Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff

Paid

Infrastructures Series

edited by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Paul N. Edwards

Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming

Lawrence M. Busch, Standards: Recipes for Reality

Lisa Gitelman, ed., Raw Data Is an Oxymoron

Finn Brunton, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet

Nil Disco and Eda Kranakis, eds., Cosmopolitan Commons: Sharing Resources and Risks across Borders

Casper Bruun Jensen and Brit Ross Winthereik, Monitoring Movements in Development Aid: Recursive Partnerships and Infrastructures

James Leach and Lee Wilson, eds., Subversion, Conversion, Development: Cross-Cultural Knowledge Exchange and the Politics of Design

Olga Kuchinskaya, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl

Ashley Carse, Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal

Alexander Klose, translated by Charles Marcrum II, The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think

Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities

Geoffrey C. Bowker, Stefan Timmermans, Adele E. Clarke, and Ellen Balka, eds., Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star

Clifford Siskin, System: The Shape of Knowledge from the Enlightenment

Bill Maurer and Lana Swartz, eds., Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff

Paid

Tales of Dongles,

Checks, and Other

Money Stuff

edited by Bill Maurer and Lana Swartz

foreword by Bruce Sterling

THE MIT PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

LONDON, ENGLAND

© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Maurer, Bill, 1968- editor. | Swartz, Lana.

Title: Paid : tales of dongles, checks, and other money stuff / edited by Bill

Maurer and Lana Swartz ; foreword by Bruce Sterling.

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2017] | Series: Infrastructures |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016028477 | ISBN 9780262035750 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Money--History. | Electronic funds transfers. | Automated

tellers. | Telematics.

Classification: LCC HG231 .M58655 2017 | DDC 332.4--dc23 LC record

available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028477

EPUB Version 1.0

d_r0

Contents

Foreword: Dead Money

Bruce Sterling

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Curating Transactional Things

Bill Maurer and Lana Swartz

1 Dongles

Scott Mainwaring

2 Checks

Lisa Servon

3 Tattoos

Lynn H. Gamble

4 Mag Stripe

David L. Stearns

5 Accounts

Taylor C. Nelms

6 Dogecoin

Sarah Jeong

7 Khipu

Gary Urton

8 Cards

Lana Swartz

9 Cash

Alexandra Lippman

10 Signatures

Bill Maurer

11 Tallies

David Graeber

12 Sharing

Maria Bezaitis

13 Leaves

Whitney Anne Trettien

14 Minitel

Julien Mailland

15 Receipts

Jane I. Guyer

16 ATMs

Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo

17 Greybacks

Keith Hart

18 The Swipe

Michael Palm

19 Ether

Rachel O’Dwyer

20 Silver

Finn Brunton

Illustration Credits

Index

Foreword

Dead Money

Foreword

Foreword

Bruce Sterling

I was charmed by this book. It’s chock-full of wonder and sadness.

I’m a novelist, but also an amateur historian of media. In my historical studies, I look for data with page-turning qualities, something eye-catching, marvelous, and maybe grotesque. Something that offers a high Cahill Factor, with the quirky and scarcely credible qualities of the legendary Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium.

Cahill’s Telharmonium, you see, was once a gigantic, sophisticated electronic music production and distribution system. It debuted in 1906. Mark Twain was a happy subscriber to Mr. Cahill’s commercial music-streaming service. The Telharmonium was the technical state of the art for Gilded Age Manhattan. Millions of dollars were wasted on this grandiose device. A mastodon in a tar pit couldn’t have died a more horrid and lingering death than this brilliant yet utterly doomed network machine. I’ve never yet written a work of fiction about Cahill’s Telharmonium, but since I know something about it, I can write books with heartfelt, melancholy titles such as Gothic High-Tech.

The Cahill Telharmonium, however, for all its merits, was never nearly so vast, so all encompassing, so ambitious, so horrible, so dinosaurian as obsolete money systems. This book is all about archaic systems of financial exchange.

It’s not a book about the fine hobby of numismatics, for metal coins, as physical objects, are romantic and pretty. It’s about the debris that are paper checks, bills, tickets, stubs, files, records, logs, accounts, and receipts, or magnetic stripe cards, dongles, Minitel units, and defunct ATM Bancomats—a huge variety of money management technologies, but, well, they’re all trash. Nobody mulls them over with the severe joy that collectors experience with their Roman imperial coinage and obscure French postage stamps. This dead financial hardware is disgusting rubbish, even pollution.

They were once of severe and painful value—the burden of a mortgage can kill you; a check that bounces is a lasting humiliation—but their worth on earth is brief, while their condition as junk is lastingly abject.

I surmise that this is why so many of the authors in this book feel a need to apologize for their keen interest in the topics they so entertainingly describe. This book is chockablock with technical wonderment. Who knew, for instance, that Benjamin Franklin printed fallen leaves into colonial American money because all-natural leaves are so hard for human beings to counterfeit? Who knew that the wife of Kwame Nkrumah kept a secret stash of Egyptian cash, robbed from her palace in an African coup d’état? But behind these bright sparks of historic erudition is a lasting air of mortal weltschmerz.

Why have we done such awful things to ourselves, just for our all-too-mortal systems of money? Take the Native Americans of California, for instance. These fortunate people were living in an area of nigh-utopian natural wealth and beauty, so it’s startling, and also depressing, to learn that these early inhabitants invested brutal effort and weird ingenuity in scraping and grinding coin-like tokens from pretty Californian seashells. Not only were these wampum-like strings of shell beads of critical importance to their own hunter-gatherer society, but they seemed to have no trouble at all exporting this system of value to everyone they could reach. They were the Silicon Valley of seashells as money.

People believe in money. But it just doesn’t last.

To judge by our modern ingenuity in storing money, shipping money, and repeatedly wrecking our society with vicious financial panics, nobody’s ever believed in money quite like we moderns do. What was once merely the root of all evil is now the root of our every whirring data packet. It’s a grim tale, and yet this fine book conveys a heartening sense of memento mori. This too will pass. All too soon, the dismal banking systems that pester us nearly to madness will be as corny and archaic as the French Minitel, whose national saga, deftly touched on herein, is even sadder than an Édith Piaf song.

Dead media can be extremely funny; silent film comedies are often wondrously hilarious. Money, by contrast, is never amusing. It’s extremely rare—unheard of, in fact—to find a coin or paper bill whose designers made a joke of it, or took the opportunity to say something witty to millions of users. Tombstones are more lighthearted than money is.

Yet there is one exception, as detailed in this book: the astonishing tale of the Dogecoin, an out-of-control Internet crypto coin that started as a wry meme joke and somehow became a form of money. Given that the Dogecoin was more or less money, though, a huckster and fraudster promptly arrived to ruin that digital party. Why? How? Read on.

Money is a distributed network computer whose circulation calculates value. That is its purpose. That is, unless you’re ancient and Inkan, in which case you’ve got a system of knotted and colored cords of llama yarn that is ideal for forcing preliterate people to work for their overlords. Money is always a system of abstracted exploitation. It’s like a language whose only possible vocabulary is who does what for whom.

That’s why people don’t love money. If you’ve spent your life writing diaries, you’re hard put to burn them, even if your death is at hand and they’re full of indiscretions. But if you’ve spent your life perched on Bob Cratchit’s clerking stool writing the double-entry books for Scrooge, everybody, including you, is secretly overjoyed when Scrooge and Marley’s warehouse falls to the purifying flames of history.

I’m a novelist myself, so I know that Charles Dickens was getting away with literary murder in that parable about the innate cruelty of money; he was utilizing ghosts, Christmas, and the crippled kid all to pretend that the people of Victorian Britain weren’t the planet’s financial overlords at the time of his own writing. Scrooge, Cratchit, and even Dickens were all making out like bandits at the cost of the rest of us. Everybody’s guilty; no one’s hands are clean. Why did Dickens write that story? Why does it last? Because money’s like that, and literature isn’t.

They were sinners, but so are we; the big difference is the Victorians lugged gold bullion in big canvas sacks while we rely on buggy, cranky, digital Rube Goldberg schemes that will soon be as dead as eight-track tapes and floppy disks. We’ve got authenticators, we’ve got connectors—but mostly we’ve got cheesy, reeking, morally rotten hacks.

Who will look with tenderness and understanding on our financial kludges, on the havoc we wreaked for objects and services with the life span of hamsters? The Ghost of Christmas Future, maybe. And the successors of the insightful people in this book.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Tom Boellstorff and Kevin Driscoll for their support and encouragement while we were completing this volume. We would also like to thank Jenny Fan, Julio Rodriguez, the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at UC Irvine, and the (former) Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing at UC Irvine for supporting the initial convening at which this volume was first envisioned. We thank Robert J. Kett for his curatorial work at IMTFI, which directly inspired this book, and for his help on our first payments party. We also thank the other participants of that convening: Mic Bowman, Alejandro Komai, Juliet Levy, Henry Lichstein, Daniel Littman, Erik Moga, Mark Moore, Donald J. Patterson, Katherine Porter, Gregory Waymire, and Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

Lana would like to thank Manuel Castells for his generous intellectual and material support. She received funding through the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication, Technology, and Society fellowship and the Balzan Foundation during work on this project. She would also like to thank Jennifer Chayes, Nancy Baym, Mary L. Gray, Tarleton Gillespie, Sarah Brayne, and Microsoft Research New England.

Maurer’s research on payment systems and technologies has been supported by the US National Science Foundation (SES 0960423 and SES 1455859). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

We are very grateful to everyone at the MIT Press for their work on this book. Series editors Geof Bowker and Paul Edwards saw merit in this book from the beginning. Katie Helke shepherded it through the next steps. Anonymous reviewers provided excellent helpful guidance and criticism for which the book is the better. We would also like to thank Margy Avery, Deborah Cantor-Adams, Susan Clark, Erin Hasley, Justin Kehoe, and Cindy Milstein.

This book is dedicated to Cooper and Rufus, who have never had to pay for a thing.

Introduction

Curating Transactional Things

Introduction

Introduction

Bill Maurer and Lana Swartz

Consider this book a catalog for an exhibition that never happened. Each contribution takes up an ephemeral object connected to the act of payment, a transactional thing that unlike metal coins or paper banknotes would rarely make it into a display case—or, in some cases, even be impossible to curate. Money is the most obvious transactional thing. It is used for billions of transactions every minute, the sum total of which we call an economy. Museums have money galleries, displaying coins, notes, and some of the other objects that people have used historically to conduct transactions—pretty things like beads, shells, stones, and metal ingots. Such items have been displaced by coins and cash, and commentators today predict the imminent demise of those transactional things, too, heralding a cashless future in the face of digital technologies of payment. Supposedly, the pretty things will get replaced by pure data.

Increasingly, however, monetary transactions have begun to require even more things. There are payment cards, mobile phones, electronic point-of-sale terminals, networks of wire, and webs of radio signals. Money-like things, too, have started to multiply. More and more, people are using frequent-flier miles, coupons, cryptographic currencies, and sharing economy platforms to conduct transactions. As sociologist Viviana Zelizer puts it, money multiplies, and how.

These payment objects and some of their ancient antecedents are the subject of this book—the transactional things that are often forgotten, ignored, or operate in the background, and the social, artistic, and political practices that sometimes bring them to light. This book is one such practice. It brings together writers from archaeology, history, technology studies, industry, law, and computer science, each of whom considers an object, turns it around on the page, and reflects on its place in the archive of human exchange.

The era of cash and coin, of tangible, physical objects serving to settle transactions, is relatively speaking a historical anomaly, especially seen from the point of view of ten thousand years of recorded human civilization. Archaeologists and historians of the ancient Near East have shown that money of account, recorded in transactional records, long predated the minting of coin or other tangible objects used as a universal equivalent for exchange. In the beginning was not the coin but rather the receipt.

So coins and banknotes are not the only transactional things. And receipts do not make themselves: there are whole technological and institutional apparatuses around the recording of transactions. Anthropologists have long talked about gift economies, which use other kinds of objects to record the transactions that tie people and groups together.

A great deal of attention has been paid to the thingness of traditional money. The US Mint calls coin collecting the king of hobbies and the hobby of kings. Most major museums feature a collection of gold coins, curious banknotes, counterfeits, and ethnographic curios of shell, stone, beads, and bones all taken as tokens of value. There is the sense that transactional things, in the form of money, connect us to the past and should be preserved.

But with rare exception, there are few people or institutions interested in preserving the stuff of new transactional things. Where are the charge-a-plates, the zip-zap machines, and mobile phone dongles? Today’s payment artifacts—along with their associated merchant guidebooks, authorization checklists, wires, and cables—are mostly regarded as trash. This is true even though pundits are perpetually proclaiming the death of cash, and even though the cashless society has been part of an idealized future for over a century.

One reason for this is because new transactional things don’t really seem like things. How, exactly, would a museum curator collect and display Bitcoin, the cryptographic currency (the British Museum has tried)? While some professors, entrepreneurs, and artists have made physical Bitcoins, these are mostly novelty items. Bitcoin lives in the blockchain, a dynamic transaction record produced in concert by a network of decentralized computers. Or what about the Automated Clearing House, the infrastructure responsible for much of today’s direct deposit and direct bill payment (though at least one money museum, at the Atlanta Federal Reserve, sought to curate it, owing to its significance for that regional branch of the United States’ central bank)?

Another reason why contemporary transactional things are rarely paid attention to is because it is part of their job to be invisible. The Square dongles that Scott Mainwaring describes in chapter 1 are given away for free, adding to their frictionless aesthetics. Like many critical infrastructures, most users only notice them when they are broken. When a point-of-sale terminal breaks, a merchant