Tokens

How do you recognize money in its new digital disguises? In Rachel O’Dwyer’s exploration of tokens, you follow a centuries-long transformation from Mesopotamian clay counters to Twitch Bits and NFTs. Her argument is that tokens—whether ancient or algorithmic—are mirrors of society’s power structures and values. They are both more and less than money: not legal tender, yet deeply enmeshed in our identities, relationships, and systems of control.

O’Dwyer’s core claim is simple but radical: to understand money today, you have to study tokens. These small instruments reveal how money intertwines with communication, surveillance, play, and politics. Each chapter, from early token economies to blockchains and DAOs, examines what happens when value becomes programmable, social, and extractive—all at once.

More Than and Less Than Money

You begin in the ancient world. Tokens recorded promises of grain, labour, or access long before paper money. Athenian voting tokens carried identity; Roman brothel tokens encoded desire and taboo. The same logics persist today: a Twitch Bit, an Amazon Gift Card, or a supermarket loyalty point all act within semi-closed circuits of meaning. They give access but constrain mobility; they document identity but restrict freedom. This dual nature—tokens as empowerment and enclosure—runs throughout the book.

When a four-year-old calls Bitcoin “a little gold thing in a circle shape,” he’s intuitively right. Tokens look monetary but perform broader functions: they carry narratives, moral codes, and community boundaries that pure cash abstracts away. As Viviana Zelizer notes, money always carries earmarks—tokens make those social earmarks visible in code.

From Platforms to Playgrounds

Corporate platforms have revived token systems as instruments of extraction. Amazon’s gift balances, Mechanical Turk credits, and Twitch Bits create internal economies that capture labour value while avoiding banking regulation. These are modern iterations of company scrip—tokens that workers earn but can spend only within the issuer’s walls. The friction that once defined industrial company stores now lives in terms-of-service agreements and platform APIs.

Yet tokens also animate collective expression. In Venmo descriptions, Dogecoin tips, or Twitch cheers, people use microtransactions as language. Payments signal belonging, affection, and humour as much as they transfer value. O’Dwyer shows tokens as speech acts—money that talks, literally and symbolically.

Programmability and Power

Where earlier tokens required trust in people, programmable assets encode trust in code. Smart contracts turn money into script: you can define who spends it, when it expires, or what it buys. That control is political. A programmable food voucher can enforce welfare discipline; a smart token for artists can embed royalties. Each script fixes rules and values—what O’Dwyer calls “persistent scripts” that outlive their authors. So the key question becomes: who writes the code?

Corporations, states, and decentralized communities all compete to define the rails of programmable money. From IBM’s token patents to central-bank digital currency pilots (“money with memory”) and crypto tokens like Worldcoin, programmability ties digital identity, credit history, and access rights together—a fusion of finance, surveillance, and governance.

Trust and the Human Return

Blockchain evangelists promise “trustless” systems—governance without people. But O’Dwyer shows that trust never vanishes; it just migrates. The DAO hack of 2016 revealed that code’s neutrality collapses when moral ambiguity intervenes. Even “immutable” ledgers can be rewritten by human consensus, as Ethereum’s hard fork proved. What you trust now are the communities who maintain the scripts—the developers, miners, auditors, and judges of digital law.

This realization reframes blockchains not as replacements for politics, but as new terrains of politics. Decision-making migrates from parliaments to GitHub threads, from votes to commits. Whether it’s Vitalik Buterin’s DAOs or Robin Hanson’s Futarchy, design dreams of algorithmic governance continually collide with the messy values of democracy.

Resistance and the Future of Value

Not every token is extractive. Mutual credit systems, timebanks, demurrage-based currencies, and Indigenous projects like MazaCoin demonstrate alternative politics of exchange. Some reclaim credit as communal trust; others design tokens to discourage hoarding or promote ecological care. Even acts of refusal—burning money, fraudulent redistribution, or meme rebellions like r/wallstreetbets—reveal how the design of monetary systems is inherently moral and narrative-driven.

A guiding question

Every token answers two questions: what kind of exchange does it enable, and what kind of world does it script?

O’Dwyer ends by returning value to its social ground. Tokens are not just technical artifacts; they’re stories told in money’s language. Whether you’re tipping a streamer, buying a virtual plot, or designing a DAO, you’re choosing—and helping code—the moral architecture of the next economy.

In the platform economy, tokens are not just symbols—they are the payment rails themselves. You see this with Amazon’s gift cards, Twitch Bits, and Mechanical Turk credits, all functioning as internal currencies that circumvent banking systems and labour law. O’Dwyer links these schemes to older scrip systems from the 19th century, where miners were paid in company credit spendable only at employer stores.

Extractive Circuits

Amazon and Twitch monetize social behaviour through private currencies. When you cheer a streamer, you buy Bits with fiat, but creators cash them out at a lower rate—platforms skim the difference. Mechanical Turk workers, particularly abroad, are paid in Amazon balances that have limited convertibility. The effect: value circulates within Amazon’s walls, enriching the issuer at every turn.

Labour Without Recognition

Tokens let employers deny employment. A streamer’s income appears as fan generosity; a gig worker’s wage looks like credit. Emotional labour and digital piecework are hidden behind the texture of social play. This is what O’Dwyer calls the double bind: workers must display intimacy and authenticity to earn, while platforms treat that labour as voluntary expression.

Tokens mask labour relations beneath performance. The cheer you give may look like applause—but it is also someone’s paycheck.

By embedding exchange inside friendship, fandom, and play, platforms reshape the ethics of work. Tokens are how digital capitalism hides the wage while amplifying the grind.

Money speaks—but tokens gossip, flirt, and cheer. O’Dwyer reframes the digital payment not as a transaction but as communication. A Twitch Bit, a Venmo emoji, or a Dogecoin tip is both payment and message. Each is an act of social performance, embedding money into language and ritual.

Expressive Economies

Twitch Bits transform cheering into spectacle: small donations yield brief thanks; large bit-bombs trigger animations and sound cues. Venmo’s once-public feed exposed friendship networks through memes and payment notes, blending intimacy and surveillance. Dogecoin, born as parody, succeeded because humour and community outweighed financial gain.

Tokens carry social metadata: what they buy is less important than what they signal. Zelizer’s concept of “earmarking” helps explain this—tokens moralize money, distinguishing a gift, a treat, or a bribe. SNAP cards, loyalty points, or wish list gifts all demonstrate how tokens script behaviour as much as they facilitate spending.

Credentials and Access

Historically, tokens served as passports and credentials. Athenian jurors carried bronze tokens; Roman festivals used admission chits. Today’s equivalents include QR-code tickets, Discord roles, or NFT passes. Each merges identity, access, and payment into one. Yet programmable restrictions mean freedom can shrink: your digital credential might also enforce discipline, limit purchase types, or automate exclusion.

When you pay or gift online, you are participating in coded relationships—tokens make private emotions and power visible as data on a ledger.

When money becomes code, politics becomes protocol. O’Dwyer dissects how smart contracts, CBDCs, and platform credit encode social rules into programmable form. From Szabo’s vending-machine metaphor to Facebook’s proposed Libra currency, code replaces clerks and courts—but also erases discretion and care.

From Automation to Governance

Programmability means precision: tokens can expire, self-deduct, or restrict usage. Welfare subsidies can exclude alcohol or luxury goods automatically. Employer credits can tether workers to brand ecosystems. This automation of moral choice creates what O’Dwyer calls money with memory: currency that remembers who you are and what you buy.

Who Writes the Script?

IBM’s token patents, China’s Zhima Credit, and central banks’ digital currencies illustrate competing ambitions to write the scripts of value. Corporate code enforces profit; state code enforces policy; community code could, in principle, enforce care or equality. But wherever rules are fixed in software, flexibility—and dissent—contract. Code has politics not because of bugs, but because it defines the boundaries of social possibility.

A token is not neutral infrastructure. It’s an argument about how society should allocate trust and permission.

As tokens become programmable, governance shifts from parliaments to blockchains. The author’s warning: you cannot outsource morality to code without losing your capacity to interpret, forgive, or resist.

“Trust the code” became a rallying cry for the crypto movement. Bitcoin and Ethereum promised systems where consensus replaced trust in people. But O’Dwyer shows that real trust never disappears—it changes form.

The Promise of Trustlessness

Satoshi Nakamoto framed Bitcoin as a solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem: strangers can agree on truth without intermediaries through proof-of-work and shared ledgers. Ethereum expanded that promise with smart contracts and DAOs—code that governs itself.

The DAO and the Return of Judgment

When the DAO exploit drained funds in 2016, it followed code logic but violated community norms. The resulting hard fork demonstrated that human values can override algorithmic purity. “Code is law” gave way to “law is code plus consensus.”

As protocols evolve (such as Ethereum’s merge to proof-of-stake), governance moves off-chain: developers, validators, and communities deliberate like legislatures. O’Dwyer’s insight echoes Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons: trust is polycentric, emerging through practice, not protocol.

Trust in code always leads back to trust in its custodians. The ledger’s truth is social, not mechanical.

Blockchains don’t abolish trust—they redistribute it among developers, miners, and users. Understanding this helps you see that decentralization isn’t the absence of power; it’s its reconfiguration.

O’Dwyer traces the intersection of tokens, art, and play. NFTs, gaming economies, and virtual land all reveal how value is now produced through spectacle, speculation, and identity. The digital world has become both workplace and casino.

Scarcity by Design

NFTs turn digital abundance into tradable scarcity. Beeple’s $69 million sale and Bored Ape Yacht Club’s tokenized memberships made ownership itself a social statement. Yet what you “own” is often just a pointer to an off-chain file. The value lies not in the art, but in provenance and bragging rights—a phenomenon the book calls the economy of display.

Games like Axie Infinity extend this logic: play becomes labour. “Scholars” in the Philippines worked for token yields leased by crypto investors. When token prices collapsed, livelihoods disappeared. Leisure and labour, gift and grind, merge into one.

Metaverses and Mirage Economies

In Decentraland or Second Life, virtual land functions like speculative real estate: proximity and visibility create value. Yet most of this land remains empty, mirroring physical-world inequality. The metaverse sells escape, not emancipation; it reproduces the inequities of the real within the unreal.

Tokens turn play into labour and culture into collateral—but they also reveal the deep human desire to make meaning from exchange.

NFTs and metaverse assets aren’t trivial phenomena. They show how identity, creativity, and property have fused in the attention economy—and how easily narrative turns into speculative infrastructure.

Tokens produce data trails. Every payment, tip, and transfer becomes information capital, fuelling both market analytics and state surveillance. O’Dwyer follows this logic from early credit bureaus to China’s Zhima Score and PayPal’s data economy.

Tracing Lives Through Ledgers

Digital payments fold social life into databases. Venmo’s public feed once exposed romantic relationships; platforms like Palantir and Alipay transform spending traces into predictive risk models. Token systems constitute not only financial, but social ledgers—records of who belongs, who defaults, and who deserves trust.

Credit scoring’s history—from Lewis Tappan’s mercantile files to machine-learning algorithms—shows how “objectivity” in finance encodes bias. Digital scoring reproduces racial and class hierarchies under algorithmic veneers. “Money with memory” means that every purchase can affect your credibility, opportunities, and even state standing.

Privacy and Resistance

Projects like DigiCash, Monero, and privacy mixers fight to restore anonymity, but regulation tightens around them. Ordinary citizens deploy “obfuscation” tactics—using multiple loyalty cards, cash, or deliberate data noise—to reclaim agency. Yet total disengagement is nearly impossible in a tokenized world.

Every transaction tells a story about you. The question is: who gets to read—and profit from—it?

Understanding transaction data as social power helps you see money as governance: whoever controls the ledger, controls the narrative of legitimacy.

O’Dwyer concludes with alternatives—currencies that serve relationships rather than markets. From timebanks to demurrage coins, she sketches a politics of design: tokens can entrench extraction or enable solidarity.

Mutual Credit and Care Economies

Experiments like LETS networks, Fureai Kippu, and Josiah Warren’s Time Store envision exchange grounded in trust and reciprocity. Value is denominated in time, not profit. Such schemes succeed when communities maintain shared norms—and fail when inequality or exclusion creep in.

Demurrage and Anti-Hoarding

Silvio Gesell’s “rotting money” and modern variants like Circles UBI aim to deter accumulation by taxing storage. Their goal: generous circulation over scarcity. These models challenge capitalism’s core promise that saving equals virtue.

Sovereignty and Resistance

Indigenous projects like MazaCoin or Payu Harris’s crypto-sovereignty efforts seek control over economic destiny. Activists like Enric Duran used financial hacks to fund cooperatives, turning debt into protest. Meme rebellions (GameStop, Dogecoin) blur subversion and speculation, showing how resistance can still feed the same circuits it opposes.

Tokens are canvases for politics. Every design decides who gets to participate, who gains autonomy, and who remains monetized.

In O’Dwyer’s vision, the future of money is neither crypto-libertarian nor statist—it’s civic. The challenge is designing tokens that encode empathy, flexibility, and justice into their circuits.