Venmo continues to be the strangest of social networks. One-part split-the-bill tool, one-part dating app(?), it is a confounding, emoji-filled receipt of life’s transactions you mostly have nothing to do with, designed to make you think paying somebody $15 for some dumplings or dog walking is meant to be a logged and shared public activity.
Now, the Brooklyn-based art collective Mschf is commandeering Venmo for a game of its own. For $10, you can join Mschf Plays Venmo. It’s basically a lottery where everyone puts in $10. Every hour, someone is voted out, and every day, someone is voted to win. This goes on until one person gets 100% of the votes to win and takes home the entire jackpot.
Scholars will note that the game, and its Greek-inspired graphics, are inspired by the ancient Athenian practice of ostracism. Circa 400 B.C., thousands of citizens scrawled names onto pieces of broken pottery called ostraca. The losers—likely politicians or other famous figures—were banished from society for 10 years. It was something of a justice system for dealing with social figures who didn’t necessarily break the law.
But my fellow plebes might see more similarity in the reality game show Survivor and “the tribe has spoken”-style democracy.
“We tend to think our voting systems are set in stone, but they are the result of past iterations, test-server patches on democracy, that have occasionally tried what seem like bonkers rulesets,” the collective writes. “Perhaps ostracism, which levels a (semi)permaban at a limited number of users will someday find a home in moderation—where potential ban targets are placed in context of the entire citizenry, prioritizing elimination of the single worst.”
Perhaps. Perhaps not! (Side note: Reddit’s moderation and downvoting comes close?) But in any case, the project highlights so much of what Mschf does best: subverting the brands and platforms of capitalism for its own, publicly participatory chaos. In this case, Mschf is running a very real social experiment atop a “social” (air quotes) network. Its FAQ encourages users to spend as little as a penny to contact other users, form alliances, and pen “backdoor deals.”
What does Venmo look like when people stop being nice and start being real? We will soon see.