Record of Burn

"It might be the most important thing of all of this"

Dearest Prometheans,

For the last two weeks I’ve been bravely battling my way through a landscape of formulas, fields and forms. I’ve channelled my inner nerd. Geeked out on the possibilities of relational databases. And throbbed as my integrations have been synchronized.

When I left the sanctuary of The Vestry two weeks ago The Record of Burn was but a humble spreadsheet. It was replete with rich sacrificial data but impotent in it possibilities. For, as Techbros will tell you - a spreadsheet is non-relational.

With CHATGPT at my side a great battle has been fought and won. I return to you bloodied but victorious.

Today, my friends, I bring to you The Record of Burn database!

Allow me a preamble before I deliver the goods…
I gave a talk on money burning at the Intersections of Finance and Society conference back in 2016. After, I was chatting to Angus Cameron - a super smart academic. At the time Angus was also an emissary for the Headless project by Goldin+Senneby. I regarded this as a delicious synchronicity. You’ll have heard me claim before that ‘Bataille is the money burner’s philosopher’? Well, Goldin+Senneby’s ‘Headless’ - an art project about money, disguised as a novel - draws on Bataille’s ideas and mythology. Famously the motif of Bataille’s secret Acéphale Society was the headless man.

The tingling sense of magical happenstance I felt talking to Angus might explain why his words have stuck with me; ‘the Record of Burn might be the most important thing of all of this,” he said.

It’s taken a decade of prevarication (and sometimes neglect) but finally I feel like I’ve taken a big step toward honouring the importance Angus identified in the Record of Burn.

Shortly, I’m going to share it with you and encourage you to enter some test data so we can check it’s all working. Before that though, please bear with me while I try to explain why The Record of Burn ‘might be the most important thing of all of this’.

Quick aside. If anyone ever fancies a trip to Marly Forest near Paris to see if we can find the old lighting-struck Oak Tree around which Bataille’s Acéphale Society met - then I’m up for doing a money burning Ritual there!

Why is the Record of Burn important?
There are a host of immediate reasons.

It makes the events visible after the fact. And that’s very handy for anyone interested in gaining a perspective on money burning. The process of recording the serial numbers and note denomination can also be an important part of the Ritual experience, itself. It focuses you on the note you’re about to burn. And then there’s the reticence some people feel about putting their name to a burn. The Record of Burn provides a gentle nudge in the right direction. Not having a record would imply ‘you don’t need to put your name to this’. Whereas having a record asks the question ‘why wouldn’t you put your name to this?’. Answering that exposes one’s relations with money’s social and cultural meanings.

I became cognisant of those ‘immediate’ reasons within my first couple of burns. Shortly after I started the Record of Burn.

But as I’ve been working on it these last couple of weeks I’ve got excited about how powerful it might be in a way that’d serve a wider political? purpose. To serve that wider purpose we’d need to collect a decent amount data. And that’s something I hope we can do with events like next year’s £10KBURN. Let me try to explain my excitement.

There is something about seeing the serial numbers and denominations of all the burned banknotes listed out that attests to money as simultaneously real and unreal. To the disapproving person who tuts and laments ‘all the good that money could have done’ the Record of Burn provides a testimony of pure waste. Real potential has been wilfully squandered and this is a mortal sin for those of an ascetic and/or utilitarian bent.

And yet, in a sense the money and its capacity for transforming our material world still exists. Every serial number points to a determinate debt on the ledger of its issuer, the central bank. Whatever value that serial number points to, or represents, is untouched. What has been given up is the bearer’s capacity to direct it. The Record of Burn tells us who those bearers are. We know their email addresses. It’d be easy to ask them if they’d object to that value being collectively directed towards some particular purpose.

I think what the Record of Burn has the capacity to do is convince us that currency is fundamentally a problem of consciousness rather than a problem of materiality. We have many material problems on Earth. But money isn’t one of them. As Keynes said ‘what we can do, we can afford.’

And I think a public-wide, deep, in our bones, understanding of this matters very much indeed. It matters infinitely more than any number of academics studying the problem of money and then trying to educate us. Money burning delivers fiscal enlightenment directly to the individual soul and then (hopefully) via the Record of Burn to the collective consciousness.

Let me end this fleshing out of Angus’s words with something concrete.

I’ve argued before our current visceral experience of money as materially finite enables politicians and the powerful to talk about tax payer’s money. The government collects money from its citizens and then this money funds public services. This is the ‘common sense’ view precisely because it most closely tallies with our lived experience of money.

And yet as many academics will tell you, it’s not true. Tax does not ‘fund’ spending. That’s not how the system actually works. Money is ‘created’ at a keystroke and then taxation works as a sort of regulatory mechanism to keep the system on an even keel. But it doesn’t really matter that this is the most accurate description of public finances. What matters is that no politician would be elected if they told voters that there is in fact a magic money tree! And that it can offer us redemption - it can heal the sick and feed the hungry. That it doesn’t, is down to political choice not money in itself.

Before you place all the blame on the politicians though we - the users of money - must accept our share of responsibility. Regardless of whether politicians understand the money system (and most do not), it is our individual and collective blindness to the nature of money that forces their hand. We create our own monsters. The cure is for us to understand that money is a mystery and not a puzzle; to acknowledge in our heads and our hearts that how we are with money shapes both our society and our most intimate being. And that if we can change it, if we can change how we are with money, we change everything.

The Record of Burn provides a testimony of our transgressions against the ‘common sense’ view that binds us to the present. Every row of data screams at us ‘another world is possible!’

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Gosh. I hadn’t intended to go quite so full-on evangelical. That’s what two weeks of techno-fuckery does for your humble Priest. It all gets bottled up! I actually have more to say but I’ve tested your patience long enough.

So you ready for it?

Viewing the Record of Burn

Record of Burn - Public View
Record of Burn - Forms

I’ve also embedded the Public View and Forms on the churchofburn.org website. Although I’ve hidden the link until I can do more work on it. Feel free to have look/play there too. I think churchofburn.org will be its eventual home. Although I also own the domain burnyourmoney.org

Record of Burn - Public View on churchofburn.org
Record of Burn - Form on churchofburn.org

PLEASE, please, please! I want you to play with the Form!!!
In the first name field put TEST (do use your real email address!) and then fill out all the fields - or as many as you like - with a made-up burn, upload some random images, enter some spurious Banknote details and then hit SUBMIT. You should see your data appear in the Record of Burn - Public View instantaneously.

Let’s play until next week - say 23rd June 2025? And then I’ll go through and delete all the TEST entries. I’d hugely appreciate your help with this as there is nothing like a real world test to check everything works.

A database is something you’d normally want to look at on a desktop. But the beauty of designing it with Airtable and Fillout is that they help you create something that’s useable on desktop and mobile. I’d encourage you to look at both. The mobile view is going to be particularly important when we develop a bespoke version for £10KBURN.

If you like to compare the new Record of Burn with the old version then see the Google Sheet here and the Google Form here. If you’re unfamiliar with database you might wonder what I’m making such a fuss about. Hopefully, you’ll be convinced in time. Creating a database allows for all sorts of magic. There’s stuff I can’t show you in the Public View.

I look forward to presenting the data in more exciting ways than a basic table. But it requires a paid upgrade and a bit of work. So something for the future.

Of course, there’s a very long list of tweaks, additions and things-to-do that I already have in mind. I won’t list them all here. But let me mention a few.

In the short term I want to make a quick Rev Jonathan video explainer to replace the intro text at the top of the Form. And work on an FAQ - I have working document here. Anything that is not clear on the Public View or the Form please tell me so I can change it or address it in the FAQ. I need to work on the automation flows (the email you get sent after you submit). Decide whether users should be able to edit their entries and whether that access should be permanent. There is still a ton of data work to be done, too. Things like the Location URLs and media are missing on lots of burns. I can add quite a lot of that. It’s just going to take time.

I’d love to hear any thoughts, criticisms and ideas on the text - especially on the Form instructions. It’s actually quite hard to write that sort of clear instruction stuff. (Well, I found it hard).

Is this costing $20 a month?
Amazingly no! It’s all done on the Free Plan at the moment. We’ll hit data limits before too long which will make going paid necessary. And being on the free plan does severely limit what I can do with the interfaces - that’s all the snazzy, meaningful and intuitive ways of presenting the data.

But it’s great to get it up and running without any cost. If you read my post in a few weeks back you’ll know I didn’t think it’d be possible without compromises and malarkey. It has been a learning curve but its been okay. I know some subscribers are anti-AI. I have to say, AI is an amazing tool for these Tech projects.

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Finally a BIG THANK YOU to

James Burt

who recommended Airtable to me several months back when we were thinking about how we were going to do the tech stuff on the £10KBURN. The work I’ve done here with The Record of Burn database will help enormously with the £10KBURN and with what Erica and I are planning for Occulture.

Burn. Shine. Love!
Jon Xx