In this chapter, we study how cash and currency work in practice: the deeper history of producing, securing, and authenticating paper money—that strange class of printed documents we have all learned how to read. We follow counterfeiters and their foes, consider the problem of trusting documents, read an accidental treatise on sovereignty in an ordinary transaction, and learn about a secret constellation that all of us have seen and almost none can recognize.
You likely carry many signatures on your person as you read this. In the United States, they are probably Timothy Geithner, Anna Cabral, Jacob Lew; in Brazil, Henrique Meirelles; in Malaysia, Datuk Muhammad bin Ibrahim; in Poland, Adam Glapiński; across Europe, Mario Draghi or Jean Claude Trichet. These signatures are the most widely reproduced samples of handwriting in existence, their little paraph swashes of personhood riding in discreet corners of the world’s banknotes, along with national monuments, blandly introspective portraits of notables, monumental digits, and the ponderous architectural-heraldic hardware of garlands, shields, scrollwork, and Doric capitals: “stalwart heroes sheathing their swords before monetary units,” the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote of banknotes at the time of German hyperinflation—“ornamenting the façade of hell.”1
These signatures of treasury officials and central bankers are part of the deliberate archaicism of banknotes, present in the paper like wisdom teeth or a vermiform appendix, the relic of bills of exchange. Bills of exchange were vehicles for the intricate chains of credit that sustained European trade for centuries. It can be modish and misleading to describe earlier technologies and practices in terms of later ones, but bills of exchange constituted something akin to a social network platform, within which a set of relationships and schedules could be established.
A merchant in one city issues a bill to an agent, promising to pay a sum at some future point to another person. With this bill in hand, the person to be paid could endorse it and use it to pay someone else at a discounted rate, who could pass it again in their turn. Rates and values for these discounting trades were shaped by the larger picture of (in Rebecca Spang’s words) “the volume of bills to be paid in a certain city and on the reputation of both the originally named payer and all those who had endorsed the bill as it traded hands.”2
Between Antwerp and Genoa, Paris and Frankfurt, and Istanbul and Lisbon, each new arrangement added a link to a chain of signatures, and each signature invoked a specific person to be held accountable. As Spang put it, the written signatures “made it possible to imagine that even hitherto unknown individuals could be found and held responsible if necessary.”3 An individual bill was the expression of a unique arrangement of people and events and goods—furniture, brandy, Monsieur X, Dottore Y, Mijnheer Z, six months from now, at the fair in Leipzig—and was itself a unique object. If lost, the holder could advertise for it “as he might a lost dog or an umbrella gone astray.” Since every person in the chain was liable for failure, it meant financial safety in numbers: the more signatures in place, the more people were affirming the probity of everyone else.
This mechanism for managing the flow of value maintained a balancing act between standardized reproducibility and the unique particulars of these people, this deal, next year. The delicacy of this balance was exposed in the crisis of signatures during the production of assignats during the French Revolution. Assignats were the currency of the new regime, tied, in theory and at first, to nationalized properties. They ended up in much wider production and circulation than bills of exchange, while still drawing on the authority of the particular signature, from the originating clerk through the links of endorsers passing it along. Sinister conspiracies of clerks were imagined with foreboding; the problem of bottlenecks on issuing new money appeared—limited by the flexibility and time of the hands and pens of signatories; engraved and printed signatures shifted the meaning of the objects themselves. Along with property, the assignats had been backed by an identity and a name. Some specific bureaucrat with his pens, his home address, the revolutionary tricolor pinned to his hat, could be found and held accountable. (The term “bureaucrat” itself was an invention of that period and came into its own in the Revolution: governance by a piece of office furniture that represented an information storage and processing system.)4
Spang’s study of this period documents a profound and subtle shift: the adoption of new techniques and technologies in printing to confirm the identity of the note itself, rather than the person who endorsed it. These notes became “objects made in new ways,” designed to confirm the identity of this piece of paper as money, rather than to confirm the identity of a particular person with assets.5
We can look to the United States for a comparable case. The paperwork of credit systems—payment orders issued to “factors,” agents, jobbers, and brokers against commodities to be delivered, warehouse receipts, bills of lading, auction records—had a mutually sustaining relationship to the monetary notes issued by banks and bound to some particular building, some community of farmers or miners, some strongbox of bullion. Communal credit networks thrived: nineteenth-century Floridian orange farmers and pioneers took in Northern tourists, who often paid with checks that couldn’t be cashed for considerable time. The checks themselves therefore moved up and down the water as money, bearing a growing list of endorsements expressing the social system of Indian River.6 “The entire business of these waters,” wrote the Irish visitor Thomas Ashe in 1808, “is conducted without the use of money.”7
The mercantile life of North America, from the Atlantic piers to the slave empires of Southern cotton to the trappers and voyageurs in Canadian rivers to the wagon trains and eventual railroads of the West, was initially organized with systems that would have been familiar to a fifteenth-century Venetian merchant family.8 It ran on kinship networks, tenuous foreign trade with double-entry bookkeeping denominated in “Adventure and Merchandise Accounts,” occasional coins and paper, and signature-centric ways of managing people, records, and investments.
Into this polyglot monetary culture, with coins and specie (Bohemian thalers and “pieces of eight,” pine-tree shillings, Spanish reales), bills of credit issued to soldiers returning from Quebec, bills of lading for future barges of coal or cotton, local banknotes, and “cash articles” like furs, beeswax, linen, tea, and gunpowder, the concept and practice of national notes came as a new vocabulary—with the same ontological twist Spang describes. Credit systems, from bills of lading to banknotes from a local institution, were networks of regional social trust and acquired experience. (“If a good bill, it must have, thickened here and there into the substance of the paper, little wavy spots of red,” says a character in Melville’s 1857 The Confidence-Man, examining a note from the Vicksburgh Trust and Insurance Banking Company.) Coins and cash articles were all matters of direct somatic knowledge—from being weighed in scales, to the fineness of a length of cloth, to the taste, feel, weight, pliability, and look of metal. National notes had to confirm themselves as a new form of monetary identity and to train their holders not just in new ideas but in new practices of assessing objects and understanding value.
You should be able to easily recognize a good bill without knowing how to produce one yourself: the challenge of secure paper. It should be trivial for the originator to create—after the initial engineering hurdles are crossed, it should have a marginal cost close to zero—while being enormously difficult for an adversary to reverse engineer and re-create. One party should be able to turn old blue jeans (mostly, in the case of US dollars) into stacks of crisp bills in such a way that no other party could either produce their own or replicate the bills that already exist. Lisa Gitelman opened a media history of the explosion of writing techniques and technologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the expansion of new ways of making documents—with a New York City death certificate: its multiple signatures, seals and borders, intaglio printing, barcode, watermark, thermochromic ink, microprinting, and expression of itself as “a true copy of a record on file.”9 With this elaborate armature in place, the kernel of fact—of an identity, a time, a death—could be used in specialized contexts, from public health to the disbursement of assets to the most melancholy kind of identity work.10 Paper money must provide a similar level of security that it is what it appears to be and do so in contexts as varied as the market itself: everywhere a cash transaction might appear, and for everyone who might engage in one.
And, still more difficult, it must now do so in the larger context of digital technologies, the proliferation of “objects made in new ways” built on systems of perfect, bit-for-bit reproducibility.
A one-dollar bill, US$1. It is one of the most ubiquitous industrially produced objects in existence, circulating in the tens of billions of units. It’s hard to say exactly how many: we know how many the Federal Reserve has put into circulation each year (11,700,000,000 one-dollar notes in the year of 2016, for instance), but the bills have the life expectancy of a gerbil, between about one to five years. In a legal and an economic sense, as money, they are all precisely the same—fungible, interchangeably worth no more and no less than any other, and capable of acting as a measurement tool to compare the respective prices of different things. As objects and as currency, though, they are deliberately and circumstantially unique.
The particular bill we’re discussing here carries a great deal of data in the numbers printed on it: where it was produced (St. Louis), the series and serial number of the run it is part of, the specific plate used to print it (FW A 81), and even its position in a sheet of thirty-two—in this case, the upper left-hand corner of the sheet (A1). It is creased, a little linty, torn on the border in two places. When I hold it in my hand—when we handle cash in general—I touch an object touched by more strangers than anything else I will encounter aside from the grab bars and straps of public transit: an act of collective, bacterial communion. Paper money carries populations of skin flora hand to hand across the world like cargo ships discharging ballast water in foreign ports.
The US one-dollar bill is an object designed to be read, in simple and complex senses. It is iconic and immediately recognizable, whether to a human or the bill validator in a vending machine. It is so visibly on-brand: the greenback, one volume in a uniform edition, its reverse featuring an eerie, bleak landscape with an unfinished and watchful pyramid standing alone like a Magritte painting, and twelve references, digital and numeral, to its cardinality—its one-ness—in relation to other numbers in the series of notes. I mean this idea, that the bill is to be read, very concretely: it is part of a larger genre of valuable paper, a potent symbol we know how to interpret in particular ways.
The design historian Frances Robertson has chronicled the close relationship between the development of the first modern banknotes and steel-engraved technical drawing and printing: the same technologies spurring the reproduction of the new industrial order—the precise and detailed renderings of mass-produced parts and intricate machines—were brought to bear on the production of notes at once easily recognized and inimitable.11 The “self-acting tools,” ancestors of sophisticated lathes, machine tools, and computer numerical control (CNC) mills and cutters, enabled geometrically precise production that could take the place of skilled handwork. These were used in producing the parts for still other machines like locomotives, ships, and bridges—and banknotes, with the looping, spiraling patterns of the rose engine lathe. Those exquisite guilloche patterns used on postage stamps, Fabergé eggs, watch movements, and stock certificates and other authenticable paperwork are also present on a dollar bill, the direct heritage of the challenge of making printed paper money.
The products of high-tech, industrial, mechanized reproduction needed also to be authentic, with their very authenticity rooted in the sophistication of their multiplication. They are identical, like the interchangeable parts of a rifle or a locomotive, and just as reliable. They are “true” in the philosophical sense (the real thing) and the mechanical sense: trued like a wheel, carefully engineered and checked. You can pass a banknote as you would ride over the trusses of an iron bridge.
The cultural historian Mary Poovey argued that this banknote is also part of a larger domain of reading, one that has become largely invisible to us. “It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on”: a phrase applied to money and writing alike. For Poovey, the naturalization of widespread industrial banknote production and models of “literary merit” around the same place and time in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and Europe was not a coincidence; the note could carry worth as a page of prose or poetry carried worthiness, part of a related set of genres for defining value on printed paper. “Money,” she wrote, “has become so familiar that its writing has seemed to disappear and it has seemed to lose its history as [various forms of] writing.”12 While too complex an argument to take up in its entirety here, it sets up another aspect of what this dollar is: a document, with a set of implicit and explicit concepts carried on it.
It is “legal tender for all debts, public and private,” and every time we transact it, it acts as our allegiance to countries in general and the United States in particular. “The paper currency is a key specimen of the quality of the product of the federal government as it expresses itself on paper,” wrote W. A. Dwiggins, the type designer and calligrapher from chapter 1 who proposed to redesign the notes. “The currency, and the federal stamps, are the most widely distributed insignia of state that anyone can adduce.”13 I take the insignia out of my wallet to participate in what the anthropologist and scholar of payment systems Lana Swartz calls a “transactional community.”14 In the case of US dollars, it’s a community that extends far past the country’s borders, from dollarized economies like Ecuador’s to the cubes of shrink-wrapped bricks of hundred-dollar bills acting as cash reserves and settlement mechanisms for operations public and covert all over the planet.
As I smooth out this one-dollar bill, trying to get the laundromat’s change machine to accept it and return quarters, I’m unfolding a living historical document, with a design approved by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a territorial remit advanced by Lincoln, a value that oscillates with reference to the Nixon Shock and the judgment of the Federal Reserve responding to market activity, “a daily affirmation of the nation-state” (the phrase is geographer Emily Gilbert’s), sixteen square inches and carried by most everyone in the country.15 I’m holding a philosophical treatise on the concept of sovereignty—a treatise whose meaning is now being challenged.
Bearing in mind how much we can read in a one-dollar bill, let’s look further up the ladder of value at a US twenty, which must meet a separate technical challenge. No one tries to counterfeit US$1s anymore; the era of small-time counterfeiters like “Old Mr. 880,” the subject of the longest manhunt in the history of counterfeiting, is long past.16 Many serious and sophisticated groups work on counterfeiting twenties. Along with everything it shares with the one-dollar bill, the twenty also must incorporate technologies to be readable but not digitally duplicable; it must police the analog-digital border by itself.
A US twenty-dollar bill is a very specific kind of object. It must be almost, but not exactly, like every other twenty-dollar bill in existence; if there is a single other bill exactly like it, one of them is counterfeit. There is no other bill like this one before me (serial number JB9557548B, 2009 series, Timothy Geithner’s signature, a little blue ballpoint pen squiggle over the portico of the White House), as far as I know, but there are 6.4 billion others that are very close. They are in wallets and envelopes and the vaults of cash machines and banks and cash-in-transit vehicles and shrink-wrapped on pallets in warehouses and buried in backcountry lots in lengths of PVC pipe to escape metal detectors. The bill works as it does only because it is simultaneously specific and generic, recognizable but not reproducible; a great deal of work goes into keeping it that way.
This particular bill simultaneously does and does not have value in the way we are all familiar with: if we cut it into quarters, we still have the substance of the thing, but the meaning has changed and the value has gone (and we’ve committed a crime in our act of defacement—it’s my note, but not really mine). It exists between now, when one holds it, and then, when it passes to someone else. It is only valuable to me because it can pass out of my hands. It is an abstract quantity, capable of becoming anything from an act of generosity to a fire extinguisher, but it exists in practice in terms of concrete qualities—it is variably earmarked and discounted by my personal circumstances, and I’ll spend, save, or give it differently.17 To all those simultaneities, we can add a new one: this bill is simultaneously analog and digital.
The friable edges between analog and digital were crumbling away in the 1990s, and the crisis for cash was imminent: the proliferation of high-resolution scanners, precise laser printers and color printers, and image editing software laid the groundwork for a counterfeiting emergency. The long, beautiful sequence of Willem Dafoe’s counterfeiter at work in William Friedkin’s 1985 To Live and Die in L.A. (one of the great montages of technique in movies, up there with the Charles Eames–directed construction of the airplane in Billy Wilder’s Spirit of St. Louis) could be replaced with after-hours digital desktop publishing in any high-end design studio. Digitization broke the arrangement that made cash viable. New strategies were employed to deal with this problem: reactive inks and security threads, optical tricks, the feel of different textiles, watermarks, even denominations hidden in diffraction gratings that you could project on a wall with a laser pointer. The most telling of these was the EURion Constellation.
If you are reading this in much of the world, you likely carry this Constellation in your purse or pocket at this moment, alongside that set of signatures. If you are holding the Mexican twenty-peso note, it’s the small yellow circles in the band by Benito Juárez’s head; a UAE dirham note generally has the circles positioned near landmarks like stars in the background; on the ten euro note they’re in the visual echoes of the arch; the US$20 hides them in small yellow “20”s. This dot pattern is recognized by the firmware in color copiers, scanners, printer drivers, and components deep in graphics editing software (like Photoshop), triggering currency recognition systems that refuse to digitize or reproduce the note.
In William Gibson’s novel Zero History, he imagined an object he called “the ugliest t-shirt in the world”: “There were huge features screened across it in dull black halftone, asymmetrical eyes at breast height, a grim mouth at crotch-level.… Diagonals at the edges continued around the sides, and across the short, loose sleeves.”18 It sounds like a cross between Shepard Fairey’s Obey face and a QR code. This pattern acts as an instruction to the “deep architecture” of digital video surveillance. CCTV cameras will record a person wearing this pattern but will remove them from the recording on retrieval. “They forget the figure wearing the ugly T-shirt. Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands.”
In the novel, a “gentleman’s agreement” has established that this cryptic symbol will work across the software of CCTV systems. It is effectively a magical object; Gibson’s characters refer to it as a sigil, a symbol invested with supernatural power. Everyone paying in a major currency’s cash has held and folded a symbol even more far-reaching: the Constellation, an expression of an international agreement that excludes particular objects from being digitized in particular ways. The ugliest T-shirt only works on CCTV systems; the Constellation only works on systems capable of high-resolution image capture, editing, and printing. (You can take a picture of it with your phone just fine.)
The Counterfeit Detection System software is freely available but closed source—meaning that its mechanisms cannot be reviewed, even by companies that have incorporated it.19 There are other recognition mechanisms that still more obscurely apply. If you mask the Constellation, some digital optical systems still know not to capture or modify the object of money, using cues that researchers are still working on untangling. This is a body of symbols meant not for humans but for machines. They work to identify an object as money: not simply to make it valuable, but to keep it as one kind of object, on the analog borderline, and prevent cash from becoming digital.
What about cash that started digitally? How was it to be secured and authenticated—and read and understood?