Why Sticker Culture

Stickers are art you can put on your laptop or your local utility box.

They are also propaganda.

A short history of laptop lids

The laptop lid as canvas is maybe twenty years old as a general practice but the underlying instinct — small adhesive art applied to public personal objects — runs back through skateboard culture, through punk-show flyers, through bumper stickers, through the entire history of graffiti. Skateboards were the original mobile sticker bombs. Laptops inherit that lineage.

What's specific to now is that the people walking into coffee shops with elaborately stickered laptops are largely the same people writing the software you use. There's a self-aware version of this where everyone at a tech conference is silently judging each other's sticker game, and there's a pure version where someone genuinely just likes their dad's old fishing-lodge sticker and put it on their machine.

The swap economy

The thing I love most about stickers is how unmonetized they are by default. Conferences hand them out free. Open-source projects mail them to anyone who asks. People show up to meetups with a fistful and trade. There's a whole gift economy operating under the actual economy.

Selling stickers is a slightly weird intervention into that. It only works if the stickers are good — original art, well-made, the sort of thing someone would prefer to a free conference one. Or maybe if the propaganda clicks with the buyer's worldview.

Why a sticker shop fits a crypto-native checkout

Two reasons.

First, stickers are low-stakes purchases. Five bucks. The friction of pasting a Bitcoin address or fiddling with a Monero slatepack feels less ridiculous against a $5 purchase than against a $500 purchase. People will tolerate a learning curve once for a small thing they want.

Second, the venn diagram of "people who buy small adhesive art unprompted" and "people who hold cryptocurrency they're looking for excuses to spend" is, in my experience, basically a circle. We're talking about the same kind of person. Building a shop that takes both serves both halves of who they are.

What's in the [portfolio](/portfolio)

A few years of stickers I've collected, found, made, or had made. Some of them are products in this shop now. Some are just photos of friends' work or stuff I picked up at conferences. The dates span December 2020 through whenever I last took a photo.

If you have a sticker design and want it printed, hit me up.

Also, go put more stickers on your laptop. Any laptop. It's good for it.