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Common and fungible things are often considered boring due to the fact they are common and fungible. As a general rule people’s interest in something increases with the rarity, and things that are unique get studied and coveted by the richest and smartest in society. Commodities fall into the common and fungible, thus boring, invisible, and unappreciated by most, but these traits make them special in a the same way as basic elements like hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon.

Commodities are to the modern world what the periodic table elements are to life – the basic building blocks. Yet, they get overlooked in favor of the end products, consumer goods, fancy foods, and large scale construction.

These end products deserve the appreciation and attentions they get for the way they dazzle the imagination, inspire the creative, lavish the taste buds, and make one marvel at the power of human kind. Commodities deserve this kind of attention too, for without them we have none of these things.

Coal, currently despised by many for it’s immense release of carbon when burned, is truly a wonder of the modern world. Ancient plants, compressed and heated for millenniums into solid balls of carbon, now known as coal, can be burned for a large amount of energy. The transformation of carbon from plant to coal makes me wonder what the difference is between that process and the process to create oil (another commodity). Both of these fossil fuel commodities completely changed the way humans live for the better, but instead of marvel at this, or the way fossils turned into fuel, most of us simply label them as bad and unworthy of a place in modern society, better forgotten and banished than studied.

Precious metals such as silver, gold, and platinum are commodities and elements. Their unique traits have made them a focus of human civilization for thousands of years as money, and more recently a dozen industrial and technical applications. Silver is a key piece of solar panels; platinum is used in fiber optic cabals, wind turbines, pacemakers, and chemotherapy; palladium is essential to catalytic converters. Gold has no purpose in modern day society, except as a status symbol and globally accepted unit of value.

There are even new commodities being created. Data has become so critical to consumer goods, marketing, and modern technology companies that it is arguably the most important commodity in the world. The most powerful companies – Meta, Google, TikTok – are the modern commodity miners. Instead of gold, copper, or silver, they mine data. The profit margins, power, and influence bestowed to the winners of this modern commodity business far outstrip the BHP and Rio Tintos of the world, old school metal and coal miners who most readers have probably never heard of.

Chat GPT (Generative AI) has created such an uproar not because of what it does, but because it promises many more new things in the future and inspires the imagination. The immense amount of data used to create Chat GPT, and implications of future data needs for advanced technologies is less appreciated and just as important.

The study of how data is used, generated, and sold should be a much larger focus of study and interest by all parts of society. Perhaps data should be categorized as multiple commodities, much as there are multiple agricultural or metallic commodities. Shopping and medical data most likely have very different values, and should be regulated differently.

Human society and attention is easy captivated by the new. Great leaps have been made by those who strive for something that is only an idea, and are driven to pursue that thing regardless of setbacks and disbelief.

Commodities do not change, and their prevalence means they are easily ignored. Yet the largest leaps are often made by those that understand the basic building blocks the best. This suggests that an understanding of commodities, the boring and overlooked, is critical to creating and imagining the next leap, which will capture the imagination and attention of many. That understanding is almost always achieved through curiosity and genuine child-like fascination in how things work.

Given that commodities are the basic building block of modern society, it follows that studying them is key to grasping how modern society works. Just as studying the periodic table of elements is key to understanding life, understanding commodities is necessary to understand the modern world.

Trade systems, the military industrial complex, and food networks are all dependent on commodities. The global systems of power, economy, and conflict is a complex puzzle driven mostly by commodities. For the ambitious and curious mind interested in how modern society works – how we got here – the study of commodities is crucial. Energy, food, and metals, quickly go from boring to the most interesting of topics when explored through this lens.

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