By Will Beaman
This essay is lightly adapted from a talk delivered at the 2026 American Comparative Literature Association conference. It contributes to a growing body of endogenous money theorization that we at Money on the Left call Democratic Public Finance (DPF). DPF begins from the distributed and publicly mediated character of political-economic life, approaching money, credit, and accounting as contested infrastructures that are at once citational and coordinative. My contribution to that project here concerns the conditions of legibility for political-economic imaginaries.
Fiscal practices and counter-practices unfold within spatial and temporal genres that rehearse what feels like a “realistic” order of operations: where money is imagined to come from and what must happen for it to name and remunerate social capacities. In those genres, design questions are often staged as discoverable facts about economic reality that necessarily constrain politics. But they can also be staged additively, so that public spending expands who and what can count. At stake throughout is how public money is imagined and how public obligation is organized.
One familiar name for this problem in endogenous money discourse is the finance franchise: the idea that monetary power is extended through licensed issuers and delegated circuits. That mapping matters, but it can mislead when it encourages us to treat monetary agency as primarily top-down. My wager is that the finance franchise is also organized from the middle, through durable genres and rehearsals that make monetary agency legible in public life. The franchise, in other words, is not only a legal architecture. It is also a genre environment that trains what public agency can look like and when it can count. Borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin, I call these patterned organizations fiscal chronotopes: time-space forms through which a world becomes legible as a sequence of events, obligations, and thresholds.
A key feature of these chronotopes is that they are often polyvocal. The same practice can remain stable while supporting more than one coherent reading. That is one reason fiscal forms travel across heterogeneous publics. It also means analysis cannot treat perception as passive reception, as if fiscal reality simply presents itself and we merely record it. What is often called “fiscal reality,” including in MMT and endogenous money discourse, is too often treated as a stable object waiting to be revealed. Here I treat it instead as reversible stagecraft: a field of gestures and formats that can sustain more than one stable reading and that trains what becomes legible as responsibility and what becomes actionable, or receivable, as public obligation.
Duck-Rabbits and Fiscal Reality
We can think about this with the famous duck-rabbit optical illusion. The drawing can be seen either as a duck facing left or a rabbit facing right. The same lines support two incompatible but equally stable readings, and that is precisely why the image circulates. Gestalt phenomenology took this as evidence that perception is not passive reception but active organization. What we see depends on both figure and orientation. The duck-rabbit shows that the same object can support different gestalt wholes without collapsing into incoherence.
That claim matters here for two reasons. First, it helps describe a dynamic that shapes the present: an inherited neoliberal temporality of passive administration amid crisis can be flipped into open authoritarian bullying without becoming identical to it. Neoliberal governance has long rehearsed a fiscal chronotope in which government is staged as the administration of scarcity. Capacity appears fixed, and the acquisition of scarce funds takes the form of a hostage negotiation in which the rich and powerful must be satisfied before money can be spent legitimately. In that chronotope, the destruction of infrastructure and capacity – austerity, underemployment, deferred maintenance – is moralized as a settlement required to keep the public books balanced.
Authoritarian politics plays off that form. It preserves the scarcity framing and the hostage structure, but converts the earlier posture of impotence before “the market” into a spectacle of punishment and reward. The “winners and losers” of globalization become something closer to the “winners and losers” of The Apprentice. Where neoliberalism moralizes constraint as necessity, the shakedown celebrates it as domination and as proof of the exceptionality of Trump’s supporters. The two chronotopes therefore share recognizable features, which is part of what makes collaboration and institutional capture possible. But they organize those features into different narratives of agency and responsibility.
Second, the duck-rabbit offers a rule for reading the campaign practices I turn to next. Last summer, Mamdani’s campaign ran a citywide scavenger hunt called the #ZcavengerHunt and introduced the Zetro Card, a playful punchcard through which volunteer contributions became receivable for campaign merchandise. The question is not whether these practices are really fiscal governance in disguise. The point is that they can be participation formats and, at the same time, rehearsals of public credit and fiscal authority. They make participation legible, and they can later help make other kinds of fiscal action feel actionable. In that sense, they point toward a new finance franchise whose conditions of possibility are distributed and democratic: authority gathered and renewed through rehearsal rather than granted only from above.
With this in mind, I read #ZcavengerHunt and the Zetro Card as formats that organize fiscal time and space. They are not policy proposals in disguise, but participation devices whose polyvalence trains what counts as collective action and what later counts as legitimate public work. The point is not to decide whether they are “really” fiscal politics or “merely” campaign theater. It is to track what they make variously legible (and hence variously actionable), and how their multi-legibility lets them travel across heterogeneous publics without requiring doctrinal consensus.
The #ZcavengerHunt
I begin with #ZcavengerHunt, which composes a bounded public present, and then turn my attention to the Zetro Card as a more durable rhythm of participation and completion. In the #ZcavengerHunt on a warm day in August, people moved through a sequence of locations, following prompts posted in real time and showing up in large numbers. It was playful and conspicuously gamified, but it was also immediately recognizable as a campaign event: a way to generate momentum, attention, and contact.
The chronotopic question, though, is what kind of time and space the format composed, and what that composition made legible. #ZcavengerHunt organized routes and gathering points so that participation took a clear, shared shape. A city that often appears as dispersed constituencies and isolated commutes was briefly refigured as a coordinated circuit: a public moving through space together according to a posted order.
This helps explain why so many people on social media reached for the same comparison and said Mamdani had finally made “Pokemon Go to the Polls” happen in earnest. The comparison points to more than fun. It names the way a game can give political participation a navigable form, one that does not require prior expertise, ideological unity, or even a single reason for being there. You do not have to be converted to join. You just have to be able to read the next move and keep going.
Campaigns sit awkwardly within the dominant governance chronotope. They happen before governance, and much of their labor is volunteer-based, informal, and hard to count. In a genre environment that tends to recognize work only once it is officially authorized and paid, campaigning can become strangely unreal: “just politics,” “just vibes,” or “just messaging,” as if the labor of coordination does not count as labor.
#ZcavengerHunt pushes against that occlusion. It renders campaign labor legible as a visible, shared activity while remaining playful, and that playfulness matters because it lets participation count without first taking on solemnity. A scavenger hunt does not require participants to share the same inner narrative about why they are there; it requires only that they inhabit the same sequence. People can show up for different reasons and still cohere as a public. That is not a weakness but part of how democratic forms remain durable across heterogeneous readings.
#ZcavengerHunt is not public works in the sense of a municipal project. But it does rehearse public work by rendering coordination labor legible and staging completion as something a public can do together in the open. It rehearses turnout and GOTV, but also the broader premise that collective activity can be organized as an ordinary feature of public life rather than dismissed as a break from “real” administration. A related form appears in the more recent snow-shoveling mobilization: a public standard is set, capacity is scaled to meet it, and the work itself is the primary obligation rather than a revenue-constrained aspiration.
The Zetro Card
The Zetro Card began as a workaround. At one point in the campaign’s fundraising, election-law rules constrained the sale of campaign merchandise. The usual sequence could no longer operate in the same way. Rather than treat that constraint as a hard stop, the campaign invented another format for recognition and circulation. The Zetro Card is that format: a playful punchcard that volunteers receive at canvasses, phone banks, pop-ups, and other events, stamped for contributions and made receivable for campaign merchandise once enough stamps accumulate.
It is immediately recognizable as gamification, and it is partly that. But the origin story matters because it shows how quickly constraints become questions of form. The card does not arise from a neutral design space. It emerges within a rule-bound environment that forces the campaign to ask how value and recognition can keep moving when a familiar channel narrows. That is endogenous improvisation in miniature: a practical restaging of how participation can be honored under constraint.
As I suggested at the time in a joking-not-joking piece for Money on the Left, the punchcard format also invites expansion. It offers a way of thinking through how organizing labor might become legible as something closer to public work without pretending the campaign had already become the city. The Zetro Card’s meaning was flexible from the start. The same format reads equally well as merch logistics, volunteer morale, or a revisable experiment in how recognition might be formalized and scaled.
Where #ZcavengerHunt gave campaign mobilization the form of an attraction, the Zetro Card established form that can persist across time. Contributions that are otherwise informal and hard to count are gathered into a shared rhythm rather than fading back into the background as “just politics.” That continuity should not be confused with seamlessness. The card works because it is modular: it can absorb uneven moments of participation while preserving a stable form. Continuity, in this sense, is not the absence of interruption but the achievement of a repeated public rhythm.
If #ZcavengerHunt made campaigning legible as collective movement all at once, the Zetro Card makes it legible as ongoing work that can persist without constant spectacle. The duck-rabbit point holds here too. The card can be read straightforwardly as morale, retention, and branding. It can also be read as a rehearsal of public credit in miniature because it stages a relationship among contribution, recognition, and redemption. Those readings do not cancel each other. Its political usefulness depends on remaining legible in both registers at once.
From Campaigning to Governing
What this adds to the campaign-versus-governance question is not a fantasy of immediate substitution but a shift in genre. The Zetro Card treats participation as something that can carry forward and return as recognition over time. It offers a small but suggestive model of how collective capacities get named and taken up through repeatable formats. When the scene shifts to snow shoveling as paid public work organized around an accessibility standard, the register changes. But the underlying wager remains familiar: the work comes first as an obligation we can name, and the question of coordination follows from that obligation rather than preempting it.
Many commentators described #ZcavengerHunt and the Zetro Card as Mamdani’s way of responding to fascist terror with fun and levity, and that is true enough. But fun and levity are chronotopic. They organize political time differently from the rhythm of fiscal and political crisis that has dominated neoliberal governance and returned in Trump’s threats and shakedowns. Within dominant fiscal chronotopes, crisis appears as something that suspends public obligation rather than reinforcing it.
The campaign practices matter because they elaborate a different, more democratic public chronotope. #ZcavengerHunt exemplifies an event whose form is nonetheless repeatable, while the Zetro Card extends that same participatory logic into a more continuous sequence of recognition and coordination. In both cases, levity is not a retreat from politics but an effect of agency: a way of making collective capacity feel present and repeatable under conditions designed to make agency feel foreclosed. If neoliberal and MAGA temporalities narrow the field of action, these practices widen it by building forms in which people can act together without waiting for permission in advance.
That framing also helps clarify why the shift from campaign to governance is not a clean break. The same administration can operate in more than one chronotopic tense at once because it inherits institutions and media habits that keep staging money as if it originates in private pockets and enters public life only through reluctant concession. In the early months of Mamdani’s term, that tension has been visible in real time. Libraries were cut recently in the name of efficiency, a recognizably neoliberal move that treats capacity as fixed and management as the art of trimming. Last weekend, by contrast, snow-shoveling capacity was dramatically scaled up around a clear public standard of sidewalk accessibility. The public messaging around recruiting shovelers had its own playful, mobilizing energy, closer in spirit to the campaign experiments than to the dour genre of austerity.
The snow-shoveling episode matters because it puts a different orientation on display. Productive capacity appears here as a political variable rather than a ceiling. The public standard comes first — accessibility as constitutive of public space — and labor is then scaled to meet it. Operationally, the cash management and accounting settlement for that expansion happens afterward through ongoing negotiation and coordination. That, too, can be read in duck-rabbit fashion. In a familiar neoliberal reading, belated settlement is framed as debt that must be “paid back,” as if the city has put extra shoveling on a public credit card that will eventually come due. But belated settlement also makes something else visible: once scale becomes adjustable in order to meet a standard, the question “how are you going to pay for it?” is already being treated as a design question rather than an external veto on what counts as an obligation.
That is the fork in the road these campaign rehearsals help make visible. One path translates public need back into scarcity management, with the destruction of capacity repeatedly framed as responsibility. The other treats care capacity and employment as public ends and treats settlement as an ongoing political task rather than using it to delay action. Fiscal chronotopes are the genre environments in which those paths become legible in the first place, where some sequences of permission and closure feel natural and others do not. The wager behind these playful practices is that changing what a public can recognize is often the first step toward changing what it can do, and that democratic public finance, especially amid open sabotage and non-cooperation from the federal government, depends on rehearsing alternative temporalities and keeping them publicly legible.
Published by