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
