Traces of Cash

L’argent, the 1983 film by Robert Bresson[1], tells  the story of one counterfeit bank note as it is put into circulation  and passed from person to person, with disastrous consequences. The  effects of this one dishonest act are transmitted to everyone who comes  in contact with the bill, until delivery man Yvon Targe tries to spend  the money and is arrested, triggering a chain of events that leave him  destitute and imprisoned for life. L’argent is a story about the  destructive properties of money, but it also a story of invisible traces  – a God’s eye study of a virulent effect as it migrates through a  community. Bresson uses the materiality of money – the peeling off and  counting and exchange of cash – as a motif throughout. The viewer is in a  position to follow the journey of the note as it travels from hand to  hand, to learn its origins and transformations along the way. Yvon, on  the other hand, experiences the malignant effect that has been put into  circulation, but is entirely without recourse, because the history of  the counterfeit bill is unknown to him. At the climax of the film, Yvon  cries out: “Where’s the money?” He never gets an answer.

Today, cash, cheques and electronic payments all circulate as  currency, but cash alone does not record its circulation in any way that  is legible. This isn’t to say that cash carries no traces of its  journey, but that these traces are secret, invisible, and don’t often  come to light. Certainly cash carries all kinds of sediment, from  bacteria and foreign organisms to illicit drugs and revolutionary  messages. A paper note, for example, can carry the live flu virus for up  to seventeen days. [2]   Along with microbes and foreign contaminants, studies show that the  vast majority of cash also carries trace amounts of illegal substances  it has come into contact with; around 80% of British Banknotes contain traces of drugs, with this percentage rising significantly in urban areas.

Money, because of its unique position as a kind of “skin of the state”,[3]  is also a conduit for civic dissent. Along with the visible emblems of  the nation state, the serial numbers and hidden visual codes designed to  prevent counterfeit reproduction, other secret messages sometimes make  their way into money. Artist Cildo Mereilles’ Insertion into Ideological Circuits Two: Banknote Project (1970)  explored the relationship between monetary circuits and collective  ideology. At the time Meireles produced this project, Brazil was  experiencing a particularly oppressive period in its military  dictatorship. The artist attempted to disrupt ideological circuits by  inserting subversive anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist messages into  Brazilian bank notes, such as the slogan ‘Yankees Go Home!’, before  returning the money to circulation.

Once put into circulation on the street, cash, while retaining its  origins in a publicly mandated system, enters another system of  peer-to-peer exchange. There is a tension here between the control and  issuance of a technology by the state and the ability of the individual  to use this public medium as a channel for radical or anti-state  communications. Furthermore, because these subversive messages are  anonymous, they are relatively safe to put into place. Here cash  functions as an analogue point-to-point medium, something that everybody  uses but nobody completely controls. Even with the availability of more  sophisticated civic media such as Twitter, such practices continue  today. In Ireland, where a controversial system known as ‘Direct  Provision’ places asylum seekers in enclosures for years on end as they  await the outcome of their applications, Euro notes sometimes carry the  slogan “No Borders: End Direct Provision”. Other messages might just be  humorous, as was the case recently in Canada, where Canadians paid  tribute in currency doodles to the late Leonard Nimoy by transforming  the face of 7th Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier on the five dollar bill to that of Dr. Spock.

We sometimes see attempts to trace cash in law enforcement. For the  purposes of everyday transactions all bills are fungible and one  Canadian $5 is no different from another if you’re using it to buy a  sandwich. But for the purposes of security and identification, all notes  are not equal; each has a unique serial number that can be recorded and  used to identify and trace money in the event of a recall or crime –  hence the concept of ‘dirty money’, where particular notes are  tainted by misdeed and the practice of ‘money laundering’, where bills  are transferred or otherwise shuffled around in order to divest them of  their filthy traces. A civic interest in the broader patterns of  monetary circulation has led to projects such as Where’s George?,  a website that tracks the natural and geographic circulation of  American paper money. Similar projects exist around the world, such as Where’s Willy? for Canada and Eurobilltracker  for Europe, among others. It works like this: bills are manually  entered into the database by a user who lists the unique serial number  of the note and their zip codes on the website, marks the note with the  website link and finally spends the money back into circulation. The  hope is that future users will see the tag, look up the registered note  online and add further information about its current location to the  database.

By tracking these bills and their migration, a whole layer of  metadata about where a token has travelled is brought to light.  Scientists have used data from the currency-tracking site to visualise  the natural trajectories of paper money and find out what these  migratory patterns can tell us, about human nature, about disease and  about mobility. Using this data, theoretical physicist Dirk Brockmann  discovered that money in the US generally circulates in quite local  arcs that resemble, but significantly do not reproduce, state  boundaries. The physicist scraped the Where’s George? website for  data about how the dollar bills travelled, and used network theory to  draw the lines  that the cash was unlikely to cross. These borders come  to represent a monetary topography that overlays official state lines.  In places these monetary lines faithfully followed state borders, but  not always; Missouri was divided into Eastern and Western territories,  as was Pennsylvania. The ‘Chicago catchment area’, as Brockmann refers  to it, also includes a significant chunk of both Indiana and Wisconsin.  In taking money as a totem for human mobility, the map illustrates how  effective communities don’t necessarily observe state lines. More  recently, data from sites such as Where’s George? and Eurobilltracker  have also been used to model and understand the spread of epidemics and  disease. Because cash is hand-to-hand, it’s still an effective  representation of physical connections and proximity, providing a  convenient way to study the spread of memes and viruses through a  population.

The Data of Payments

Projects like Where’s George? and Ideological Circuits  point to the latent patterns and practices embedded in the circulation  of cash, ‘un-mined’ data about human mobility, sociality, community and  commerce. The buried treasure is really there, but hard to spot. It  takes something more for these caulked and disjointed traces to come to  the surface, to become information.

Even with Where’s George? or Where’s Willy?, there’s still a limit to how much information can actually be gleaned from a marked bill. Where’s George?  asks its users to tag their bill with their zip code, illustrating  where the bill has travelled to since it was first registered on the  website. From this data you can’t tell what a bill is being spent on, or who  specifically passed it into circulation – just where it has migrated to  and roughly when. The ‘information’ to be gleaned is impersonal and  oblique. But even more crucially, a user has to make the decision to  ‘opt in’ to the Where’s George?; a marked bill might interest her enough to log on to the website and register a hit but it doesn’t compel her to do so.

Digital payments change all of this. Instead of cold, hard cash, much  of our money now rides the rails of information and communications  technologies, over computers, tablets, smart phones and maybe even smart  watches. Alongside credit card companies, which have been around since  the fifties, mobile network operators, Internet service providers and  social media platforms are moving from the transfer of flows of  information to the transfer of flows of value, as can be witnessed in  the range of different mobile and e-payments options available today,  from Apple Pay and Google Wallet through to Tweets for Cash, Facebook  and peer-to-peer services like Venmo and Snap Cash. Physical tokens melt  into air, to be replaced by SMS texts, cryptographic hash functions or  140 character strings. The result is that most of our transactions now  occur in heavily mediated spaces, where data about our transactions is  automatically registered alongside a range of other personal data  including our identity, location and our social networks.

Internet companies make money by building channels for cash on top of  those already put in place by banks and credit card companies, allowing  for the secure transfer of payments online, over mobile phones or  through well-known social media platforms. The revenue these companies  make is generally a ‘toll’ for electronically transferring value from  place to place in a secure fashion and/or providing the appearance of  synchronous settlement.[4]  Payment-related fees are a primary value proposition; but it turns out  that these fees may not be large enough to justify these new services.  First of all, there is already competition from existing banks and  credit card companies in the e-payments space who also rely on similar  fees for revenue, and second, there are growing regulations in the US  and the EU that limit the amount of fees that a company can charge for  monetary transactions or remittances.[5]  Another form of revenue then is based not on tolls but on leveraging  the value of data that is gathered by the network throughout the course  of an electronic transaction. In other words, instead of selling a right  of way, throw your roads wide open and sell a little bit of whatever  falls off the truck – purchasing information, demographic information –  the various bi-products of transacting online.

Data is more valuable than fee-based revenues.[6] In fact, Information about a  monetary exchange may have a comparable or greater exchange value than  the monetary token engaged in the transaction itself. As Alex Rampell argues,  “as society becomes ‘cashless’, companies have a larger business – and a  more valuable one – in closing the loop for offline transactions and  helping deliver customers to advertisers.” And when data about a  financial transaction is taken together with linked data such as  identity, location, behaviour and social connections, this yields all  kinds of future value propositions. (Or at the very least many of the  companies operating on this model are speculating it will). (Meta)data  is the new money.

Metadata is the new money

Data can be automatically gathered through the use of a platform, a  handset or through a customer loyalty card, through purchase histories,  basket analysis and click streams. Mostly this happens in online  shopping and payments, but it is also being applied to our behaviour in  physical retail spaces. Companies are working to bring the same level of  data mining to bricks and mortar spaces through the use of beacon  technologies that, through mobile phone identification, can track a  consumer’s position as well as their purchases – a practice Verizon Wireless has cheerfully dubbed “cookies for the real world”.

Transactional data is often sold to third party advertisers where it  is used for targeted advertising and location-based services or to  promote cross-selling. Perhaps people who buy donuts also buy Ariana  Grande tracks? Or, to gloss Minority Report, ‘Here’s a coupon for that  Gap store nearby. How did those button-downs work out for you the last  time?’ This data is also used by retailers to streamline in store  operations, pricing, logistics and supply chains. Yet another rising  trend is the use of transactional data to introduce tailored financial  services. Companies are now coming forward who specialise in  personalised credit offerings based on mined transactional data. One  such company, Branch, focuses on data emerging from the growing use of smart phones in Sub-Saharan Africa. Branch  leverages data from the use of services such as the popular mobile  money app M-Pesa and Facebook to offer tailored micro-loans to its  clients. In short this involves data mining a user’s transactional data  and other kinds readily available through their devices such as  demographic, psychographic, social network and even biometric data and  using this information to infer a user’s potential credit worthiness and  design persoanlised lending criteria. In China today Alibaba, the  world’s biggest online shopping platform, have released the ‘Sesame  Score’, a social credit rating based on transactional data gleaned from  the site and from its partners such as the taxi service Didi Kuaidi.  The score can be used to procure credit from Alibaba’s financial wing,  but users are also encouraged to publicly advertise their scores to  their peers. Baihe,  one of China’s largest matchmaking services, has even teamed with  Sesame to promote clients with desirable credit scores on their  websites. Using the Sesame Score as a testbed, the Chinese government  recently announced that something similar will be mandatory by 2020.  This score will contribute to the outcome of obvious processes such as  loan applications but also to Schengen Visa applications, with the  launch of Sesame’s Credit Visa system.

While most companies are a little cagey about specifically what kinds  of data points among the 5000+ accessed build these real-time credit  ratings, payments, purchases, the financial solvency of your relatives  and social networks, your online sentiments and even how often you  charge your phone get mentioned.  Buying too many video games might also be a bad idea. Having wealthy  friends might positively impact your credit rating. But having fewer  friends might impact your credit score further – who can say exactly?

Targeting Customers

It’s not that using consumer data to profile populations or segment  markets is a new practice, but that these practices are much more  extensive than ever before, and more personal. Profiling companies have  started to produce individual rather than aggregate profiles by  combining data such as credit and store card transactions, click  streams, social media posts and other kinds of personal data. Instead of  producing a widespread message, advertising companies can now produce  fine-grained communications for a small number of targeted consumers. Frank Pasquale  has suggested that the precision of such analyses far exceeds anything  we could previously have imagined, not taking in market segments such as  18-24 year old female in a particular zip code but hyper-segmented  markets as precise as ‘gullible elderly with history of gambling’ or  ‘had a daughter who died in a car crash’. Probably the best-known  example of this is the story of the chain store Target,  who correctly inferred that a teenage customer was pregnant, based on  her purchasing history, and inadvertently broke the news to her parents  with some thoughtful baby crib flyers.

We are seeing new identity-based monetary systems, which in turn have  the power to produce greater inequalities not only in terms of economic  wealth and opportunity, but also in terms of citizenship and everyday  life. The machinations of these systems produce new algorithmic credit  castes and financial instabilities. In sum the effects of such  dataveillance are unevenly distributed; as academics such as Helen  Nissenbuam,[7] Joseph Turrow[8] Frank Pasquale[9], and Martha Poon[10]  have all explored, such computerised and software-based systems don’t  proceed without bias but have a tendency to reproduce and strengthen  existing racial, gendered and economic biases.

What’s more, transactional data doesn’t only influence decisions that  are made about us in the present. Categorisation and segmentation also  play a constitutive role that shapes our futures whether we are aware of  it or not, foreclosing certain possibilities and suggesting others. The  extreme example of this logic at work might be something like Amazon’s predictive shipping algorithm,  patented in January 2014, which allow for anticipatory logistics in  response to customer analysis, a kind of ‘what you want before you know you want it’.

But these techniques also have implications beyond being pushed  unwanted recommendations or sold products that appear to fit with our  algorithmic profile. Secondary data and data derivatives are also  repackaged and sold to governments and institutions where they are used  in new and unintended ways. Increasingly transactional data are used in  security, governance and law enforcement; for example, in the targeting  of anti-money laundering practices or tax evasion, as is the case with  the Italian Redditometro,  an algorithmic income meter designed to compare people’s spending  patterns with their income to detect possible tax fraud. Or perhaps your  data might be used to infer something about your trustworthiness or to  defame your character in some future context – like the LA supermarket  that threatened to disclose one of its customers alcohol purchase  history in a slip and fall lawsuit. Or more seriously, this data might  also be used to profile you as a terrorist or security threat (helpful  hint: don’t purchase a pressure cooker and a backpack on the same weekend).

Tactics for Secrecy

All of this throws up ethical considerations about who owns and  controls transactional data. Is transactivity a ‘commons’, held and  produced by people and outside the remit of the state or the market, or  is payment data part of the purview of corporations and government  agencies, a quid pro quo for convenience or a necessary ingredient in  the prevention of tax fraud or terrorism? And what’s the answer for  those who wish to keep their private transactional data private?  According to Peter Sunde,  founder of the PirateBay, cash is now the last bastion of privacy in a  world where all our transactions are subject to dataveillance. Hence the  enduring popularity of cash payments in illicit transactions: “If  everything is traceable you start thinking about your purchasing  behaviour. You need cash for anonymous behaviour”. And yet we can all  probably recognise the utility and even the necessity of electronic  transactions in a lot of instances.

As a result, communities of artists, hackers, engineers and academics  have worked to develop obfuscation tactics to make transactional data  more secret. These include tactics that hide money’s footprints in a  mesh of false traces, that work to erase the traces left behind by  digital money, or, by swapping accounts and tracking objects (SIM cards,  loyalty cards) within a group, produce false and confusing data.

A decade ago this included face-to-face loyalty card swap meets,  where users collectively pooled their purchases on a single loyalty  card, or periodically swapped loyalty cards to maintain the savings  benefits while confusing transactional data that was being gathered  about them. The greater the number of people involved in a card swap and  the further the cards travelled and circulated, the greater the  obfuscation of this data.  Gradually these practices were performed over  social networks and mailing lists such as the now defunct  Cardexchange.org, a website which coordinated swaps through mail. In Rob  Cockerman’s culture jamming project, The Ultimate Shopper the artist printed and circulated the code on the back of his loyalty card to other users. Another example by Rob Carlson, Giant Bonus Swap Card Meet,  created an online card swapping system for the Baltimore and Washington  DC area where participants could enter their card numbers into a form  on the site and then print out and paste someone’s bar code onto their  loyalty card.

Contemporary tactics focus on digital data obfuscation.[11] Applications such as Cachecloak  produce obfuscation strategies for Location Based Services. While  Cachecloak doesn’t act on transactional information specifically, it  acts on other contextual and locational information gathered at the same  time, obscuring a user’s location by surrounding it with other paths  through the propagation of ambiguous data. Sites such as Trackmenot seek to obfuscate search and transactional data, while Adnasueum  engages with the negative outcomes of targeted advertising so a user  doesn’t have to. Another approach involves shirking credit cards and  accounts in favour of Prepaid options. Prepaid Gift Cards,  once exclusively the remit of the under-banked or those without access  to credit, are now being strategically used for their anonymity and  privacy benefits. Another less cumbersome option is the use of virtual  credit card services. Privacy.com, for  example, creates a virtual credit card number for every transaction,  marketed as a solution both to increased online fraud but also to data  mining.

Cryptocurrencies

Probably the most significant tactic of all lies in the development  of cryptocurrencies – digital currencies and payments systems that use  cryptographic techniques to guarantee the security of a monetary  transaction. Unlike a publicly mandated payment system, which has some  centralised authority such as the Central Bank or the Federal Reserve as  its guarantor and trusted intermediary, or commercial payments systems,  which rely on centralised platforms and data infrastructures,  cryptocurrencies decentralise both the infrastructure of monetary  creation and value transfer. Instead of a central trusted authority  then, cryptocurrencies use cryptographic techniques to verify and secure  transactions. This system not only ensures that no centralised entity  or institution is the gateway for monetary supply or transfer, but also  affords a high degree of anonymity in digital transactions, impossible  when transacting through the gateways of a private or publicly-mandated  network. The best example of this is of course Bitcoin.[12]

Bitcoin offers its users some level of anonymity in their  transactions, because cryptographic transactions require public and  private keys. Private keys are analogous to a password or pin number,  not to be disclosed with anyone, while public keys are analogous to a  bank account number, with the key difference that these public keys  aren’t directly associated with a particular identity. At the same time,  because of the decentralised design of the currency, the history of  previous Bitcoin transactions are all perfectly legible, detailed in a  distributed public ledger (called the blockchain) where anybody who  wants to can see them.

The relationship between transparency and personal privacy in Bitcoin  is different to other digital payments, therefore. The protocol offers a  level of anonymity because Bitcoin addresses aren’t readily associated  with a public identity. This makes it difficult to link transactional  histories to individual users. Consequently Bitcoin is often used for  illicit transactions online. Bitcoin continues to be associated with  transactions on the dark web, with darknet marketplaces like Silk Road  and its successors, such as Evolution, processing more transactions than  Bitpay.  However, in another way the Bitcoin protocol is more transparent than  other payments systems because the entire history of all transactions on  the network is publicly available for all time (or until people get  bored of Bitcoin, whichever comes first). Because of the public nature  of the information, transaction data on the blockchain and associated  lists such as message boards, public forums and social media networks  can be mined to identify particular users and patterns in transactions.  Indeed, this is now the aim of anti-money laundering units worldwide

More recently, extensions to the Bitcoin protocol have attempted to  tackle some of these weak points through additional obfuscation  strategies. With Bitcoin laundering, for example, it is possible to use  various techniques to cover your tracks when using Bitcoin, such as  pooling funds together into a shared wallet with other trusted  individuals. Services like Bitlaunder or Bitcoin Mixer remove traces of previous ownership from transactions to scramble transaction histories. Zerocoin  have also developed the Zerocash protocol for more truly anonymous  payments. This uses added secure cryptographic techniques to ensure that  “transactions record neither the payment’s origin, destination or amount”.

Strategies like prepaid cards, privacy plug-ins and cryptocurrencies  provide tactics for users who, for whatever reason, don’t want to their  traces discovered. Many of these obfuscation strategies also require a  degree of technical expertise that is outside the remit of most  consumers, or present playful short-term fixes to what is ultimately a  more widespread problem. Still too, these practices have come in for  criticism for designing the perfect hack for aiding and abetting tax  evasion or criminal practices. As an example, the Paris attacks in  November 2015 were partly funded by anonymous prepaid debit cards.

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New economies of Metadata

According to Marshal McLuhan, “’money talks’, because money is a  metaphor, a transfer and a bridge… It is action at a distance both in  space and time.”[13]  Money is both information and infrastructure, in other words. It  includes the symbols that represent an abstract economic value but also  the cultural and technical infrastructures that support their  circulation: physical tokens, kin communal networks, fibre optic cables  and electromagnetic spectrum. Money is the medium and the message, its  true. We can now add a third facet to this and say that in the shift to  digital payments money is also the hidden traces of its own circulation,  what Jeffrey Pomerantz calls administrative metadata, which provides information about the origin and maintenance of an object, and use metadata, which provides information about how an object has been used.[14]  These new economies of metadata demand our attention. What does it mean  for the future of money when all monetary transactions can be indexed  and traced? When the bi-product of exchange now has its own exchange  value?

The trends discussed in this article throw open questions about the  artefacts of exchange, a valuable data commodity that until recently  wasn’t a ‘thing’ or an asset at all, but a hidden trace that didn’t  extend much beyond the imaginaries of Bresson’s forged tokens. With the  shift to digital payments, and in turn a shift from publicly mandated  monetary systems to commercial IT platforms, we see changes not only to  how money is issued and guaranteed but also to how cultures of exchange  are managed and mediated. Above all is the question of whether  transactional data – a bi-product of exchange – should be available for  inspection or commodification and whether appeals to security or  consumer convenience are really enough to justify these practices. Does  providing an infrastructure for exchange provide a license to data  collection? And how will the collection and analysis of this data  influence questions of financial equality, citizenship and security  going forward? And yet other practices discussed in this article hint at  how cultures of exchange always contain an element that is  excessive to capture, a hidden trace, something in art works, hacktivism  or everyday monetary practices that escape circulation in the system.  Whether this counts for anything remains to be seen.

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Acknowledgements:

Many thanks to Johannes Lenhard for his editorial input and to Quinn  Dupont for his helpful comments in the draft stages of this article.  Thanks to Nigel Dodd, Where’s George, Cildo Mereiles, Dirk Brockmann for  image permissions. Rachel O’Dwyer’s Research is supported by the Irish  Research Council.