Globalization tied to semiotic exchange decimates all natural diversity in favor of pure uniformity, leads to extinction through biodiversity collapse.

It is often acknowledged that centuries of globalisation have reduced both cultural/ linguistic and biological diversity (Emmeche, 2001; Maran & Kull, 2014: 47; Eriksen, 2021, 2023). As Claus Emmeche observes, “[w]hat looks like increased ‘semiotic freedom’ so to speak, becomes in fact increased uniformity and a standardization of nature” (Emmeche, 2001: 249; cf. Eriksen, 2021). In listing eight ‘key principles of ecosemiotics,’ Timo Maran and Kalevi Kull declare (as Principle 4) that “[h]uman symbolic semiosis (with its capacity of de-contextualization) and environmental degradation are deeply related” (Maran & Kull, 2014: 45). Having traced the feasibility of the money sign to the human capacity for symbolic reference, we turn now to how money is connected to globalisation, decontextualisation, and loss of diversity. Fundamental to all semiotic inquiry is the insight that meaning is contingent on context. Over billions of years of evolution, semiosis has driven diversification and speciation by calibrating the genetic codes of organisms with their specific ecological contexts. However, the past six centuries of human history have been characterised by the diametrically opposite logic, closely tied to the ramifications of money: evolutionary success has been geared to being independent of context. In various ways, this tendency preoccupied the major social theorists of modernity in the 19th century, whose reflections were succinctly synthesised in Anthony Giddens’ concept of ‘disembedding’ (Giddens, 1990). Drawing on Simmel and other theorists of money, Giddens demonstrates the central role of money in generating the social conditions of modernity (Giddens, 1990: 22–26). Karl Polanyi, too, focused on the fundamental transformation of society brought about in 19th-century Britain by all-purpose money and the ‘disembedded’ market (Polanyi, [1944] 1957). Whether we refer to it as ‘capitalism’, ‘modernisation’, or ‘globalisation’, the logic of money has pivoted on decontextualisation. Commodity fetishism, cosmopolitan personalities, and universalising knowledge production all have this in common: they presuppose and encourage the capacity of exchange-values, people, and concepts to detach themselves from the particular and the local. Whereas premodern semiosis tended to enhance embeddedness in local contexts, modernity and globalisation have favoured mobility, interchangeability, and abstraction. In terms of political economy, this is to observe that ‘exchange-values’ have become hegemonic at the expense of ‘use-values.’ As Baudrillard has shown, use-values are semiotically determined (Baudrillard, [1972]1 3 Signs of Life and Death: The Semiotic Self-Destruction of the Biosphere1981; Sahlins, 1976). Exchange-values, in contrast, are quantitative and prone to digitalisation.2 The expansion of money and the global market has transformed the selective pressures shaping the formation of both social and ecological systems. The ‘survival of the fittest’ is no longer primarily about calibration within ecological or local contexts, but may increasingly be a matter of transcending or emancipating oneself from the specific. The logic of selection in the modern, globalised world benefits both cultural and biological generalists (Hornborg, 2023b). The organisms, objects, and thoughts that are most likely to spread are those that are least dependent on context. This drift toward decontextualisation is ultimately a corollary of what I have proposed is a fourth mode of reference: a (money) sign that liberates interpretants to imagine its referent as they fancy, almost without constraints. The uniqueness of the money sign is that it does not communicate any indication of what it might refer to, whether through contiguity, similarity, or convention. This level of semiotic freedom appears to represent a threshold where its repercussions no longer generate increasing diversity but rather the opposite: accelerating entropy. It is the point where freedom from constraints shades into anarchy. Paradoxically, the sign that most historians and not least economists celebrate as the epitome of human progress is simultaneously the root of the global ecological crisis that threatens us, along with innumerable other species, with extinction. At this point in history, further progress must mean acknowledging the semiotic basis of the Anthropocene predicament and assuming control over our own semiosis. As Per Aage Brandt observes, ”[w]e may have to discuss the possibility of ’sustainable symbolization’ and, thus, of the sustainability of money as such” (Brandt, 2017: 156). He pertinently asks, ”Can money be changed into something less pervasive and destructive?” (Brandt, 2017: 160).3 A semiotic perspective on money might focus on how it relates to context, difference, and entropy. It is a sign, invented by humans, that neglects all contexts, recognises no differences, and conveys no other message than to increase entropy. It thus operates so as to reverse the evolution of complexity and diversity throughout the planetary biosphere. Ironically, the thrust of this evolutionary process has for several billion years been a struggle against entropy by generating ever more complex layers of ‘difference that make a difference.’ The challenge confronting humankind is whether to allow money fetishism to mindlessly continue to dismantle such differences, diversity, and complexity, or to assume responsibility for the sign that was to serve us but has become our master. I have argued elsewhere that it would in principle be possible to redesign money so that it enhances contexts, diversity, and complexity (Hornborg, 2017b, 2019, 2023c). This is not the place to reiterate the scheme; suffice it to say that the basic idea is to recognise more than one currency and to distinguish between them as referring to separate spheres of value, separate functions, and separate scales of geographical reach. It would mean inscribing difference and A. Hornborgsensitivity to context in the sign system through which we engage each other and the remainder of the semiosphere. In investing intentions in the design of our currently vacuous monetary signs, it would signify a momentous advance in semiotic agency.