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It’s Thursday… time for our weekly show and tell. This time back to 2011… let’s talk about CHⒶO$ CⒶ$H™ from the Bank of Mutant!
These notes weren’t just a design experiment… they were part of an actual art piece and social experiment I made for our Black Light Mutants gigs.
We had them scattered about, handed out, chucked from stage (sometimes to the annoyance of venue organisers)… left like artefacts… but they also worked. You could spend them at our merch stall, and they had a QR code to exchange for things online.
They featured Alice and Bruce of course… our friendly AI automatons on stage under the black light… who also lived in our flat.
We also made a little zine around DIY currency… making your own money.
Because that’s the thing… “real money” is just paper. Or numbers on a screen. It only works because we all agree it does.
And that’s always been true.
In the US, before centralisation, loads of banks issued their own notes… some legit, some dodgy. You had to trust the issuer or it was worthless. Then in company towns, workers were paid in scrip… money only usable in the boss’s shop. Not freedom… control.
We’ve had our own versions in the UK. Beer tokens, pit tokens, the truck system… wages tied to pubs or company shops, cycling straight back to those in charge.
But people have always pushed back.
Local currencies, time banks, LETS schemes… and in more anarchist spaces, mutual aid, free shops, skill swaps, temporary gift economies where money disappears for a bit.
Then crypto comes along with that same promise… decentralised, outside control. Whether it’s lived up to it is another question, but it’s the same thread.
Who gets to decide what has value?
There’s been loads of talk lately about redesigning UK banknotes… swapping figures, maybe animals instead. Who do we choose to represent value? What story does money tell?
And honestly… one of the funniest parts was watching people, a few drinks in, trying to gather them up like they’d hit a jackpot… only to realise it only meant something in that space, at that moment. Which is kind of the point.
Back in 2011 we were messing with that idea in basements, pubs and squat gigs… printing our own, spending it, trading it… making value up as we went.
