Protected: I’m Broke But I Swear I’m Grateful

Two years ago, Aubrey Cline voted “yes” on Prop 10: Alternative Banking, “feeling magnanimous” as she did. The proposition approved TOTs—or Tokens of Thanks—as viable currency in California. Between then and now, Aubrey has lost her job at a textbook publisher, and “won the TOT lottery” as a result. At the outset of Christine Vines’s inventive and incisive story, the world seems like our world, and TOTs seem like SNAP benefits—a flawed but well-intentioned public safety net. 

In the opening scene, Aubrey offers to treat her sister to an expensive birthday dinner and is embarrassed and flustered when her TOT card is declined. She’s sure everyone at the chic rooftop restaurant notices, as the card is “a horrendous, almost chartreuse that calls as much attention to itself as possible.” If she were faced with Prop 10 today, she thinks, she would vote “no,” on the grounds that, as it turns out, the system is built on humiliation. 

The world of “Please Accept This Token of Thanks” has fallen into an even more dystopian state than our own when it comes to big tech and public assistance. Unlike SNAP benefits, TOTs have to be paid back by submitting to a kind of gratitude extraction, in which the customer is hooked up to nodes and shown video renderings of their emotional debts, clearing their accounts only when they’ve registered sufficient thankfulness to everyone they’ve paid with TOTs. 

The TOT system is predicated on the “psychological benefits of gratitude,” the kind of paternalistic notion characteristic of liberal noblesse oblige, designed to flatter privileged stakeholders rather than actually help those in need. The TOT office, when Aubrey arrives to repay her debt, is reminiscent of a startup. Reading these scenes, I was reminded of how Google, one of several companies systematically seeking to relieve our culture of human creativity through generative AI, was purported to be founded on the motto, “Don’t be evil.” As Aubrey’s repayment grows increasingly harmful and exploitative, one begins to wonder if any aspect of personal experience, even a feeling as dear and private as gratitude, will survive being monetized. Evil dressed up in neo-liberal catch phrases is still evil.

– Halimah Marcus
Editor, Recommended Reading