Stories about objects left in the wake of transactions, from cryptocurrencies to leaf-imprinted banknotes to records kept with knotted string.Museums are full of the coins, notes, beads, shells, stones, and other objects people have exchanged for millennia. But what about the debris, the things that allow a transaction to take place and are left in its wake? How would a museum go about curating our scrawls on electronic keypads, the receipts wadded in our wallets, that vast information infrastructure that runs the card networks? This book is a catalog for a museum exhibition that never happened. It offers a series of short essays, paired with striking images, on these often ephemeral, invisible, or unnoticed transactional objects--money stuff.
Although we've been told for years that we're heading toward total cashlessness, payment is increasingly dependent on things. Consider, for example, the dongle, a clever gizmo that processes card payments by turning information from a card's magnetic stripe into audio information that can be read by a smart phone's headphone jack. Or dogecoin, a meme of a smiling, bewildered dog's interior monologue that fueled a virtual currency similar to Bitcoin. Or go further back and contemplate the paper currency printed with leaves by Benjamin Franklin to foil counterfeiters, or khipu, Incan records kept in knotted string.
Paid's authors describe these payment-adjacent objects so engagingly that for a moment, financial leftovers seem more interesting than finance. Paid encourages us to take a moment to look at the nuts and bolts of our everyday transactions by looking at the stuff that surrounds them.
Contributors
Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo, Maria Bezaitis, Finn Brunton, Lynn H. Gamble, David Graeber, Jane I. Guyer, Keith Hart, Sarah Jeong, Alexandra Lippman, Julien Mailland, Scott Mainwaring, Bill Maurer, Taylor C. Nelms, Rachel O'Dwyer, Michael Palm, Lisa Servon, David L. Stearns, Bruce Sterling, Lana Swartz, Whitney Anne Trettien, Gary Urton
About the Author: Bill Maurer is Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of How Would You Like to Pay: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money and other books. Lana Swartz is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Bill Maurer is Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of How Would You Like to Pay: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money and other books. Lana Swartz is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Lana Swartz is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Bill Maurer is Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of How Would You Like to Pay: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money and other books. Julien Mailland is Assistant Professor at the Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. Finn Brunton is Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press). Hugo Award-winning science fiction author and futurist Bruce Sterling has been called by Time perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today in any genre. Three of his novels have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and he has been a contributing writer for Wired since its conception. In 2005 he is Visionary-in-Residence at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Bruce Sterling's blog Beyond the Beyond has been active since 2003.
