Bit Rot
Page 23
Afternote: I wrote this piece on a flight to Schiphol. Three minutes after deplaning, two security guards on cloud-grey Segways silently overtook me, then rounded a corner and disappeared from view. The moment was slightly thrilling, as though I’d spotted two endangered birds in the wild.
Klass Warfare
Okay. So I’m in Berlin and scheduled to fly to London on Lufthansa at 6:10 p.m.—however, a meeting comes up, so I look up a later flight but learn there are no later Lufthansa flights. Who else flies to London? The answer: Ryanair. But wait. I’ve never flown with them, and aren’t they the ones where people fly standing up so they can get more people on the plane? Surely not. Well, what could possibly go wrong on such a short flight anyway? So I buy my ticket online and go to the formerly East German Schoenefeld Airport. But something is amiss…The airport building has miraculously time-travelled from the early 1970s and has endured much battering along the way. Have I wormholed into another time-space continuum? No problem. I can pretend I’m in high school on an exchange program—it’ll be fun.
However, it turns out I bought the online ticket for the wrong day (@#$%!) so I buy a new ticket at the airport counter and head to the gate, stepping gingerly around brawling sunburned travellers and glistening puddles of vomit. Remember, Doug, think high school—this is an adventure.
I arrive at the gate, but something’s wrong with my ticket. My German’s not good enough to know what the problem is. I’m told to sit in a stanchioned off area and…whatever. Read your newspaper. Try to see the mirth in everything. Then comes the announcement, Meine Damen und Herren…It’s boarding time, and suddenly the room goes silent and everyone turns to look at me with hate in their bloodshot, booze-ravaged eyes. Huh? I then listen closely and it turns out they’re pre-boarding passengers in “Ryanair Business Plus”—which would be…me? So the silent room, filled with maybe two hundred people, watches me stand up, get my boarding pass bleeped and enter the plane’s jet ramp. Well, that was uncomfortable.
Once inside, I’m actually oddly disappointed that the seats aren’t arranged in a vertical sarcophagus mode—that would have been cool—but I am instead shown to my Business Plus seat, which is in the exit row above the wings. The seat is a regular seat but there’s a good six feet of space in front of me. Not bad. Like anyone, I hate no legroom. However, the price for my seated comfort is that I have to endure a thirty-minute parade of hate and loathing as other non–Business Plus passengers lumber past me, muttering highly ungenerous things to the back of my head.
Finally, the door up front closes and I see that the plane is totally packed—all except for my row of six seats all to myself. A gentleman from the row in front of me tries to reasonably spread out into one of these seats but is harshly singled out by a flight attendant who makes sure it’s painfully clear that these seats are exclusively for the use of Business Plus customers. Further laser beams of hate are shot my way. The plane lifts off.
Once in the air? Complimentary wine. Complimentary magazines. A selection of hot meals. It’s actually kind of great and time passes quickly and, before I know it, we’ve landed at Stansted Airport—another airport I’ve never seen before. After a long hike I get to the luggage carousel without having been tripped and belittled by my Ryanair co-passengers. Once at the carousel I come to the conclusion that Stansted isn’t so much an airport as, rather, a Burger King with a prison attached to it. An hour later I find my suitcase, I grab a cab, and my unplanned exercise in social mobility comes to a close. At the hotel I look up the price difference for my seat: about fifty euros.
What is it about business class that brings out some of the weirdest and deepest class responses we experience in a given year? I have a hunch that airlines do as much as they can to ensure that those not seated behind the blue curtain are fully aware of what’s happening behind it.
Some business class flights are amazing, like an Emirates A380 from Dubai to New York, filled mostly with expats coming or going from or to six-month stints living in walled compounds, with everybody getting hammered for opposite reasons. They also have great Wi-Fi, but there’s something really odd about enjoying Wi-Fi when the in-flight map tells you you’re directly above Baghdad. And then you’re above Romania. And then…and then your mind wanders off to poor old Malaysia Airlines, and you take your mind off things by watching 1983 Duran Duran videos on YouTube.
Business class on KLM is no-nonsense. They give you one drink, then a hot meal and then…no more anything, and if you ask for even a cracker beyond that, they make this face at you. It’s hard to describe…sort of like, “So you think you’re better than everyone else on this plane, do you?”
All business classes aren’t the same, but even writing about class stratification in a plane actually feels a bit uncomfortable…like it shouldn’t exist, like we’re in the United States in 1800 and we’re discussing slaves and it’s somehow okay. But to take this further, the whole notion of jet travel seems slightly uncomfortable to discuss. It’s an ecological crime. It shouldn’t exist. In the future I hope there’s just one class: propofol class. You get on a plane and then they administer propofol (the Michael Jackson death drug) and then you wake up on the other end. Who needs class when you have obliteration?
3.14159265358
The invention of the hamburger was a way of homogenizing cows. Take whatever you want from any number of animals (but, one hopes, all cows), grind it up and suddenly you have a consistent and uniform beef unit: the hamburger patty. In this same manner, humanity took time as it was once experienced and converted it into seconds, minutes and hours. One second is basically a time patty, or “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.”* Romantic!
Modern culture since 1900 has been about the relentless homogenizing of anything that can be homogenized: pig byproducts into hot dogs; coffee into Nespresso capsules; junk bonds into hedge funds.
In this spirit of investigation, I began to wonder, “What, then, does money homogenize?”
The average person with a high school education uses three thousand words a day but is able to recognize about twenty thousand. But when it comes to sequences and numbers, when does a word stop being a word? Examples: Is the alphabet itself a word? We all know it: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. It ought to be. Is the sequence 1234567890 a word? We know that 1,000,000 is a word, but is 1,000,001 a word too? My high school math teacher gave us all an extra point if we memorized pi to ten digits, and of course we all did, so is threepointonefouronefiveninetwosixfivethreefiveeight a word? And if so, is it a different word from pi to nine digits (threepointonefouronefiveninetwosixfivethreefive)?
A few years back I was cleaning out an old space in the house, and I found inside a rusty paint can a canvas bag filled with silver coins—silver pre-1967 Canadian dimes, plus a wide selection of older US coins. I don’t know what it’s like to find treasure, but it must surely feel like finding a rusty paint can full of coins. I mentioned it on the phone to my mother, and she said, “Bring it over right now. Have you sorted them yet?”
“Yes.”
“Dump them all back in the can. I want to sort them here.”
I went to her place and she had a magnet ready to help sort them out (silver isn’t magnetic). It was my first money-sorting party in the Scrooge McDuck tradition. The value of the coins came to $2,100.00. If my accountant phoned to say he’d found a tax break for $2,100, I’d be in a good mood, but it wouldn’t feel like treasure. Good accountants should hide bags of rebate money all around your house. Imagine the joy they could bring to people.
Worrying about money is one of the worst worries. It’s like having locked-in syndrome, except you’re still moving around and doing things. Your head burns. If other people are not having money problems, it pisses you off because it reminds you that you’re limited in the ways you can express your agency in the wo
rld, and they aren’t. Worrying about money is anger-inducing because it makes you think about time: how many dollars per hour, how much salary per year, how many years until retirement. Worrying about money forces you to do endless math in your head, and most people didn’t like math in high school and they don’t like it now.
People will do weird things for weird amounts of money. At the opening of a show of mine in Vancouver, the gallery’s fundraisers asked if there was something people could do to earn a ten-dollar coupon from Starbucks, one of the show’s sponsors. I arranged a pile of red Lego into a twenty-foot strip and called it the “Lego Walk of Fire.” You couldn’t get your coupon until you walked across it without shoes. It was pretty popular, but then we noticed that if you put out less Lego, it was actually much more painful to traverse, which made it irresistible. There’s a marketing lesson there.
I’m not a Mormon but I admire Mormonism as a religion. They get things done, they dress nicely and they don’t seem that preachy. I also like them because they believe that the two things that separate human beings from everything else in the universe is that human beings have free will and the perception of time’s passing. I think this sums up a fundamental aspect of humanity on Earth—and maybe that’s as basic as philosophy gets. So I got to thinking that perhaps that’s what money is: a crystallization—or, rather, a homogenization—of time and free will into those things we call dollars and pounds and yen and euros. Money multiplies your time. It also expands your agency and broadens the number of things you can do accordingly. Big-time lottery winners haven’t won ten million dollars—they’ve won ten thousand person-years of time to do pretty much anything they want anywhere on Earth. Windfalls are like the crystal meth version of time and free will.
Time and free will. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s true: if you ask people over fifty which they would rather have, more time or more money, almost every person will choose time over money. But what would they select if they could choose between more money and more free will? We know the answer to that question: it’s called Scandinavia.
* * *
* Wikipedia contributors, “Second,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (mid-2015), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Second&oldid=714856192.
The Great Money Flush of 2016
Last week I was making a collage that included the sacrifice of a one-dollar bill for the sake of art. A friend watching me do this made a horrified face and said, “But the government could punish you if they caught you destroying money!” I quickly corrected her assumption. From the government’s point of view, a dollar bill destroyed is a dollar bill the government no longer needs to back. Nothing would make the Treasury Department happier than people around the world setting fire to boxcars full of money—basically, bonfires like that would be a massive cash gift to the nation.
Then I got to thinking about boxcars full of money—more specifically, I got to thinking of places around the world where one might find truckloads of cash to burn. I couldn’t think of any boxcars per se, nor could I think of, say, a Scrooge McDuck money bin. But what I do know is that around the planet are perhaps millions of suitcases and sacks and boxes filled with American dollars, much of it denominated in one hundreds. What if one were to magically destroy all of that cash? Out of the blue the Treasury Department would earn perhaps trillions of dollars for doing absolutely nothing.
At first this idea struck me as fanciful, but then I fleshed it out. What if the government were to have, say, a “currency flush”? Basically, it would announce that, as of January 1, 2017, it would no longer honour any hundred-dollar bill printed before December 31, 2013. People around the world with socks and suitcases and safety deposit boxes full of hundreds would have two years to redeem or spend their cash, quickly. What would happen?
Well, such a currency flush wouldn’t necessarily affect everyday people too much. People who work in bakeries, teach high school or drive taxis tend not to have suitcases full of hundreds in their universe—nor to have much sympathy for those who do. But for those people who do have stashes, there would be a two-year window to convert this cash into services and tangible goods. The problem here is that it looks very, very suspicious to walk into a Mercedes-Benz dealership and buy an S-Class with $87,000 in cash. Or to buy a Montauk summer house for millions. Or a boat. Or jewels. Or anything, really. Discreetly divesting oneself of soon-to-be valueless hundreds would actually require great skill. At the very least, suitcase owners would be eating at expensive restaurants, buying first-class plane tickets and living it up for two brief years. What a boon to the economy for zero effort! And near the end of the flush, there might be a huge bump in the number of thousand-dollar lap dances and bar tips—but then that revenue would have to be recorded and taxed. More money in the coffers!
The Great Currency Flush would give the US economy a defibrillation of unparalleled voltage, but of course there would have to be a few rules. For example, you couldn’t just take a hundred-dollar bill to the bank and say, “Give me five twenties.” Once set in motion, the flush would demand that hundreds be used in only one go. You could buy a pack of gum with a hundred, but you wouldn’t get back any change—so why not instead buy a hundred bucks’ worth of gum? The people selling the gum, in the meantime, would have to document where the hundreds came from—not that hard to do. It’s also not hard to imagine many, many books in many, many places being very, very cooked. Yet overall, even given the biggest one-time-only spending spree in history, enormous chunks of money would go unredeemed. Imagine the number of suitcases out there parked by people now long dead—or people who are, um, in jail and won’t be able to get out their shovels and retrieve their trove.
Sure, there would be attempted workarounds. Go to Las Vegas, buy a million dollars’ worth of chips and then cash them in. Buy $500,000 worth of gift certificates at Saks and then shop up a storm. But workarounds like those would be easy to predict and just as easy to cut off at the pass.
Would such a flush be ethical? Why wouldn’t it be? The government’s not saying the money is valueless. It’s just saying you have two years to spend it or go to the bank to redeem old hundreds for new hundreds. Except who’s going to go to a bank to redeem a duffle bag full of hundreds? Perhaps someone stupid. The government is trying to flush out all the zombie money—not unreasonable—while giving itself something of a financial enema at the same time.
It’s hard to imagine much collective political anger being wasted by the masses in support of that one percent or so with boxloads of money. After all, people got those suitcases full of money by doing, um…whatever it was it took to get it. I’m sure they have receipts for all of it. Why wouldn’t they?
Ick
Money is kind of disgusting if you think about it too much. It’s like keeping tiny little hotel bedspreads in your wallet. God only knows where those banknotes have been. If this were a movie, this would be the point where we insert a montage sequence of Wall Streeters snorting coke, and crack-den habitués finding a tenner in the back crevice of a sofa, albeit glued to a thong and a hypodermic needle by God only knows what cementing agent.
Money is fun. I remember being in the rooftop lounge of Sydney’s Intercontinental hotel and drinking with some Americans and looking at Australia’s paper currency, which at the time, a decade ago, was in the world’s vanguard of banknote design: it had a transparent window, holograms, a special chip that activated a smartphone son et lumière of Nicole Kidman’s career trajectory. I told my new American friends I was from Canada and that Canada actually had the world’s first banknote portraying somebody smoking a cigarette, Camilla.
They: Seriously?
Me: Oh yes. It was part of a deal Charles struck with the Queen to get her blessing on their marriage.
They: That’s so free and open-minded!
Me: [Silently amazed at humanity’s gullibility.]
—
Canada recently got rid of pennies. They vanished without a s
ound and, the moment they were gone, nobody missed them. Nobody even thought about them, and if they did, it was along the lines of, “Thank Christ those effing pennies are gone.” Then last month I was in the United States and bought something and got pennies back in my change and it was like…time travel. Why are you people still using these things? Why would anybody want them? They exist solely to perpetuate their own existence. A big post-penny trend in Canada is people making floors out of pennies and resin, except the pennies vary in sheen from one to another, and when you put them all down, they look not only like useless pennies that you hate, but they also have that soiled-hotel-bedspread look of paper money. Worst of all worlds. Poor penny floors.
Women might not realize this, but guys inherit their father’s taste in wallets. This is to say, if your father had a huge, overfilled black leather job packed with receipts and business cards and filthy banknotes, then chances are you, as a grown-up son, are going to channel the exact same wallet, sometimes held closed by thick rubber bands and looking, in your front pants pocket, like you’re shoplifting a clubhouse sandwich. The only way to avoid this curse is to adopt extreme measures: the Euro Wallet, a sleek rectangle made from the finest leather and capable of handling, at most, one business card, one Amex card and one and a half hotel bedspreads. Add a family photo or a lottery ticket, and the whole thing blows up.
Canada stopped making its one-dollar bill in 1987, replacing it with an eleven-sided brass-coloured coin bearing the image of a loon, hence its nickname, “the loonie.” I can’t think of a stupider name for something monetary but, once you get used to it, it’s like saying Google, and no longer feels so dumb. Then in 1996 Canada stopped making its two-dollar bill, replacing it with a bimetal coin called, yes, the toonie. And yet, somehow life manages to go on in the face of the onslaught of all these ignominies. I miss the two-dollar bill. It was handy and somehow far easier to work with than the toonie, which is like a dense, unnecessarily large Norwegian coin used for yuletide shenanigans involving striped stockings, gingerbread and fjords.