Silver

This article is a field report on PorcFest, a libertarian festival. The festival is part of the Free State Project, which seeks to build a libertarian voting bloc in New Hampshire. Porcfest is also a temporary proof-of-concept for a utopian libertarian society. At PorcFest, the preferred money forms are those that contain precious metals (such as bits of silver or pre-1964 US dimes) and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which offer a kind of digital metallism. As a temporary site of economic alterity, PorcFest offers a reworked vision of shared value and trust in and between individuals.

ATMs

This chapter investigates the history of the ubiquitous yet banal Automated Teller Machine, or ATM. There is no single inventor of the ATM. Rather, it emerged through innovation around the globe and across the industry. In order to build a successful ATM system, engineers and bankers had to overcome challenges that ranged from security and authorization to weather-proofing electronics. This chapter surveys some of those developments. Increasingly, ATMs are being designed to offer a variety of services beyond dispensing cash. In the future, the ATM may prove to an important site of automated retail banking and consumer financial services.

Tallies

For millennia, humans have used physical tokens to record credits and debts. This chapter focuses on objects broken apart into pieces that can be put back together again to indicate an obligation incurred or a debt settled. From sheep’s knucklebones or clay potsherds in ancient Greece, to notched wooden sticks that could be broken and put together again, tallies were circulating records and tokens of debt, from Europe to China. Tallies emphasize money’s role as a unit of account rather than a medium of exchange, as well as its connection to interpersonal credit and, alternately, to its cooptation by the state. The author uses tallies to reflect on the ephemerality of money, debt, oaths and even love.

Cash

This chapter juxtaposes two artistic interventions into money: one, an “occasional coffee shop” where patrons are exhorted to “throw $$ on the floor;” the other, the work of artist MáximoGonzálzez, who creates installations out of cut and folded decommissioned banknotes. This juxtaposition allows the author so discuss the relationships among money, waste, art and payment. Venturing into “Squamuglia,” a pop-up coffee shop and/or artistic performance in Los Angeles presents an occasion to reflect on physical banknotes, art and philosophy with Squamuglia’s host, Ben Turner. Merging sound, objects, refuse, trees and branches, plastic, wooden beams and other items, Turner’s coffee shop went through diverse, always different iterations, each one, however, centered around serving espresso coffee drinks, and an exhortation to pay—or not—by throwing money on the floor. Ben would collect the money, which would usually have become dirty, and wash it with soap and a sponge before recirculating it. Yet he felt that this made the bills less “vibrant.” Money’s dirtiness or vibrancy also has to do with its relationship to the state, a theme explicit in González’s art.

Khipu

Khipu are sets of knotted strings used by the pre-Colombian Inkan Empire for record keeping. The chapter situates khipu in the history of accounting systems globally, and makes a case that some khipu may have conveyed similar information as double-entry bookkeeping, developed around the same time in Europe. Khipu cords were made from spun or plied cotton or llama or alpaca fibers and display three types of knots organized in complex arrangements of tiered clusters. Cords were spun with separate strings in specific patterns, too, allowing for a great deal of data storage. The Inka did not possess writing but used this accounting system and a decimal numbering system conveyed through knots to administer the empire. Double-entry bookkeeping in Europe contributed to the rise of capitalism; that double-entry khipu did not may be attributable to the Inka’s conquest by Spain in 1532.

Leaves

In the early 18th century, the American colonials were awash with both paper currency and its twin: counterfeit bills. Benjamin Franklin became a proponent of using leafs prints in currency as an anti-counterfeiting measure. Duplicating a leaf print is difficult not just because the resulting patterns are so complex, but because the original leaf is destroyed in the process. Franklin’s innovation, then, is that he shifts the burden of counterfeiting from copying the content of a note to discerning and iterating the process of its reproduction—even as that very process prevents the thing, the leaf, from ever being reproduced in the same way again. In this, we can see a kind of environmental nationalism: authority inheres not in the material substance of the paper itself but rather in the land that prints it and it printed upon it.

Tattoos

California indigenous peoples used strings of shells to serve as money. Their value was set by standards based on length, measured by tattoos on the arms of men of noble rank. The chapter discusses the history of shells and tattoos among the Hupa and Yurok of northern California, and the Cahuilla and Chumash in the south. In the south, only clan leaders, and not all man of noble rank, possessed tattoos. Where in the north shells were associated with the pursuit of individual gain and wealth questing, in the south, they had ceremonial functions and were associated with social hierarchy and prestige. Tattoos were thus records in the flesh of value, but different values.

Checks

In 1940, the first monthly Social Security payment in the form of a paper check was issued. Social Security was established by the United States government as a universal retirement system for workers. The Social Security check became a symbol of the social safety net for older Americans, and the relation of that safety to a lifetime of compulsory productivity. Over the years, there has been much innovation in the physical properties of Social Security checks, as well the systems that produce, distribute, and cash them. The Social Security, check, however, will soon become a thing of the past. With or without their cooperation, recipients are being transitioned to electronic direct deposit systems.

The Swipe

This chapter traces the meaning of “the swipe.” The verb “to swipe” has many colloquial meaning. In recent years, it has come to mean running a charge card through a digital reader or using an index finger to manipulate the touch screen of a smartphone. As smartphones become payment instruments, these two meanings have been united. The chapter explores the so-called “swipe fee wars,” being fought between banks, retailers, and phone companies to determine who will bear the cost of payment. As the business models move away from fees and towards extracting the value “big data,” a related battle is being waged over access to transactional data.

Receipts

The author remembers examples from her childhood and her adult life of the collection, management and curation of paper receipts: in so-called cash railways, mechanical devices used to move cash and receipts around a store; and the cigar box a relative used to store receipts. Receipts and their containers spotlight money as a unit of account, and the social, business, and personal significance of accountings and record keeping. Receipts are memories, not just of business transactions but of interpersonal relationships and values beyond the material. Receipts provoke conversation, and in so doing restore the symbolic and political dimension to otherwise impersonal economic transactions.