Chump Change

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Money is personal for everyone, in that we all need it; we’re forced to forge a lifelong relationship with it. Our financial histories shape the way we move through the world, how we think and feel, who we are, and who we can become. Money contains the power to render human beings objects in its image, and frequently it does. We too make objects in the image of money. At first, we did it with tokens. In 7500 BC, Neolithic tokens emerged alongside the development of agriculture, borne of the demand to store, and trade, goods collectively. Clay formed into simple shapes, representing commodities–grain, oil, livestock and human labor–became the first example of accounting, tangibly. 

Rachel O’Dwyer’s ambitious book, Tokens, details how these quasi-objects were also the first example of written record keeping: inextricably tying language and money, making the figurative literal. Clay tokens would later become a form of media, meaning that they “conjured the ownership of real things in the real world.” And now, the real world, or at least people in it, has conjured something at once hyperreal and maybe also completely fake: online tokens. How we got from clay to shitcoins, and the question of whether these two entities are even related at all, is part of O’Dwyer’s project. She charts the history of extra-monetary economies by prodding and attempting to define what tokens are, what they mean, and why we should care about them. 

She begins the book by writing that it’s a book about “things that are almost but not quite money” but “money-ish—money with a wink and a nudge.” By taking such a broad approach, she dispels the myth that tokens are a new or internet-native phenomenon. Marketing copy, ahistorical bloggers and public relations firms may have impressed upon the public that Bitcoin marked the beginning of our current venture into sub, or extra-currencies. It isn’t so, she writes: contemporary tokens slot into practices and places that have forever ghosted the “real” economy–accounting for exchanges of labor, commodities and things in-between which blur the edges of these things. In making this point, she delineates the “real” from the “fake” economy, or one which is bound to financial institutions, versus a subterranean, invisible one. 

O’Dwyer offers her study of tokens during a time when individual understandings of how systems, like the economy, impact us, couldn’t be more fractured or disparate. She writes that:

“The token is not supposed to be valuable for what it is in itself, in other words, but because of what it represents. This link between representation and so-called ‘real value’ is not only the biggest question surrounding the nature of money; arguably, it’s the biggest question surrounding meaning since the early twentieth century. The link between representations and things is what key questions of language, art and value boil down to.” 

These questions lead me to consider O’Dwyer’s work within the context of our economy, including cultural representations of debt, more broadly. I feel that contemporary tokens and pseudo-extra-monetary devices are an empty sign of a future that can’t escape the logic of capital, and the concomitant foreclosure of human possibility. Within the disorienting present, our financial system is brutal and unruly, and the status quo is predicated upon a vicious, ahistorical insistence that how money works now is normal, natural and logical. O’Dwyer refutes this, by insisting that how we represent and use tokens, money and money-like objects, has always been continuously subject to change and evolution. 

There is a broad, felt, palpable desire for financial systems to work differently for the majority of people. And, instead of expanding our view of value relative to money, tokens and hyperfinancialized products insist upon the value of ownership–often in spite of their stated goal, which purports to offer the opposite: community, agency, freedom. But tokens have perpetual plausible deniability, because they’re only half-there, and take on a bewildering, ambiguous quality. This is also how debt is positioned and discussed in our culture, one which values ownership, and private property, above all else. Debt becomes a phantasmic enemy at-large, stalking individual people the way the token’s empty promise of a rich future follows people across gambling websites, X.com and Twitch. 

You get the feeling reading Tokens that a kind of doubling happens: tokens represent not only a fluid monetary value, but also an alternative way of dealing with money and “value” writ large. But the promise of a functional, liberatory token is a functionally empty one as it stands–all systems, and users, are too deeply steeped in existing financial systems and the logic of capital. So, tokens become an empty sign of the future. They purport to offer a way out, instead, they gesture and swallow. And yet, the pull remains stronger than ever, and this empty promise is cynically utilized by predatory companies and financial services. This promise is co-created by advertising and public relations acting on behalf of industry: they are language manufacturers. 

Language is at the center of how the artificial and the surreal flow into, co-create and uphold our wide-open, worldwide, free market. The centrality of language in the creation and marketing of tokens’ quality makes them difficult to define. O’Dwyer argues they’re a kind of money with “plausible deniability”, often used on, or tied to, social media: “A streamer in a hot tub on Twitch is ‘just chatting’, and if other users choose to send her a token, then it’s all good. But it isn’t money.” It isn’t money, and she isn’t working: that’s the official line. Her ability to convert her tokens into cash isn’t spoken or broadcast, and it’s none of your business, too, since she’s just here to have fun. Whether we are using tokens for work or for play, how we talk about receiving them, and issuing them, shapes their ongoing legitimacy, or lack thereof. 

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US Dollars are of course defined in large part by their being “official”; an above-board, government-issued currency. Despite its waning presence, cash – that is, physical currency – still flows through the hands and wallets of people across the country, as it has for thousands of years across the world. For as long as we’ve used cash, people have been trying to make sense of what it means both as an agent of transmission and as an object. In detailing the literary history of the development of modern banknotes, O’Dwyer explains what they are thusly: fully transferable promissory notes issued by a bank, and payable to the bearer on demand. Because of the sprawling nature of Tokens, O’Dwyer’s succinct and precise definitions are critical to distinguish money from not-money, from kind-of-money. When banknotes were first disseminated, a strange new literature also emerged, one Mary Poovey calls “the literature of social circulation.” This 18th century category-genre involves tales narrated by money, such as Thomas Bridge’s The Adventures of a Bank-Note, which involves a token bearing witness to a life, and recounting tales of the people it meets along the way. There is a peculiar intimacy to the literature O’Dwyer describes, where money is spying on people, as it changes hands, making observations about the character and businesses of its fleeting owners. 

O’Dwyer also writes how banknotes carry “molecular echoes”: bodily fluids, parasites and traces of peoples’ lunches and their drugs. She writes that in the beginning of Covid, before countries had sufficient information about the virus, and how it was transmitted, governments took measures against cash-based virus transmission. In the U.S., money that had circulated in very covid-affected areas was physically quarantined: sick, dirty money. She also points out the fact that using cash can now almost be a bit bizarre socially, conferring a “whisper of a feeling” which is inarticulable in its distant strangeness. 

This peculiar, one-sided intimacy is a theme throughout the book, one which arises in both her discussion of how gamers and streamers are sometimes paid in non-payment tokens, and through Amazon wishlists, but also in the development of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Hyun Shin of the Bank of International Settlements called CBDC “money with memory” and predicted that through the power of computing, soon a vision of a “shared ledger of all past transfers” could be fully realized, material: a tangible, bureaucratic reality. And although the pandemic seemingly accelerated the trend towards state-enforced cashless economies, O’Dwyer says that countries have long incentivized cashlessness, as a way to monitor and police shadow economies, which could include anything from babysitting, to cash tips, to drug dealing, or animal breeding. Without cash, these industries can be surveilled, taxed and controlled.

On the surface, tokens beg to be differentiated from cash; this differentiation skirts a slew of legal issues. And yet tokens, functionally, can do many of the things the United States Dollar can: purchase items, pay wages, and store value. In fact, sometimes the only difference between them, and money, is that the issuing agent claims they are not money: at least not practically, and definitely not legally. In this way, tokens blur the edges between legitimate and “illegitimate” work, and legitimate and illegitimate transactions, which are still not exactly private. O’Dwyer connects the advent of the contemporary private credit scoring system to “nothing less than the birth of surveillance capitalism: the gathering and monetization of detailed transactional data at the behest of a private organization.” 

Whether you own your data, and what kind of monetary value your data holds, is a tangled, slippery issue that continues to swell in volume and complexity. Transactional data from individuals is not only subject to surveillance, but also connected to an ever-expanding web of technological and financial products which have ominous uses. In one example of this, O’Dwyer explains how Amazon’s 2014 patent for anticipatory shipping, which details a logistical model using browsing history analysis, builds a new kind of business model where this data is a fundamental resource, one interconnected with an ecosystem of ads, inventory management and risk analysis. Another example is Palantir prospectively integrating consumer data with sensors in the user’s environment from tags on clothing, or sensors in their home fridge, to “fine-tune inventory flow management”, ahem, buy them more stuff, before they even know they need it. For just $355.52 per year, could IDX Complete offer tools and solutions to stem the tide of some of this tracking, giving you your privacy back? Maybe–or maybe, like so many people, you’ve surrendered, or even leaned in, to being tracked. But whether you have the resources to exercise any semblance of personal agency over this overwhelming, private-systemic surveillance, is critical. Aside from the myriad questions about privacy, the value of convenience and surveillance, these trends also have complex and direct relationships to credit, user identity and insurance. And who doles out that credit, confers that identity? 

Thankfully for issuers, many people are all too happy to think of themselves as, and identity chiefly as, consumers. Others may have passively acquiesced, finding themselves in this position, which makes opportunistic tokens-as-media, and tokens on social media, a boon for identity-based targeting and marketing. And a substantial part of how contemporary tokens function is that it’s a business to make them a business. Social media, and Twitter in particular, are heavily featured in O’Dwyer’s survey of how tokens function, because they live there, are discussed there; they live and die there. 

O’Dwyer writes, “When Elon Musk invested in Dogecoin on behalf of his progeny in 2021, and briefly flipped the Twitter bird logo to a Shiba Inu in 2023, it seemed like the joke was on us.” It was a joke in the sense that he could play it off as one, but how seriously are we supposed to take the fact that financial “experts” promoted it as a legitimate investment? It became a real investment partially because Musk spoke publicly about it, broadcasting it as real. In turn, he made real money. If you believed him, followed him, it’s possible that you could have made money, too. Or you could have invested your money at the wrong time, lost it, and maybe plummeted into debt: then it becomes your personal, individual problem. Now, your token is functionally no longer; a digital image bearing the likeness of a Shiba Inu bit your outstretched hand, and ran off with your life savings.  

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The conventional, middle class route of working a 9 to 5 salaried job, in order to save money to buy a house and retire, has become inaccessible for many, and exists as a kind of distant mirage for many people coming of age in America. As the cost of living outpaces even jobs well above the minimum wage, so many people are living paycheck to paycheck, yet working all the time. Enter: the image of the influencer, documenting his world for your pleasure, and getting paid to merely exist. Among the American middle class, the pull towards abandoning a “real” job to take up influencing, dropshipping, content creating or landlordism (renamed “house hacking” if you don’t own the home), has transformed the ways people talk about money online. Could this expeditious hustle be better than a “bullshit” job? Discourse abounds. 

In Reddit communities, on TikTok, in Discord groups: you can feel a collective suspicion, which occasionally tips into protest, and often contains a conspiratorial bent, about whether to believe what we were taught about existing financial systems. What if we’re all getting screwed? What if it really could be as easy as one hour a day to set up passive income, grow your following, and purchase the next ticket out of here? This feeling–an individualistically-considered suspicion, which also contains kernels of awareness about systemic inequities–feeds into a growing disillusionment with conventional ways to make money. This disillusionment with conventional, salaried, middle-class ways to make money and secure a future played a role in creating the GameStop frenzy, an event detailed in the book with sensitivity and nuance. 

The whole “Gamestop thing” in early 2021 revealed a surprisingly intense sense of urgency and desperation that had been previously hidden just beneath the surface. What brought this to the fore was a glimpse of a way out: Robinhood screenshots of people making tens of thousands of dollars on Gamestop options overnight. In a carnival inversion of the existing order the everyman became the elite stockbroker, occupying Wall Street for just a few days. So many people wanted a quick fix, a cash windfall, an easy way out, because at that time, making it through the pandemic with one’s body, family and finances intact wasn’t certain. A posture of ironic distance cloaked an earnest proximity to a livable future; O’Dwyer writes of the contemporaneous Reddit posting: 

“On the ‘loss porn’ thread, someone posts that they have invested their entire student loan in one stock meme and now they have nothing. They have not slept in days. In response, someone else shares a GIF of a slice of bread being fed through a cheese grater. Someone else links to a rope for sale on Amazon and suggests that the poster buy it to hang themselves. Do it, the forum agrees. It’s what evolution would want. KYS. For the good of the species. All this nihilism makes a kind of meaningless sense when the future has no perceivable value.”

Of course the future feels shaky. Young people are racking up historic levels of consumer debt; coming of age in the wake of the 2008 financial crash wasn’t exactly stabilizing. The cruel posters encouraging this person to kill themself–offering them up as a ritual sacrifice–contains an echo of tangible medical reality: debt is a medically established suicidogenic factor. Debt can feel like a promise–assuming it offers the possibility of a reassuring future–but the reality is, it’s often a barbed cage. The future becomes the present, and now your bill is due. 

In a culture which values ownership, and private property, above all else, debt becomes a demon, and also takes on a ghostly and surreal quality–especially in relation to the invisible and transitory quality of tokens and other financial “products”. This surreal quality of debt is doubled by the fact that it’s of course defined as a lack. And yet, debt is the foundation of our existing economy, and has a radically different meaning for an institution or government, versus an individual person. But these meanings are so routinely confused and conflated in news articles and popular culture. The end result of this conflation is that individual people are blamed and shamed for accruing debt for basic needs: education, medical bills, food, housing–you name it. When they are blamed and shamed in this way, it makes sense that people will grasp for an alternative: enter the empty promise of tokens.

The pull towards tokens is tied into a palpable, widespread frustration concerning our “broken” financial systems, and the way work is valued or not valued in our above-board economy. During a time of official breakdown–Covid–when mass death dovetailed with mass unemployment, the possibilities of people working less, not working, and/or working in jobs that are not currently and officially sanctioned or legal, bubbled to the surface. O’Dwyer details people working alone and hustling in attempts to outpace the rising cost of living. She writes how, absent other options, working-class and middle-class women turn to platformized performance work and sex work to pay off their student debt. But it’s not just that; they’re also guarding themselves against “the uncertainty of the job market – first in the aftermath of a global depression, and later in the midst of a global pandemic.” To be paid in tokens to alleviate an educational debt, or hedge one’s position in the job market, is to live in the thick of mixed metaphors. Most people are used to this, even though it’s all a bit surreal. 

Meanwhile, the only concrete, totalizing force is that of capital: immutable, unceasing, omnipotent. But for whom are financial concepts and instruments literal, and for whom are they figurative? O’Dwyer points out that tokens qualify as both, and I understand debt in our culture to have a similar texture and function. In fact, the relationship between user identity and credit is one which routinely surfaces in conversations about debt. Like tokens, debt has also been around forever, and is a functional, if unspoken, and misunderstood, tool of infrastructure in the American economy.

In Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink, economic historian Louis Hyman argues that the history of debt is something of an “impossible thing in history” to address due to its ubiquity. He argues that in the United States, we proudly offer the first example not just of an economy based on debt, but one where debt can be “resold at a profit, with all its associated possibilities and dangers.” This history of a closed private credit system, one which colluded with major retailers and formalized private credit (and debts) along racial lines, persists today, although its forms evolve as credit evaluators utilize, and also become, data brokers. 

Because the “real” money is now in the data: it’s used in logistics, to profile people, and to underwrite credit and risk. So what are we to make of credit offerings based on mined transactional data? O’Dwyer writes that many of the companies specializing in credit based on transactional data target users who are “unbanked” or “underserved” in what she refers to as “the digital subprime market.” According to Debtor Nation, in the 1960s, Columbia Sociology professor David Caplovitz demonstrated that poor people living in poor areas paid substantially more for the same goods than wealthier counterparts. The study offered irrefutable evidence for something which many likely knew all along: that an unequal financial system means that the daily, material reality of making ends meet is not just abstractly difficult: it literally costs more to be poor, by dollars and cents. Your data, including your credit score, can impact your ability to access housing, get a job, and can mean that you are shown higher prices for basic needs shopping online.

These high costs create burdens for people with fewer resources to survive, and live comfortably. And the language we use to characterize these systemic burdens is often imprecise and slippery, further compounding the issue. We co-create and normalize absurd realities related to money, tokens and debt, which feed off of jargon, obfuscation and individual blame. You’d be forgiven for thinking that an individual person has a direct relationship to America’s debt ceiling, based on popular news reporting from reputable outlets. It’s a triumph of the guise of journalistic objectivity combined with an imprecision of language, and an apparent wanton credulity towards existing financial systems displayed by some reporters. Amid the May 2023 debt ceiling crisis, a CNN headline read: “‘Every family should be concerned’ about debt ceiling, consumer watchdog warns.” Ok, so they should be worried, and do what? There was nothing actionable or specific, just a reminder that it’s something to fear; what the JPMorgan CEO called “the risk of mayhem in markets.” 

Perhaps a political solution could solve this mayhem in the markets, this dissatisfaction with the state of the labor market, too. On November 5, 2020, then-President Donald Trump tweeted “STOP THE COUNT!” while votes were still being tallied for the presidential election. The system is fraudulent, we can’t trust it, so we need to interrupt the quantification of something so obviously wrong. Soon thereafter, “stop the steal” became the rallying cry of Trump and his followers across the country to discredit the 2020 presidential election. These phrases were quasi-political calls, screeches and hollers; they were also invocations of a collective desire to halt quantifying individual bids for systemic change. Something was stolen, something was miscalculated: please, can we band together to banish these rotten numbers, these unbelievable figures, and return power to its rightful owner? It’s a childlike quasi-logic – but in a way, no more childish than the unwavering faith in the fortitude and sanctity of capital markets. 

As much as every person would like to believe that they’re rational, the way we collect evidence to determine whether things count as facts, and are true, is influenced by our emotions and moods to a nearly unfathomable degree. This 2020 episode of disbelief and anger concerning the presidential election mirrors, and is tied into, how people feel about, and view, the economy. It’s a big, big, thing, it’s a system, it’s opaque: what is going on? Small business owners, gig workers getting the short end of the stick, and executives alike are often single-issue voters: lower taxes, which are calculated wrong, so that I can get more of my fair share. So many people from all kinds of backgrounds, political orientations and cultures, are angry, disillusioned, depressed: they want money, and the economy, to work differently. And they turn to whichever politician offers the most plausible-sounding palliative to the collective economically-induced malaise.  

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O’Dwyer situates the history of tokens within the context of art and culture, which produces insights about how tokens function, and also how they represent larger, more complex relationships people have with physical (and quasi-physical) objects and ourselves. She says: “This link between representation and so-called ‘real value’ is not only the biggest question surrounding the nature of money; arguably, it is the biggest question surrounding meaning since the early twentieth century. “ She says Athenian tokens demonstrated that tokens have always played a role in politics (which persists, strangely, in conversations about “token” people of specific marginalized identities, the unstructured landscape of identity politics). And while ancient tokens were created to complement democracy, some “smart” tokens want to replace it–the idea that “the right token might stand in for the messy business of human cooperation.” 

In a global example of this, in the year 2024, tokenized soy on the Blockchain means one thing to the owner of the token, and another to the farmer wherever the soy is. This creates new problems at the intersection of digital-physical worlds –including that we don’t yet know how to solve a tangle of problems associated with computer server storage efficiency. Speculative fiction has offered certain solutions, like in the book Blockchain Chicken Farm And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, wherein author and artist Xiaowei Wang imagines a future that uses soybeans as a mechanism for human data ingestion, and a cheap vehicle for data destruction. In a chapter titled “How to Eat Yourself”, Wang writes that in 2017, Microsoft researchers began working on ways to store data within DNA, a step towards fixing this server storage efficiency issue. So, they imagine a future which marries GMO foods and data storage: “If you truly were your user data, could you eat yourself?”. 

That sounds like a question of whether you’re feeding yourself, or whether you’re “treating” yourself; beans on toast, or avocado toast? Bought with EBT (otherwise known as food stamps, and a type of token), or with your own hard-earned cash? What does it mean that we individually blame people when they feel powerless at every turn, but then turn around and also tell them that good work, a good career and good money are possible for anyone in America? The dollars and cents don’t add up, and O’Dwyer reminds us that our personal relationships with, and conceptions of, money begin at young ages, sometimes even with the use of tokens as not-money in games. The opportunity to engage in new, technologically mediated types of work, and tokenized investments, so often end up feeling not-new at all, enriching those with more resources, asking those without them to take more risks. Individual people assume individual risks, and get individually blamed, in an obviously rigged system. 

I’ve been trying to find the language to address the surreal quality of living in a wealthy country whose economy is based on debt, where tokens purport to represent an alternative way of dealing with value, but end up seeming like a joke, or, really, a scam. I feel that this reality is upheld by the way we speak about money, and that our language is so steeped in the logic of capital, individualism and perpetual growth, that it is inescapable. 

I remain curious about how the language “we” (the public) use to discuss tokens and debt shapes it as much as the things supposed or real experts, policy makers, entrepreneurs, or executives, do not or cannot say. A deep cynicism undergirds the promotional language for many tokens, credit cards, Klarna, Affirm, and for many popular devices which purport to offer economic mobility but in fact contain a predatory edge. As O’Dwyer writes in the first pages of her book, when she attended the “Money 2020” conference, she asked a man if his company, on one level, was for international phone remittances. But really, it’s a way to send money internationally, without sending actual, physical money, right? “‘I mean, not exactly, but…’ — and he winks.” He gets to keep on winking, as long as he doesn’t say it with words, right? There’s really nothing there.