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

by Bill Maurer (Editor), Lana Swartz (Editor)

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.

Genres: Business, Economics, History, Money, Finance

288 pages, Hardcover

Published May 5, 2017

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.

Reviews

[Brishen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. An easily digestible collection of different types of currencies, payment systems, and credit. The fact that it is a seemingly random collection of things that can at times be only loosely tied to the subject is probably its greatest strength because that's really getting at the issue of what money actually is. In that, this isn't a clear subject and while it might seemed wrapped up in the more "hard" concepts of silver and cryptocurrency, it's also very much about credit and payment and settlement systems.
Working through this book a little each day was a pleasure, and a testament to the importance of interdisciplinary studies.

[Cullen Haynes · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Cash, which was born several thousand years ago, the son of Barter, the adopted child of Trade, died today”, read the obituary for cash in 1963 by Marty Simmons, Vice President of The Diners Club Card.

This and other anecdotes are replete within Paid, it’s authors capture the idiom of the time in which these fleeting payment-adjacent objects held the people’s financial attention.

Paid is a museum filled with the relics of exchange past and soon to be, from seashells, to checks, to Dogecoin. 55 years on, we have not yet moved into the cashless society touted by Simmons, FIAT currency still reigns supreme - for now...

[Helen Varley · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is an interesting cross between theoretical text and coffee table book: with short chapters and plenty of illustrations, it presents a timely overview of diverse topics connected to payment processes, technologies and materials - from early historical systems of exchange to today's contactless payments and cryptocurrencies. the brevity of the chapters make it quite a page-turner, although several times i would have appreciated a bit more depth. however it is packed with interesting quotes, comments and references that inspire further research.