Cause you know, enthusiasm leads to collecting which leads to price speculation.

OHHHHHH SHIT THIS STARTS AN ECONOMICS DISCUSSION

So... what's the value of a plant? The article mentions tulip mania because of course it does but whatever plant we're talking about it's just a plant. The intrinsic value of a tulip is very close to nothing. The intrinsic value of a human being is less than a dollar. It's the extrinsic value where things get interesting.

An upside down plane fascinates us because we don't understand why a typo should be worth a million and a half... except we do. It's worth it for the same reason we anticipate our odometers rolling over every ten thousand miles, or when the hour and the date form a pattern, or Mars and Venus in conjunction or whatever. It's out of the ordinary and we're hardwired for that shit. Rarity is its own reward for humans.

But in order for that rarity to have extrinsic value, someone else has to value it.

Watchmakers are the worst. They're hoarders. Relentless hoarders of odd little tools nobody can understand but since it's a watchmaking tool, you can sell it to other watchmakers for way way way more than you bought it for (because you probably bought it as part of 300 other things you barely understand as part of an estate sale). Fortunately "way way way" in this case means $7 for some thingamajingus in a ratty yellow box that nobody needs because one well-placed grenade on a well-timed Saturday morning would wipe out every watchmaking enthusiast in a city of twelve million people. There just aren't enough people who need your mildewed yellow box to drive prices up.

Enter Instagram.

I just typed "plantfluencer" and found four thousand likes for this thing. 40,000 followers. Frickin' House of Garrard only has 140,000 followers and they've got some pretty potent influencers. So what we're looking at is a "market" where 40,000 people give too much of a shit about a plant while 140,000 people give too much of a shit about the literal Crown Jewels.

Note that none of these 40,000 plant people have to know anything about plants. It's probably better if you don't. After all, the currency is impressing other people with a shallow experience of plants. And as the actual involvement in those plants starts and ends with "take pictures with your iPhone" the actual expertise with those plants starts and ends with "is it in focus."

Yet the likes are real.

Thus do we get people paying $300 for monstera where five years ago it was $6 a pot at Home Depot. Because there's a market. There are people who will buy, which means there will come people who will sell, and when the people who buy aren't discriminating the people who sell aren't either and here we are, with a fake plant scandal on Instagram.

The postal clerk who sold the sheet later said he did not realize the image was inverted because he had never seen an airplane before.