Cartoon by Tom Toro, The New Yorker, 2012.

Paper factory in Sweden, 2007. Photo by Michael Caven.

Images on cover

The first coin that depicted a woman, the Egyptian Arsinoe II Philadelphus (227–270 BC). It was issued posthumously by Ptolemy II, 253–246 BC, Egypt.

Five figures found on rock shelters in the Colombian Amazon, 11,800–12,600 years ago. Figures are thought to be pregnant women.

Icon designed by Iconoclasistas, 2015.

Image from face recognition patent 2019/0045094 A1 filed by Apple.

CAPS
LOCK

How capitalism took
hold of graphic
design, and how to
escape from it

Ruben Pater

They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.

Silvia Federici

There is no document of civilisation which is not
at the same time a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin

Valiz, Amsterdam

INTRO

There is no such thing as ethical graphic design under capitalism.

Desmond Wong, designer

Apathy befalls many graphic designers when trying to imagine a design practice outside of capitalism. Desmond Wong fits in a long line of designers who have critiqued capitalism, from the First Things First manifesto in 1964 all the way back to William Morris (1834–1896). Through its anti-capitalist critique, graphic design has become more, not less entangled with capitalism. It seems that three centuries of this dominant economic system has paralyzed our ability to imagine alternatives. The feeling that no individual or collective can change anything until either dystopian or utopian fantasies of total collapse or full transformation, respectively, are realized.

I spent the last three years trying to answer the question if ethical graphic design can exist under capitalism. The focus is on graphic designers, but this perspective could also extend to other disciplines. The search starts by finding the origins of the current economic system, and how design has come to be so intertwined with it. Thinkers from sociology, economics, social geography, critical theory, and anthropology are consulted for the theoretical foundations. Many of them base themselves on, or are inspired by, the writings of philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883). His critique of capitalism is widely accepted as the most detailed and thorough analysis of capitalism across the political spectrum.

Another reference point is my own twenty years of work experience as a graphic designer. I have worked in advertising, branding, infographic design, social design, speculative design, and critical design. I have made activist campaigns, annual reports for banks, and interfaces for consumer websites. I have worked under a boss, as a freelancer, I have run my own business, and have taught in design schools on several levels. From that experience I have been involved in many of the capitalist design practices mentioned in this book.

What is Capitalism Anyway?

Capitalism is an economic system that is founded on three basic principles: everything should be privately owned, all production is for the market, and people work for a wage. Based on these principles a business makes a profit and grows. Capitalism is based on ideas from the Enlightenment, in the pursuit of freeing the individual from the control of church, nobility, and family. The idea being that if all individuals would pursue their self-interest, this would best serve both them and society.

In theory, capitalism offers everyone unlimited potential but in practice only a small group of people can own the factories, crop fields, and machines needed for production. Since everything is privately owned, those with no access to the means of production have no other choice than to work for a wage. This creates a society where a minority (capitalists) has control over production, while the rest have to find a job to survive.

How does the capitalist economy work? Those who control the production—the capitalists—have to invest their profits from these ‘means of production’ to stay competitive, for the ultimate goal to grow. In reality they keep a lot of it for themselves, as we can see by the concentration of the world’s wealth around a tiny group of 2,000 billionaires, who have more wealth than the poorest 60 percent of the world population combined.¹

Capitalism is also called a market economy. The market is where goods and services compete with one another. By promoting products and services, graphic design plays an essential role. In theory, the free market arrives at a natural equilibrium in supply and demand, which leads to fair prices and a higher standard of living for all. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case. The ‘free’ market is in reality a complex constellation of trade blocs, tariffs, and subsidies. Corporations make use of the lack of regulation by using tax havens and ‘free economic zones’ in low-wage countries to produce their products without the threat of unions.

Another myth of capitalism is that international markets will find a natural balance, yet economic crises are the norm rather than the exception. We have witnessed financial crashes like the one in 2008, leading to global destruction and devastation, for which the least fortunate end up paying the bill. Nor do supply and demand seem to create an equal marketplace. As businesses expand, sectors tend to monopolize markets. Adobe has an 80 percent market share in graphic software and Google has a 92.62 percent market share in search engines. It’s not really a free market if competitors are either bought up or pushed out.

Capitalism has failed to deliver on its promise that it would create an economic system of freedom and prosperity for all. After more than three centuries, extractive industries have depleted the earth and are threatening the world’s ecosystems with imminent collapse. Income inequality has increased in most developed countries since 1990.² Since 2014 extreme poverty has been rising with 688 million people going hungry on a regular basis.³ Even the more privileged workers in the wealthier countries suffer from higher burnout rates and depression to meet the high productivity benchmarks. Endless consumption by the wealthy has led to an interlocking system of design, production, consumption, and waste that is nearing a point of no return.

CAPS LOCK

This book tries to understand how graphic design and capitalism have become caught in an infinite loop of creation and destruction. The central question of CAPS LOCK is twofold; first to historically retrace how graphic design and capitalism came to be intertwined, and secondly what strategies present themselves to unlink graphic design from capitalism, with the intended outcome of developing some kind of vision of a graphic design practice that can exist without capitalism.

Given the complexity of the relation between graphic design and capitalism, the topic cannot possibly be covered in one book. Instead of attempting a complete overview, each chapter takes a different perspective on the subject by focusing on the various roles of designers. Each role contains an historical outline, followed by practical examples. Together, the twelve roles present a cross-section of the political economy of graphic design that provides insights from different perspectives.

Design writer Guy Julier wrote that politicians often talk about the economy as one uniform entity, which is so complex it requires experts to run it.⁴ In fact, design serves capitalism by devising abstract forms—infographics, money, corporate identities, branding—that hide the fact that ‘the economy’ is a collection of social cooperative relations between people. That’s why, as a critique of design itself, this book doesn’t follow the method of design theory, which usually centres designed objects. Precisely because capitalism manifests itself not only in the appearance of posters, books, or websites, but more in how they are produced, where they are they published, and how they are sold.

The first part explains how the work of graphic designers bolsters capitalism and economic relations. ‘The Designer as Scribe’ is about the predecessor of the typographer. The scribe or clerk was crucial in organizing complex economic societies by keeping financial records, designing coins, banknotes, stocks, and other graphic notations that instil trust in the financial system. A role that is now partly replaced by software, but is no less impactful. ‘The Designer as Engineer’ is about the systematic ordering of markets using graphic documents such as forms, contracts, passports, infographics, and maps. A process of standardization that allowed international markets in capitalism to function. Brands, logos, advertising, corporate identities, and interfaces are discussed in ‘The Designer as Brander’ and ‘The Designer as Salesperson’. Further examples of contemporary work of graphic designers that each in its own way serves the commodification of all parts of society.

The second part explores how designers themselves are economic actors too. ‘The Designer as Worker’ and ‘The Designer as Entrepreneur’ take a closer look at wages, working hours, burnouts, unpaid internships, freelancing, exploitation, bosses, and the possible alternatives to these toxic work conditions. ‘The Designer as Amateur’ continues to question professionalism in design itself. Who can call themselves graphic designers? Who gets paid for design and who doesn’t? ‘The Design as Educator’ explores how education prepares designers for working in capitalist conditions, and some of the alternatives that challenge the view of design education as a factory that produces graphic design workers.

The third part dives into some of the strategies that have emerged from within design in response to capitalism. ‘The Designer as Hacker’ looks at how the hacker ethic can change the designer’s dependence on the tools and platforms made by large corporations. We also see how digital tools can intensify consumer manipulation. ‘The Designer as Futurist’ presents strategies by designers who want to improve society by thinking beyond what is feasible. Future design methods, such as speculative design, were intended to criticize consumerism, but have also had the reverse effect. ‘The Designer as Philanthropist’ is a response by designers who wish to use their skill to help others, for example social design. We find that even design with good intentions can also be neocolonial and turn out to amplify the powers of capitalism and keeping inequality in place.

Finally, ’The Designer as Activist’ questions the rhetoric of activism in design, and suggests how a shift towards thinking of design as a commons may resolve some of the paradoxes that designers face. Then we leave theory behind and introduce six design collectives from around the world whose anti-capitalist practices challenge ideas of competition and exploitation. They have practiced anti-capitalist forms of graphic design for many years, and parallel to the theory this can help us understand what practical obstacles are up ahead. Brave New Alps from Italy, Common Knowledge from the UK, Cooperativa de Diseño from Argentina, Mídia NINJA from Brazil, Open Source Publishing from Belgium, and The Public from Canada. Their years of experience can provide insights and practical ideas for those who want to change their practice towards working outside of capitalism.

This Book is Neither Objective, Nor Global

Because of my personal background and experience, this book is written from a Northern European perspective, a region where capitalism and colonialism were born, and where graphic design emerged as a separate discipline. I am from the Netherlands, the country with the first stock exchange, and the first multinational corporation. As a centre of colonialism and capitalism this can give some insight about its historic foundations. Because of my background, I am relying on written sources that are either English or Dutch. This affirms the dominant Eurocentric point of view that has disproportionally influenced the design discipline. I invite the reader to be aware of this bias, and seek different sources and voices, insofar they are not yet suggested in this book.

That brings me to my second point, about neutrality. In my first book The Politics of Design, I proposed that there is no such thing as a neutral or objective position within design.⁵ The same goes for CAPS LOCK, which was written from the idea that capitalism is a harmful economic system, because it destroys the planet and exploits its people. If you look at the established canon of graphic design history books, many titles celebrate design work by Western (male) designers for multinational corporations, often without mentioning the social conditions under which their work was produced. Designers that serve capitalist objectives have become so much the norm in design writing and education, that they are considered to be neutral. This book attempts to counterbalance that narrative by questioning some of the assumptions that form the basis of Western graphic design theory. The purpose of CAPS LOCK is to understand how graphic design and capitalism are historically related, what the effects of that relationship have amounted to, and what alternatives exist. Regardless of political persuasion or background, I believe anyone will find this book useful as an historical overview of how economy and design are related. CAPS LOCK is constructive but not always pleasant. It links violent events such as slavery, colonialism, exploitation, gentrification, and environmental destruction to design practices. As uncomfortable as that may be, these stories are also necessary to understand how well-intended actions can have damaging consequences.

In the final chapter more hopeful tactics appear, from six design collectives that have created, in their own way, more ethical ways of working outside of capitalism. Collectives that are setting up small-scale economies that look after the well-being of humans and their natural environment instead of pursuing profit. Designers that have found practical ways to run a design studio without bosses, working for social causes, based on solidarity and mutual trust. That provides more than a glimmer of hope that graphic design can be both meaningful and useful for humankind. Rather than waiting for politicians to realize grand ideas of utopia, these designers understand that true utopian politics already exist in the small and everyday acts of working and living together.

Ruben Pater, June 2021

CONTENTS

CAPS LOCK — Part 1

The Designer as Scribe

On The Record / Trading Information

In Gold We Trust

Notes from the Bank

The Plastic Economy

Playing with Money

The Designer as Engineer

One Size Fits All / The Good Citizen

Desktop Power / Scientific Rhetoric

Get Off My Property!

To Map is to Conquer

The Designer as Brander

Making Marks / Corporate Identity

Contrabrand / Stealth Branding

Selling the City

The Designer as Salesperson

The Sales Curse

The Worship of Products

Design vs. Advertising

Quantified Everything

Crash Sale / Banana Republic

CAPS LOCK — Part 2

The Designer as Worker

A History of Work

My Work is My Passion

Work it Harder Do it Faster

The End of Work

Showing Solidarity

The Designer as Entrepreneur

Like a Boss

The Star Designer

Intellectual Property

The Designer as Amateur

Who is a Designer?

The Rise of Professionalism

If You Don’t Get Paid, it’s Not Work

A Matter of Taste

Informal Economies

The Designer as Educator

Teaching Design / The School as a Factory

The Creative Curriculum

Who Even Has $50,850?

Towards a Radical Pedagogy

CAPS LOCK — Part 3

The Designer as Hacker

The Age of Data / What is a Hacker?

Who Owns the Network

Merchants of Data

Pixel Engineers and Time Thieves

Stupid Artificial Intelligence

The Hacker Ethic / Open Source

Ethical Digital Design

The Designer as Futurist

The Spectre of Speculative Design

Priests and Prophets

The Prediction Economy

Design and the Future / Trading Futures

Commodification of the Future

Design Derivatives

The Designer as Philanthropist

Change makers / Philantrocapitalism

Design for Good / Design Thinking

Design Like You Give a Damn

The White Saviour Industrial Complex

Mutual Aid

The Designer as Activist

What is Activism?

The Personal is Political

The Design Commons

Brave New Alps

Common Knowledge

Cooperativa de Diseño

Mídia NINJA

Open Source Publishing

The Public

CAPS LOCK — Part 4

Outro

Alt/Escape

Common Sense

Notes

Bibliography

Image Credits and Sources

Index

Colophon

Umicore gold bar 1 kg, price $61,704.

iPhone 8 Plus, price $290.

Money changer in Indonesia.

Carl Bloch, Jesus Casting Out the Money Changers at the Temple, 1874.

Assyrian scribes.

THE
DESIGNER
AS
SCRIBE

Oh my hand.

Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your
back, it dims your sight, it twists your
stomach and your sides.

Now I’ve written the whole thing:
for Christ’s sake give me a drink.

Medieval Monks

Clay tablet; record of beer; 3100-3000 BC, Uruk, shown at true size.

ON THE RECORD

A bill for the rental of a boat, the sale of an oxen, a receipt for beer. The oldest messages ever found are not diaries or love poems, but financial records. They were written on clay tablets by scribes in Mesopotamia, thousands of years before the first alphabet was invented. Mesopotamian cities like Babylon had 200,000 inhabitants, at their peak. To feed such populations, large amounts of grains were stored and traded, which required a class of trained scribes to ensure an effective financial administration.¹ The fact that these designed objects were so detailed and have survived for so long, reveals the importance of bookkeeping in managing the first large agricultural societies.

Financial records are clear examples of early graphic design. Scribes had to master skills such as consistent mark making and the ordering of information on small surfaces. The fact that these tablets predate other forms of written communication might not be coincidental. When a debt is created, stored, and traded, at some point a written record is needed to keep track of it. Economy is a system where value is exchanged based on trust, and for thousands of years scribes were responsible for creating trustworthy documents that guaranteed authenticity and authority in large societies.

This book, which is about the relation of graphic design with capitalism, begins with the designer as a scribe. Until the invention of the printing press, scribes and clerks were the only source of written communication, being typographers, lay-out specialists, and printers combined. In societies where few people were literate, this meant they had a position of power. They received an official education and their job was to systematically track and document value exchange; an indispensable task in the first large agricultural economies. In this chapter we will retrace the origins of economic notation and professional typography skills as a means to instil trust and authority in economic systems.

The copyist Jean Mielot in his scriptorium, fifteenth century.

The Hand of the King

In ancient Mesopotamia, scribes received their education from a very early age, and they practiced by endlessly copying tablets using a stylus with a sharp triangular tip. Tablets were small, often no more than ten centimetres wide. These documents were issued, traded, and therefore owned. Communication as a form of property was contrary to the oral culture of early primitive societies, which was a shared form of communication, as researcher and author Seth Siegelaub notes. The fact that these notation systems were owned rather than shared, indicates a changing concept about property and ownership in large early agricultural societies.²

Emperors and kings used scribes as an extension of their power. Scribes provided the consistency and style to convey the words of the sovereign, making their words indisputable. Different handwriting styles—called ‘hands’—were developed to distinguish kingdoms or functions. In the Middle Ages, Charlemagne promoted one unified handwriting style, which thus became known as the Carolingian minuscule, the handwriting of Charlemagne. A visual identity in handwriting allowed communication to be read across long distances, and promoted the identity of the kingdom. Using well-trained scribes was therefore an act of government branding. Since very few people could write (including kings themselves) a hand also provided the necessary security for government documents. Some styles were designed to be purposefully difficult to copy, minimizing the chances of forgery, like the French Merovingian charter script and the English chancery hand.³

Italian chancery hand, 1598.

The Spreadsheet Never Lies

It’s not just our alphabet that is rooted in financial record-keeping. The layout and ordering of information also started with financial records. In Graphesis (2014), Johanna Drucker explains how tabular formatting on early clay tablets reveals the first use of the design grid.⁴ Just like spreadsheets today, the grids on clay tablets show a mathematical thought process. The graphical ordering of financial information commands authority, even though financial scandals have shown that mathematically correct tables in annual reports can hide a world of fraud and financial malpractice. Complex economic societies rely on consistent numerical ordering and especially in today’s financialized economy where ninety percent of all money exists only in digital form, a trustworthy notation and encoding is essential.⁵ Not unlike the clay tablets, financial information today is time-stamped, encrypted, and stored in standardized formats. Whether these documents are kept in warehouses or on servers, Lisa Gitelman reminds us that even if these documents are never seen, their primary function is to serve as silent witnesses that can be summoned when needed.⁶

Quintin Massys, The Tax Collectors, 1520.

Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world—both the world of men and nature—of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.

KARL MARX, PHILOSOPHER

Financial documents are designed to look trustworthy by using style of writing or typography that is consistent, legible, and official. Documents are provided with a seal protecting the message contents, but also carry the symbol—and thus the authority—of the sovereign. State seals, national coats of arms, or bank logos still have a similar function. Finally, the date and the signature make these documents legally binding. Today, additional marks are included for machine reading—such as RFID chips, bank codes or bar codes—but similar graphic technologies can be found on tax forms, passports, and banknotes.

Computer Says No

The importance of bureaucratic documents is often overlooked, explains Lisa Gitelman in Paper Knowledge (2014).⁷ Official documents are central to economic power whether they come in the form of financial spreadsheets or clay tablets. Trading and borrowing have always been part of society, but the moment financial information is documented and stored, it changes everything. A social relation based on trust—between neighbours, friends, or family members—suddenly becomes an abstract relation between debtor and indebted. This shift that is created through contracts and financial records makes trade between strangers easier, but also weakens social relations. For instance, you can be evicted if your payment is one day too late, or you can lose a job because you lost the hardcopy of a diploma, or you can be arrested if you lose your passport. Measures that seem utterly nonsensical and inhumane on a social level, but are perfectly in line with administrative thinking. In that sense graphic documents discipline our social behaviour to great effect.

The Breaking of Tablets

If financial records are the only existing proof of debt and wealth, then destroying such records is a revolutionary act. In the film Batman: The Dark Knight Rises (2012), the villain attacks the Gotham stock exchange with the intention of wiping all financial data, thereby eliminating all forms of money and debt. Such a drastic event hasn’t happened yet, but records do go missing. The Australian Commonwealth Bank ‘lost’ 20 million bank records in 2016. Magnetic tapes on which the records were kept had disappeared or, as it turned out, had accidentally been thrown out.⁸ In early Mesopotamia the destroying of financial records was actually a celebratory event. The New Year festivities in Babylon included the ‘breaking of tablets’. An annual ritual to wipe debts clean and literally start with a clean slate.⁹

Mr. Zaner’s article on business penmanship, 1894.

Sales records from Laban Morey Wheaton’s day book, 1828–1859.

TRADING INFORMATION

Beating the others to the punch has always been a deciding factor in trade. In the nineteenth century, stock broker Jim Fisk made a fortune by sending very fast ships from the US to London to go short on Confederate bonds. Since stock market news travelled by courier, his ships only had to be faster than those of the couriers, which gave Fisk an advantage before the news would reach the market.

The speed of trading changed with the invention of the ticker tape in 1867, the first electronic financial communications medium. An early kind of printer, it used electronic input from telegraph lines to print stock quotes on a continuous strip of paper. The limitations of the mechanics gave the ticker tape its unique graphic identity. For example, a stock quote would read: IBM 4S 651/4, meaning 400 shares of IBM are sold for $65.25 per share. Company names were abbreviated and capitalized and dots and numbers were added. The stock information that scrolls across screens today, is based on those early mechanical printers.

A stock exchange is where companies raise money by issuing company stock, which are essentially parts of the company itself. ‘Taking the company public’ is allowing others to put their money into your business, sharing both risk and reward. Retracing the shifts in the communication of financial information shows us that the search for fast information processing led to technological innovations and formal changes in notation. For instance, the way companies are listed on stock exchanges by their abbreviations. Before the ticker tape, company names were shouted over the trading floor. As the number of listed companies increased, long names slowed down the speed of trading. Introduction of the ticker tape led traders to use shortened names for the faster relaying of price, thus even the communication of economic information was optimized.

Operating the stock exchange board via ticker-tape, 1918.

Price Currents

Capitalism originated in Europe around the same time that transoceanic sea voyages began. Colonial journeys were expensive and extremely risky. Many ships did never return, but if they did, the profits could be considerable. The financial risks were so high that governments could not cover them and a growing class of wealthy merchants stepped in as investors. With an economy so focused on seafaring, any news on wars, shipwrecks, and pirates was crucial. The first newspapers were in fact the correspondence between investors sharing shipping and trade information. Diplomats and bankers would exchange information in private letters, thus having an advantage in trade.¹⁰

One of the oldest stocks ever issued from the Dutch East India Company, 1606.

Stock markets began in Europe in the seventeenth century to facilitate the expansion of colonialism. The first stock exchange started in 1602 in the heart of European colonial power at the time, the city of Amsterdam. With it came financial newspapers such as the Prijs-courant (Price Current), which was published by stock brokers in Amsterdam in 1614, and similar journals such as Lloyd’s List (1734) from London, and the New-York Price Current (1795). These featured commodity prices, insurance and exchange rates, collected and put together by clerks. The influx of wealth from the colonies led to a flourishing arts and printing industry in Europe, and the availability of cheap raw materials and wealth in combination with new technologies would kickstart the industrial revolution. We should keep in mind that this wealth came from the violent process of exploitation of people through slavery, forced labour, and the pillaging of natural resources. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in a speech in 1967: ‘The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor—both black and white, here and abroad.’¹¹

Pricelist of the Amsterdam stock exchange, 1796. A pre-cursor of today’s financial newspapers.

Stock quotes in The Herald Scotland’s financial section, 2000s.

Abstraction of Information

The shift from the agricultural economy to a trade economy that occurred in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth century changed the way the economy was represented. Capital, currencies, and stock prices became more important, with their abstract graphic representation of numbers and lists, made possible by the printing industry and moveable type. The printing industry was influenced by fields such as statistics and a search for precise scientific notation in the Enlightenment period.¹²

The design of financial information today is regarded as neutral, even scientific. Financial sections of newspapers list stock prices using tabular lining figures; numerals that have equal height and width designed for the optimal reading of tables and lists. Lining figures came into existence late, and are thought to have originated from shopkeepers handwriting. In an interview with type designer Kris Sowersby—who designed the typeface for the Financial Times—he explains that numerals are read differently than words. ‘We process words by their aggregate letters and graphemes’, he says, ‘but numerals are processed number by number. So, each numeric glyph should be distinct and assured in its form.’¹³

Stock market information in The New York Times, 1933.

The scribe is someone who documents, and therefore ‘translates’ daily economic transactions. We can find the language of financial data everywhere; in newspapers, on televisions screens, scrolling across outdoor billboards, on our smartphones. If stock markets were once meant for professional investors, today we are all encouraged to buy stock and become investors, either through our savings, pension plans, or mortgages.

The compact numerical graphic language of the stock market has become a representation of economy itself. Designers apply mathematical and professional rigour to financial transactions, but the form also functions to hide more about these transactions than it reveals. By representing all human economic interaction in numbers, knowledge about the underlying cultural and social value is lost. Its scientific truth makes one almost forget that behind every stock quote, every number, and every interest rate is a person working, a family being fed, someone dying, or a rainforest being cut down. We simply don’t know because this is hidden behind meticulously designed and formatted tabulated numerals.

That economics can also be represented differently is shown by Gapminder, a Swedish non-profit. Dollar Street was invented by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, who wanted to compare the income of families in the world, without reducing them to statistics. Photographers went to 264 homes in 50 countries to document the objects and their owners, the faces and objects behind the statistics.¹⁴

We want to show how people really live. It seemed natural to use photos as data so people can see for themselves what life looks like on different income levels.

ANNA ROSLING RÖNNLUND, DESIGNER, GAPMINDER

Dollar Street, Gapminder. gapminder.org/dollar-street

Gabriël Metsu, Usurer with a Tearful Woman, 1654.

IN GOLD WE TRUST

One of capitalism’s founding fathers, Adam Smith, wrote that money is a natural phenomenon that emerged from barter societies. In his theory, exchanging objects or services for one another simply became impractical when societies grew larger.¹⁵ It is unlikely that barter societies ever existed, argues anthropologist David Graeber in Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011). Most archaeological evidence suggests credit was used before money existed, which could just be memorized or be stored using objects, like the clay tablets in Mesopotamia, or the knotted strings and notched strips of wood in China. Contrary to what Adam Smith asserted, money did not just naturally appear from larger societies, but was intentionally introduced by ancient kingdoms to control trade and to finance wars.¹⁶

Money itself is sometimes seen as the root of greed and consumerism. As money forms are designed, what role does the graphic designer have to play? For a lot of graphic designers, designing a coin or a banknote is considered a dream job. Their seductive appeal makes them popular collector’s items. But limiting our focus to the aesthetics of coins and banknotes would be ignoring the more pressing question of how the work of graphic designers is needed for the functioning of our economic system. It is important to remember, as writer Jon Astbury notes: ‘Money isn’t real. The coins, notes and digital transfers we use to buy things are merely proxies for an abstract idea of value.’¹⁷ The role of the designer as a scribe is to devise graphic techniques to represent economic transactions so that they are trustworthy. It is no coincidence that the word ‘credit’ comes from the Latin verb credere which means to trust, or to believe.

Earlier in this chapter the scribe was someone who documented and legitimized economic transactions in the name of the sovereign. With the introduction of money, we find that the manual skills of the scribe are replaced with mechanical reproduction techniques to assign value and ownership. Over time, technological innovations not only help to prevent counterfeiting, but also enable more abstract forms of trust to emerge. This isn’t limited to capitalism. Any large centralized economic system cannot function without designers as scribes providing the graphic language that builds trust and authority.

Oh, most excellent gold! Who has gold has a treasure even helps souls to paradise.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

Lydian coins, 610–546 BC, electrum. The lion represents the king, the tails shows the denomination.

A Short History of Coinage

The first coins appeared in the kingdom of Lydia, in present-day Turkey, around 600 BC. Electrum was a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver, which was found on the banks of a nearby river. Lumps of electrum were used to mint the first coins by stamping them with animal heads: the lion as a representation of the king. The Lydians succeeded in splitting electrum into gold and silver, which made the coins all the more popular. These silver and gold coins featured a lion attacking a bull. Notably, it is a sculpture of a bull that stands outside the Wall Street stock exchange, a symbol for aggressive financial optimism known as a bull market.

Coins were rare when they first appeared two thousand years ago and were mostly used by merchants. The Lydia coins spread through trading with neighbouring countries and their popularity inspired the minting of coins in Greece. Each Greek city-state issued its own coins and by the fifth century BC more than one hundred mints were in operation. The gold, silver, and bronze Roman coins were widely used, and accepted far beyond its borders. The circulation of the Roman denarii by itself was evidence of imperial power.

One theory of why Lydian coins appeared is that they were used to pay Greek mercenary armies, according to Graeber.¹⁸ Armies needed food and rations. Rather than sending large provisions with them or having armies plundering and pillaging the lands, it was easier to issue coins to the soldiers. Coins would give local farmers an incentive to sell their food to the soldiers, and this in turn allowed the state to demand the same coins as tax payment in return. Voilà, a market was created.

Greek coins from Syracuse, 415–405 BC. Silver tetradrachme with a chariot with Nike, and on the right the head of Arethusa. Both sides are signed by the artists.

Heads or Tails

‘The coin is the earliest forms of mass-produced graphic media’, write Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish in Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (2009).¹⁹ Every small kingdom or territory started issuing their own coin to raise money or to finance wars. One side (heads) was stamped with the sovereign, and the other side (tails) featured the currency’s nomination and value. The image of the sovereign would give the coin authority, guarantee its value, and warn against counterfeiting. Wherever it surfaced it promoted state power. The basic design functions of coins have not changed since.

The young White King learns the principles of minting. Woodcut by Leonhard Beck (c. 1480–1542).

The first person who had himself depicted on a coin was Alexander the Great. The Roman elite flaunted their wealth by having coins minted with their likeness to impress competitors. Roman Emperors were honoured by being depicted on coins after their death, also because the emperor’s image in itself was respected and made coins more valuable than just their weight in gold or silver.²⁰ When coins or banknotes are designed today, any individual who is depicted is still subject to political debate.²¹

By the sixteenth century the number of coins that circulated was impressive. On markets in the city of Amsterdam, 388 coins from all over the world were allowed as currency. Books and posters were produced with images of coins and their nomination to help recognize them. Moneychangers weighed coins and calculated exchange rates, a much-needed profession with such diversity in currency. Counterfeiting was punishable by death, but ‘clipping’ was a common practice: shaving off the edges of gold and silver coins. By the seventeenth century the first silver and gold coins were designed with a milled edge to prevent clipping. Milled edges are still used and serve as extra identity marker for the visually impaired and to distinguish same-size coins.

A sixteenth- or seventeenth-century hoard of coin clippings discovered in Derbyshire, UK. When coins were made out of precious metals, shaving off silver or gold from coins was a punishable offense.

Digital Security Coin

After more than two millennia, coins are still around. The fetish that surrounds these small slices of shiny metals has reached a new level with the design of the one-pound coin in the UK in 2014. This 12-sided shaped coin features a secret digital, secure identification system with a code embedded in the top layer that becomes visible under ultraviolet light. Her Majesty’s Treasury claims to it be ‘the most secure circulating coin in the world’.²² The technical document reveals the function of trust in the object and the powers that back it:

Coins should command respect; Subject to the foregoing, coins should be small and light; A coinage system should be easily understood, in particular to help tourists, the elderly and all disability categories; Coins should be designed in such a way that counterfeits cannot easily imitate them.²³

The introduction of coins transformed human relations, since it allowed complete strangers to engage in trade, if only they accepted coins. This meant tremendous possibilities for trade, but also diminished local forms of exchange based on trust. Historian Yuval Harari writes in Sapiens (2015) ‘We do not trust the stranger … we trust the money she/he holds. If they run out of coins, they run out of trust.’²⁴ A form of trust designed by using precious metals, the face of the sovereign, and anti-counterfeiting measures.

High secure £1 coin, Royal Mint, 2014.

Coin book from the Dutch republic with woodcut illustrations, 1622.

NOTES FROM THE BANK

With their elaborate patterns, relief printing, secure embossing and foil printing techniques, banknotes are popular design objects. Noteworthy about the design of banknotes is that their basic elements have changed little, since they were introduced more than a thousand years ago. It is still a piece of paper printed with signatures and stamps using the latest printing techniques, with a government guaranteeing its value. Banknotes have the advantage over coins in that they are easier to transport and store. On the banknote we find all of the skills of the scribe for authenticating and standardizing financial records: detailed and consistent graphic forms to create a legible and portable object that can be reproduced but not easily copied. The 50-euro banknote includes watermarks, colour-changing inks, perforations, raised printing, security threads, microprinting, a bar code, a serial number, ultraviolet ink, a hologram, and light sensitive printing. Banknote designs often include the portraits of heads of state or other important national historical figures, as studies have shown that faces on banknotes convey confidence.²⁵ Although they are called banknotes, there is little writing on them today. The most important information is basic or numerical, the serial numbers, the signature, and the country of origin—making banknotes effective in their use across cultures and languages.

Woodcut printed banknote of 770 mò of the Song Dynasty (920–1279), the first paper money.

Woodcut printed banknotes from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), Hu Pu Kuan Piao: 3-Tael, Year 4.

The Rise of Paper Money

The first banknotes appeared in seventh-century China. Instead of having to carry around large quantities of coins, merchants were given printed notes so the coins could be safely kept in vaults. These banknotes were woodblock-printed in as many as six colours, on special paper and with state seals to avoid counterfeiting.²⁶

Outside of China trade was dominated by coins for over a thousand years longer. By the thirteenth century, merchants in Europe ran into the same problems as the Chinese: the inconvenience of carrying large amounts of coins. Italian moneychangers saw an opportunity and promised to keep their money safe in exchange for cash notes. These letters of exchange (lettera di cambio) needed the signature of both parties. Merchants often ended up not reclaiming the coins, and kept using the notes instead. The moneychangers that loaned money became the first banks.²⁷

A more organized introduction of paper money didn’t occur in Europe until halfway the seventeenth century. Copper had devaluated so much that some of the Swedish daler coins weighed almost 20 kilogrammes. This unwieldy ‘plate money’ led Sweden to issuing banknotes. The first daler banknote was large, almost A5, resembling handwritten notes. Bills had dotted lines where the name, date and signatures had to be written by the user. Banknotes were rare, and were used by rich merchants and nobility. Since each note carried the signatures of all previous users, it was like receiving an invitation from a club of wealthy gentlemen.²⁸

Banknote Design

The issuing of the first banknotes was unregulated. Problems arose when many banks started printing their own notes in the nineteenth century, and, in largely illiterate societies, people often had difficulty distinguishing between fraudulent and valid banknotes. At one point 8,000 banks were issuing over 5,000 different banknotes in the US alone. Banknote designs were influenced by Romanticism in the arts and nationalist symbolism. The banknote was a canvas on which the new states could project the idealized image of the nation and its morals, with manuscript typography, ornaments, and patterns. Many banknote designs still refer to this visual language of the late eighteenth century, as this was the time when paper money started to become used frequently in everyday life. The use of portraits on banknotes took flight after the economic crises of the 1920s, when trust in the banking system and the economy had eroded. The Weimar Republic in present-day Germany saw the price of bread go up from 160 marks to 200,000,000,000 marks in just a year. This hyperinflation led to the design of emergency banknotes (Notgeld) to reflect the quickly changing rates. Banknotes began to portray national figures and statesmen in the hope of instilling a sense of trust.

Counterfeiting has been one of the greatest motivators for a country’s need to redesign its currency.

RICHARD ZEID, DESIGNER

The Green Back

In 2003, in the midst of war-torn Baghdad, the US government flew in 363 tonnes of dollar bills from the New York Federal reserve to Baghdad’s central bank. In this covert operation, a total of $12 billion was flown in on different flights, 281 million bills of $20, $50 and $100 as plastic-wrapped bricks, heavily guarded by military personnel. The money came from Saddam Hussein’s financial assets and was intended to pay government employees. How much of the $12 billion actually reached the employees is unclear, but it is known that a large part of it disappeared during transport.²⁹

The first ‘greenback’ design of the US one dollar bill, 1862, 79 × 187 mm.

The first European banknote, the Swedish 100 daler banknote, 1666, 155 × 195 mm.

US one dollar bill, 2003, 66 × 156 mm.

Jan van Toorn, 100 guilder bank note design proposal for De Nederlandsche Bank, 1986.

War and money have always been related. A trusted currency requires a strong government backed by military power, as a currency from an instable government is just not very trustworthy. The most widely used currency today is the US dollar, and it is considered the global currency. This dates back to World War II, when the allied countries made a plan for a financial order in the post-war world. It was then decided that exchange rates would be linked to the US dollar. This dominance of the dollar has less to do with the trustworthiness of the colour green than with the military and economic dominance of the US. Two-thirds of US currency is used abroad, and the country that supplies this currency is not coincidentally also the country with 800 military bases outside its own borders. Historically the US has not shunned away from using its military might to force a hand in economic trade. The power of a currency depends on the ability to drop bombs in any place in the world at any moment.³⁰

The relation between war and money becomes evident in the designs that Jan van Toorn (1932–2020) proposed for the competition for the Dutch banknotes in 1986. He wanted to show money as a crucial element of society. The design for the 100-guilder note shows a nuclear power plant and weapons; fighters, missiles, tanks, armed vehicles. This was at a time when there were mass-scale protests in the Netherlands against nuclear weapons and many Dutch were outraged with the arms race of the cold war. Van Toorn explains that he knew the banknotes would not be chosen as the competitions’ winner, but that he took part in the competition for the sake of the experience.³¹ His banknotes are perhaps the only ones ever designed that connect money to the state’s military power.

Pallets of $2.4 billion in US currency arriving in Iraq, 2004.

Endnotes

At face value the banknote is an administrative document for daily economic exchange. But money ends up being much more. In popular culture we see people going crazy over stacks of bills in films, music videos, and game shows. Money isn’t worth anything as an object, but it represents purchasing power, which is why it has come to symbolize power, luxury, generosity, luck, fortune, happiness, even beauty. This symbolic value is perhaps why artists and activists have often used banknotes as a medium to criticize capitalism or consumerism. But singling out money as the culprit of capitalism would be missing the point of how capitalism works. Every society has used forms of money to track economic transactions, and by itself money doesn’t have to be a symbol of capitalism or exploitation.

Emergency banknotes (Notgeld) designed by Herbert Bayer for the State Bank of Thuringia, 1923.

Banknote from Zaïre (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo) with the head of Mobutu punched out after 1997, when he was ousted.

In his life-long work to understand capitalism, Karl Marx notes that the problem is not money itself, but that in capitalism money disguises social relations.³² A dollar earned by a fourteen-year-old selling candy on the street for eight hours in the afternoon heat, is worth the same as a dollar earned in a millisecond by a stock-broker in an air-conditioned office, even though the time and efforts it took them to earn that dollar are not anywhere near comparable. What money does, is that it reduces any social or cultural association to a simple digit, which is precisely what also allows us to consume guilt-free. When we earn ten dollars, we simply have no way of finding out how the value was created that these ten dollars represent. This is why ultimately everything in capitalism can have a price tag: water, a river, CO₂ emissions, even a human life. Therefore, imagining a currency that reflects economic transactions as well as the social relations it represents, would have to coincide with an economic system that prioritizes social and human values over economic growth.

Hyperinflation in Germany, 1923. One US dollar was worth 4,200 billion German marks.

Money market in Hargeisa, Somaliland, 2020. One US dollar is worth 585,000 shilling.

THE PLASTIC ECONOMY

The first BankAmericard, a pre-cursor of the VISA card, 1958.

Coins and banknotes are fetishized objects, so what happens if cash disappears? The end of cash started in 1971, when the US abandoned the gold standard. As the world’s global currency was no longer backed by gold, its value became solely based on trust in national governments and the global financial system. Together with the low cost of plastics and the new possibilities of information technology, this gave rise to a new form of money: the credit card. Digital technology made it possible to replace the authority and security provided by the designer as a scribe with binary information. The graphic designer no longer assigns trust or prevent counterfeiting in virtual currency forms, but has to manufacture positive associations in order to encourage spending.

Credit cards were invented in 1921 but did not reach high circulation until the 1960s. The first successful credit card was the BankAmericard (the precursor of the VISA card) issued by the Bank of America in 1958. In the same year American Express became the first credit card that could be used outside of the US. Credit card companies used aggressive marketing to gain a market share. The BankAmericard was mailed to more than a million people in California, among whom the entire population of Fresno. It was a success. Two years later, cardholders in Fresno had spent $60 million with their new cards.³³

Before the credit card, small loans existed in the form of store credit or family and community loans. Credits cards introduced easy and portable forms of credit, making debt an easy way to enjoy luxuries people could not yet afford. Credit cards turned out to be an extremely profitable business, since credit card companies found a loophole which allowed them to charge sky-high interest rates. Today a third of cardholders pay interest rates of 20% or higher.³⁴ Credit card debts have grown exponentially since 1950 from nothing to over $1 trillion today, with an average of $8,402 per US household.

As Light as a Free-Floating Dollar

The form of the credit card perfectly illustrates virtual money. Its size, its printed surface and thickness does not reveal anything about its value, which is inscribed in the digital information on the magnetic strip, or the card’s chip. Value that has to be extracted by machines and has to be communicated via screens or printouts. The OCR-A typeface (1968) is especially designed to be read by machines, and the credit card’s 16-digit number is not easily memorized. The invisibility of the credit card’s value, hidden by its lightness and shiny surface, makes it an easy object to promote.

Its mundane appearance is an ingenious way to make money from people who have none. This is why the credit card industry flooded US households with 8 billion credit card solicitations in 2006 alone.³⁵ It is no longer allowed to send people free credit cards, but aggressive marketing techniques in the US persist, targeting those most vulnerable and in need of fast credit. Credit cards are also effective surveillance tools. Each time a credit or debit card is used we forfeit part of our privacy. Credit cards leave a detailed trail of our location, spending behaviour, desires, and needs, which can be marketed and sold for security or marketing purposes.

Everyday Speculation

The shift from paper to plastic card is not just a formal transformation, but an ideological one. A cash payment is done with money that you have, whereas most credit card payments take an advance on money that is expected in the future. A credit card’s appearance remains the same, independent of one’s bank balance, making it seem one can spend infinitely. That puts financial risk at the heart of everyday spending. Together with mortgages debts and student loans, citizens are expected to actively participate in financial risks that provide the raw material for financial speculation.³⁶

With the advent of virtual money taking over physical money, the role of the scribe is outsourced to automated technology. Transactions are digitally stored and inscribed, only indirectly visible through online or offline balance sheets. Credit card users are expected to keep track of their own financial situation, betting on that job they are hoping to land, or a raise that was promised. Society expects citizens to take out loans and mortgages and invest in their future. But when risk-taking leads to a crash of the financial system like in 2008, it is not citizens but banks and financial institutions who receive most of the compensation.

Typefaces designed for machine reading, or optical character recognition (OCR). Many of these were designed for automatic processing of accounting and routing information on bank checks. The OCR-A is still used on bar codes, credit cards, and bank checks.

Design guidelines for credit cards with magnetic stripe, 86 × 54 mm, thickness 760 micron.

Titanium Plastic

The success of the credit card form has led to an almost ubiquitous use. From government identity cards, healthcare cards, to discount cards, many of us carry dozens of plastic cards around. Banks and credit card companies therefore require designers to make cards look more valuable. In the form of different spending categories, where a certain amount of money upgrades your card to a more luxurious level. Even within the world of plastic, design details like finishes, coloured plastic cores, and subtle typography can specify certain classes or bank privileges. Each category of credit is carefully designed to fit its net worth.

Take the JP Morgan Reserve card, which is made of the rare material palladium. You can get one of you have $10 million in assets. It has no printing, just inscribed information in the metal. Another prized card is the American Express Centurion card. To be eligible, you need to spend at least €250,000 with the card each year. Nicknamed the ‘black card’, it is made of anodized titanium with information etched in the material. There is an entire category of this credit extravagance. Cards made of pure gold, like the Kazakh Sberbank card or cards with an actual diamond inlay; the Eurasian Diamond Card Visa Infinite. A fetishized version that defies its origin as a consumer object carrying digital information that extends quick credit.

Advertisement for the BankAmericard as part of the ‘Fresno drop’, 1958.

JP Morgan Reserve card, made from Palladium.

American Express Centurion Card, made from titanium, the most expensive credit card in the world.

Three hierarchies of American Express cards, Platinum Card, Gold card, and regular card.

Darren Cullen, Pocket Money Loans, 2013.

PLAYING WITH MONEY

Governments and banks don’t like cash. It is costly to design, print, circulate, and distribute. It can be counterfeited, it is anonymous, and can be kept out of sight and control, which is why it is favoured in informal economies. Even more importantly, banks cannot gather spending data. This is why governments and banks have tried hard to abolish cash in favour of digital payment systems such as credit cards, debit cards, and payment apps. In the Netherlands more than sixty percent of all payments in 2012 were digital.³⁷

Many shops and restaurants no longer accept cash, and even debit and credit cards are quickly losing terrain to banking and payment applications. Long bank account numbers, credit card numbers, verification codes and passwords have turned people to apps that use fingerprint or face recognition verification. Paying with smartphone applications provides the unique possibility for companies to link financial information to social media, location data, and contacts. Digital payment systems have tarnished the monopoly of banks, and many tech companies are now getting into finance, for example Facebook with its currency Libra, and Apple Pay. Some of these tech companies are finding new ways to turn money and finances into a game.

Money and games are never far removed, whether people are gambling, playing monopoly, betting on the stock market, or simply toss a coin. Ironically, among the first printed objects in China were banknotes and playing cards.³⁸ Finance itself has been compared to a game, as in the term ‘casino capitalism’, coined by Susan Strange in 1987.³⁹ Decades of innovation in the financial industry have been used to extract more profit from the financial activities of everyday citizens. Financial technology, (FinTech) is merely the latest step. Venmo is a popular payment application with more than 40 million users, that functions as a social network. Designed for friends to split bills or give group gifts, it comes with a feed where people can discuss their shared expenses. Such social paying apps are convenient, but they can also bring out unequal relationships. The Chinese payment app WePay further gamifies the paying experience by offering options such as randomized payments, and gift payments for holidays or graduation.

Media and communications researcher Rachel O’Dwyer finds this gamification of money worrying.⁴⁰ When spending money, splitting bills, or managing finances becomes a competitive activity among friends and relatives in plain sight, this may further promote and celebrate money as a person’s most important quality. By doing so it can exclude or punish those who are poor or choose to live on small incomes. More importantly, alternative or non-monetary exchanges such as sharing, barter, or non-financial gifting, do not exist in these apps. Here, the role of the designer as a scribe is no longer to assign trust, but to create interfaces for websites and apps to keep users addicted to the application for as long as possible. Notifications, infinite scrolling, and limiting navigation are interface techniques borrowed from gambling, manipulating users into spending more time on the app than intended. Visual interface elements on paying apps still reference forms of trust and authority, but the design mostly serves to create positive and playful associations to nudge people into experiencing finance as entertainment, ultimately with the goal of spending more and spending often.

Your Credit Score is Excellent

In countries such as China and the US, personal privileges are increasingly influenced by credit scores, conjured up by algorithms that combine credit history and other personal details. Such scores can determine if you can buy a house, the height of your insurance rates, but are also used in dating apps, and by employers. More than half of US companies check credit scores before hiring new employees.⁴¹

Cathy O’Neil is a mathematician who warns against the dangers of credit scores in Weapons of Math Destruction (2016). Credit score systems often contain errors, like two people with the same name and birth date can be easily mixed up. Credit scores also perpetuate class division and racial discrimination, because credit may be influenced by the neighbourhood you live in or who you are related to. In China credit scores are set up as part of a social scoring system for all citizens, where your credit and even your purchase history can influence your chances to obtain a travel visa or a government job. Although this is still in an early phase, eventually a social score could put someone on a nationwide blacklist, which currently includes no less than 13 million people. Blacklisting would prohibit you from sending your kids to certain schools, or buying train or airplane tickets.⁴²

Today we’re added up in every conceivable way as statisticians and mathematicians patch together a mishmash of data, from our zip codes and Internet surfing patterns to our recent purchases. Many of their pseudoscientific models attempt to predict our creditworthiness.

CATHY O’NEIL, MATHEMATICIAN

Mint personal finance app, Intuit 2007–2021.

As credit scores are becoming more important in society, companies are anticipating this by selling applications that help to manage finances. Mobile applications such as Mint keep track of all your spending, and calculate your credit score. Mint promotes this to say they are helping customers to get financially ‘fit’. These apps obtain valuable insight in anyone’s spending behaviour. The design of financial applications is inspired by the gambling industry.⁴³

Apps such as Mint, Apple Pay, Venmo and WePay perfect this strategy, using the reliability of a spreadsheet with the fun colours and typography of gambling and computer games. The playful design obscures the function that these apps have to discipline our financial behaviour as good citizens, gather data to categorize and nudge us towards products, and posit money as the core social value.

In spite of anti-establishment rhetoric, blockchains are increasingly being developed by major corporations, banks, states and international financial institutions to secure and expedite their infrastructures.

Max Haiven, researcher

Apple Pay website, 2020.

Cryptocurrencies

A much-discussed topic is cryptocurrencies, a form of money that only exists digitally. They are created and circulated outside of government control, and therefore popular for conducting informal or illicit transactions. Bitcoin (2009) was the first cryptocurrency, and by now there are about 1,800 others. Cryptocurrencies are associated with informal transactions, because some of them can be used anonymously. How cryptocurrencies exactly work is notoriously complex, and is better explained elsewhere. In the context of this book there are a few aspects worth noting: the way they create trust, and whether they are anti-capitalist or not.

Cryptocurrencies are not backed by governments (yet), and for a currency to function it needs to be trusted. What makes cryptocurrencies interesting is that trust is not forged by state power, signatures, or printing techniques, but by using computer encryption and computer networks. The blockchain is the Bitcoin database that assigns trust to each transaction. It does that by leaving a copy of each timestamped transaction on every computer in the network. Since there is not one central place where the information is stored, no single person can interfere or control the currency. Trust is outsourced to strong cryptography (mathematics) on the one hand, and the power of a multitude of computers (the collective) on the other. Blockchain, in theory, can be useful to organize large decentralized digital infrastructures without government interference.

Group chat within the Venmo payment app, 2021.

Yes, gelukt (Yes, it worked). Memes when completing transactions in the payment app Tikkie, 2021.

The ingenuity of cryptocurrencies to create a global currency without government interference doesn’t mean they are anti-capitalist. On the contrary, the popularity of Bitcoin has driven up its value from $0 to $46,966 in twelve years, making early investors incredibly rich. The energy needed to ‘mine’ Bitcoin is proportional to how many people are mining, and today one Bitcoin transaction requires the energy nine homes consume in one year.⁴⁴ Its incredible increase in value has attracted so many interested parties, that power-consuming computer systems are custom-built to mine them.

The popularity of cryptocurrencies ignores the fact that wealth cannot be created out of nothing. As long as cryptocurrencies can be used to buy actual goods and services, the millions that Bitcoin investors have made will have to be paid for by someone, somewhere. Whether through the slow price increase of food or real estate, a higher pensioning age, or the deflation of national currencies, or the price of lithium which is needed to create the computer batteries to mine the cryptocurrencies.

Alternative Currencies

Any serious effort to create an economic system that prioritizes human and social values over profit would require a currency that is more socially embedded. Some initiatives have a go at this by using alternative or complimentary currencies. Many of these currencies, such as the Bijlmer Euro, or the Brixton Pound, are local currencies that keep value circulating in the region. These local currencies often have the same value as the national currency, the difference is that they are only issued locally and accepted locally.

For example, if you do a design job for a local beer brewery, and you spend the money at a big supermarket chain, the value created in the community by you and the brewer leaves the community. Now if instead the brewer pays you the equivalent in a local currency, you would have to spend it at local shops (the only places that accept them), and the value is kept in the community. As a benefit, local shopkeepers may be more inclined to hire you rather than a designer from far away, since you accept the local currency. The advantage of such a local economy is that any profits stay in the region, there is more contact and trade between people locally, and less costs and pollution due to transport of products.

Caroline Woolard, Exchange Café, 2013. At Exchange Café, you will be greeted by waitstaff with direct experience working in, with, and for solidarity economies. You will be offered products with political biographies: tea carried across borders, milk distributed by prison abolitionists, and honey gifted by bees. On the wall, an emergent publication about one-on-one engagement invites contributions, and TheExchangeArchive.com shows that artworks emerge in dialog between people, not in solitary isolation. Exchange Cafe is a social space dedicated the power of one-to-one agreement. (text from artist website)

There are many alternative and local currencies in use. In 2006 there were sixteen regions in Germany where regional currencies were used instead of the Euro.⁴⁵ The last chapter of this book features the cultural network Fora do Eixo (off-axis) from Brazil, who have used their own $FdE currency since 2006. Some alternative currencies have their own bill designs and nominations, some are merely an upgraded version of existing bills. For example, the Bijlmer Euro was a project by artist Christian Nold to strengthen the community economy in this eastern district of Amsterdam. People could transform their €5 or €10 bill into Bijlmer Euros by pasting a sticker with an RFID chip on it. Shop owners would scan the chip and the circulation of the currency could be followed by everyone via a website.⁴⁶

A much older alternative currency, which wields a very different form of value, is TimeBanking. This form of currency began in the US in 1827 as an experiment by Josiah Warren, whose shop would sell goods in exchange for the time it took to produce them. It is based on a very simple concept: one hour of work is equivalent to one hour of someone else’s work, independent of what that work is. One hour of work by a creative director is worth the same as an hour spent by a cleaner vacuuming that same office. The currency derives its value from the resource that is scarce for all human beings, time. According to Wikipedia there are Timebanks in 34 countries, with 500 in the US alone.⁴⁷ One credit equals one hour of work, which is known as a time credit or a time dollar. When someone earns a time credit, it may be kept indefinitely with the advantage that there is never any inflation or deflation.⁴⁸

Alternative currencies aren’t legal, but national banks usually allow them to exist on a small scale. Since these currencies are not theoretical but used in very practical ways, we can learn something about different ways to create economies that respect the value of social life within communities. These kinds of small-scale experiments are also known as solidarity economy, or social and solidarity economy. The terms that are used for economic activities that are concerned with the needs and desires of people, rather than maximizing profit. This is a catch-all term for TimeBanks, barter networks, gift exchanges, community gardens, free give-away shops, sharing economies, and so on.

This chapter began with the designer as a scribe, as the one who is hired to provide graphic forms that authenticate and secure economic transactions, whether it is in the form of coins, banknotes, financial records, or stock market information. Digital forms such as credit cards or payment apps need designers to make these products desirable and encourage spending. The designer finds herself locked in a role to authenticate state economic power, only to win the public’s trust. The examples given here of small-scale economic experiments may seem far removed from what a graphic designer can do. But alternative currencies and the solidarity economy show that the agency of the designer goes far beyond those roles. Designers are economic actors, we earn money and spend money, we too are subjected to a system that tries hard to ignore the social relations behind money. By spending and earning money locally, by encouraging the use of alternative currencies or setting up barter networks, you can yourself begin by creating small alternative economies that strengthen social bonds instead of designing abstract forms to represent them.

Capitalism and other systems of power are ultimately vested in how we cooperate; they can only be overcome or changed if we cooperate; not only on the level of small experimental collectives or individual subcultures, but as a society.

Max Haiven, researcher

Lawrence Weiner, Hour Note prototype, 2009. Paul Glover, Ithaca Hours, 1991. This Ain’t Rock and Roll, Brixton Pound ten pound note, 2011. Christian Nold, Bijlmer Euro, 2009. Joseph Beuys, Kunst = KAPITAL, 1979. Zachary Gough, Bourdieu: A Social Currency, 2014.