Abolish Currency: The Ed Sheeran Machine and The Art of the Apolitical

Look at this mug. This is the mug I drink coffee from in the office. The gall.

I have an annoying mug that I made with my annoying face on it that reads, annoyingly, “Abolish Currency.” I made the mug to say one thing, but I keep it because it says another thing.

On its face, it’s a joke. An obviously absurd political stance that takes something as ubiquitous and pedestrian as cash money and paints it as a societal problem that we should all be working together to solve. But the thing is, it’s an obviously absurd political stance that I nevertheless kind of stand by. The influence of money on power and politics is a net negative for the world at large. And consider the sheer percentage of crimes that are committed out of a lack of money and the need for more of it. It’s a system that was intended to facilitate commerce, but seems to have become a corruption machine that eats governments and turns the poor into murderers.

So I started saying “Abolish Currency” partly as a joke, but partly because I do think the fact of money is, itself, kind of absurd. The thing you need to live in a house is the same thing a CEO can use to bribe a government official to reduce regulations and make your neighborhood unlivable? That’s fucked up! If I run out of money, I lose my house. But if Elon Musk runs out of money, he just has to start obeying laws. I’m not smart enough to suggest a system to take its place, but I am smart enough to say, “this sucks.”

Now, paying your bills isn’t necessarily a political act, but paying off a Senator is, and you use the same tool to do both.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of “apolitical” a lot the last week. In a certain way, it’s easy to look at someone like Ed Sheeran and honestly understand where he’s coming from. He’s just an entertainer. He wants to make music and perform for crowds and occasionally show up in movies and TV shows and have people go, “Why does that one soldier's hair look like shit?”

But then he finds himself in the middle of something like his opening act taking a clear stance on Israel/Palestine, and he just wants to opt out. He never set out to be political, he just wants to make his money and pay his bills. The cool thing about this example is that it’s the clearest illustration I can think of where a person is saying in one breath, “I don’t want to be political,” and in the next breath saying, “this is who should have authority over me.” That’s politics, buddy. That’s all it is. Agreeing that those with power SHOULD have it is a political choice.

Ed Sheeran is two things at the same time: In one sense, he is a person and a performer. At the same time, he is a media franchise. There are people whose job it is to make sure that Ed Sheeran stays famous. He supports and is supported by teams of professionals who build and maintain his brand. Notably, he does not lead nor own these teams. And there is the very real threat that, at any moment, they could simply cease their work, and the Ed Sheeran Machine would sputter to a stop and Ed would have to go and get a regular job.

You can imagine an alternate situation where Ed Sheeran and Macklemore had a conversation, and between them, they realized that they could just find someplace else to play. They could put 50,000 butts in 50,000 seats with just the words “Ed Sheeran and Macklemore” on the poster. You can imagine the Ed Sheeran Machine throwing itself in reverse, withdrawing the support to keep the cultural eye trained on these two men with bad hair. And you can imagine it not really mattering. Because the ticket-buying public aren’t part of the Ed Sheeran Machine. They’re regular people with regular jobs who will vote with their dollars for the thing they actually want to do. And a lot of them do want to listen to “No Scrubs, but About how Women are Hot” or whatever.

The true fact is that a situation like that is possible (it also seems to be exactly what Macklemore himself is doing), and the refusal to entertain the possibility is a political decision. It is a vote for everything to stay exactly the way it is. A vote to continue to power the Ed Sheeran Machine, which is itself a part of a much larger machine entirely.

So yeah: Abolish Currency. Because “voting with your dollars” is a vote for Dollars. And for Dollars As Vote. It is the implicit claim that the most important judge of whether something is a good idea is whether or not it makes money. That more money equals more power and that that fact is good and cool.

And I’ll just say it! I think that sucks!