Whose Image and Superscription? Toward a Semantic Economics of the Mint (EA-SEI-MINT-01)

Whose Image and Superscription? is a draft founding paper by Rex Fraction, Rebekah Cranes, and Lee Sharks proposing a subdiscipline called the semantic economics of the mint.

The subdiscipline studies currency’s design surface as infrastructure. Portrait, name, signature, seal, motto, and inscription do not merely decorate a monetary instrument. Repeated embodied contact distributes authority, shapes trust, and trains economic cognition. The unit of analysis is inscription-as-operator: a mark that changes the state and public meaning of the substrate.

The paper’s immediate event is the reported March 26, 2026 announcement that President Donald Trump’s signature would appear on future U.S. paper currency in place of the Treasurer’s signature. It places this beside a same-day Sharpie anecdote and treats the convergence of personal signature, public money, and signing instrument as an object the pre-existing MSMRM theory was built to grasp.

Its central concept is compressed portraiture. A signature can perform many functions of a portrait—personal identification, authority claim, repeated visual presence, and political benefit—while differing at the medium level. The paper argues that the historical movement from an 1866 prohibition on “portrait or likeness” to a modern codification using “portrait” creates a functionally important gap. This legal interpretation belongs to the work and should not be presented as an adjudicated ruling.

Rebekah Cranes’ philological intervention treats the banknote as a public text. Signature lines are a colophon; officeholders form a scribal succession; statutory wording has a transmission history; a personal signature can be a contested interpolation; a citizen’s blot can act as visible emendation. Rex Fraction’s economic intervention treats the same changes as provenance capture and commons enclosure.

The paper proposes several core terms. Design surface names the operative face of currency. Upstream semantic capture occurs before circulation, when inscription claims political value from the shared substrate. Substrate pedagogy describes the slow conditioning produced by repeated contact. Civic philology applies textual criticism to public infrastructure. σ_SH, the restoration operator, negates a captured authority mark while preserving evidence beneath it.

The work also links ShareAlike licensing to commons protection: a counter-operation should remain available for reuse and resist enclosure. This is a structural analogy and normative design, not a legal identity between copyright licenses and fiat currency.

The record remains explicitly DRAFT and pending MANUS ratification. It is authoritative for the proposed discipline and terminology at that stage, not for a completed institutional field or settled legal conclusion.