Reddit mentions of Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams

Well he actually goes a step further, a good deal of Graeber's anthropological work goes towards examining alternatives to capitalist and state capitalist economic arrangements. Gift economies, markets, etc.

His anthropological work shows that there are different origins for currency but I think you might be interested in stuff like "Towards An Anthropological Theory of Value"

>This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.

Or some of the work done by his forebears like Mauss' "The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies"

>Since its first publication in English in 1954, The Gift, Marcel Mauss's groundbreaking study of the relation between forms of exchange and social structure, has been acclaimed as a classic among anthropology texts.

>A brilliant example of the comparative method, ?The Gift? presents the first systematic study of the custom—widespread in primitive societies from ancient Rome to present-day Melanesia—of exchanging gifts. The gift is a perfect example of what Mauss calls a total social phenomenon, since it involves legal, economic, moral, religious, aesthetic, and other dimensions. He sees the gift exchange as related to individuals and groups as much as to the objects themselves, and his analysis calls into question the social conventions and economic systems that had been taken for granted for so many years. In a modern translation, introduced by distinguished anthropologist Mary Douglas, ?The Gift ?is essential reading for students of social anthropology and sociology.

I agree that this would be a cool project. If we are investigating the process by which user data becomes a commodity, then Marx's concept of commodity fetishism would also be an interesting lens to analyze the relationships between users of social media, user data, and the owners of the social media platform.

For those interested in an interesting reading of commodity fetishism, I recommend checking out David Graeber's Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (you can also find PDFs of this book floating around the internet).

The answer you are looking for is either:

Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams by David Graeber

or

Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein

but

The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss is the cornerstone of the field and very enjoyable, though shorter than the other two. It may be helpful to have read Mauss in order to understand the previous two mentioned.