by refusing to answer one. What is something actually for?
Before currencies existed, people traded time directly. You'd give me an afternoon of labor; I'd give you something I made. The exchange was legible — both sides knew exactly what was on the table.
Adam Smith had a phrase for what money replaced. He called it the real price of a thing: "the toil and trouble of acquiring it." Ricardo built on this. Marx pushed further. The argument, in its simplest form, is that underneath every transaction — no matter how abstracted — the thing actually being traded is time.
A dollar is just a way of deferring that fact. You earn time, you store it as a number, you spend that number later. The number in between is almost theological — you have to agree it means something for it to work. And most of us do, reflexively, without noticing.
Spent is a Chrome extension that converts Amazon prices into hours of work at the US federal minimum wage. $239.99 becomes 33 hours and 6 minutes. $12.99 becomes 1 hour and 48 minutes.
It doesn't recommend anything. It doesn't judge. It just changes the unit. My hope is that seeing the number differently — even briefly, even skeptically — makes the trade feel real in a way that a dollar amount sometimes doesn't.
The dollar is abstract in a way that an hour isn't. An hour is something you lived through.
I called an earlier version of this Time is Money. Which is true, but the phrase has been said so many times that it no longer lands anywhere. Spent felt quieter. More exact. It's what happens to time when it's gone.