One week after taking the presidential oath in January 2017, Donald Trump signed his fifth executive order. Its stated goal was to “protect the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States.” This order, which banned entrants from predominantly Muslim countries, quickly became referred to in the media as the “Muslim Ban,” and was immediately challenged in court. Given Trump’s anti-Muslim remarks during his campaign, to many it appeared as thinly veiled religious discrimination: its logic of denying entry was clearly based on religious grounds rather than national ones (the latter would be constitutional; the former would not).

In response to legal objections, Trump issued a second order revising the first. This one emphasized the nationalities of the prohibited entrants rather than their religious views. In pre-election statements and tweets, Trump had outlined a course of action closely resembling what unfolded when he took office. He’d suggested that he would try to prevent Muslims from entering the US, and if that didn’t work he’d reframe the plan in terms of nationality.1

Following the second order, a group of organizations including the International Refugee Assistance Project filed an appeal against the Trump administration. In a joint statement presented to the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, the plaintiffs spent significant time examining Trump’s actions prior to taking office, in order to argue that his stated intent before becoming president—to keep Muslims out of the country—can be assumed to match his intent once in power. In order to uphold Trump’s executive order, the plaintiffs said, the government would need to prove “that the challenged action is ‘facially legitimate and bona fide,’” which, they argued, it is not.2

Facially legitimate means that “there must be a valid reason for the challenged action stated on the face of the action”; in other words, the justification the order gives for itself must be a legal one. On the other hand, bona fide refers not to the validity of the wording of the action but to the validity of the “good faith” behind the wording. To prove the first, one needs only to show that the explicit reason for the order (in this case “protecting” the nation from “state-sponsored terrorism”) is legal. Proving the second requires demonstrating that the intent behind the order matches that statement. A facially legitimate statement might be a lie, as long as it is a good lie; a bona fide statement must be the truth.

While this is a key judicial distinction, it seems to have become almost null in much of common political discourse. With the advent of Trumpian politics, facial legitimacy has taken center stage. As long as a statement is legal, commentators seem to think, it might as well be true. He means what he says. He says what he means. This creates a tautology that defies argumentation.

Opponents of the type of rhetoric Trump espouses continue to fight back by insisting that such statements are not bona fide—that they are false—but this makes no difference to those who only care about facial legitimacy. Authenticity has become a surface claim, as Faisal Devji explains in his essay for this journal. In Devji’s words, Trump’s political persona is “defined by an absence of all depth,” his statements repeated ad nauseam as the sole method of proving their sincerity. There will never be an adequate argument against lying in a culture focused entirely on face value.

What follows is a preoccupation not only with the facial legitimacy of speech, but with the face doing the speaking. Just like “authentication” of rhetoric, the authentication of identity acquires supreme value. For their contribution, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollman explain how identity commodification is intensifying due to advances in biometrics. This ranges from situations where refugees are forced to submit to identity tracking in order to enter public support systems, to seemingly more banal scenarios, such as smartphone iris recognition.

Levin and Tollman write: “Money has long been connected to faces,” via the literal head of a sovereign stamped on a coin. One wonders whether faces themselves will gain supreme value as currency, especially as the identity-based buying behavior of consumers becomes information-commodity. Stefan Heidenreich, in newly translated excerpts from his recent book on the coming “non-money economy” (Merve Verlag, 2017), proposes that we are entering a new phase where the global economy may not be premised on currency at all. The technological infrastructure is already in place, he argues, to support a system of exchange unmediated by a centralized currency or price—and we are likely within the first media-phase of that transition.

In Stewart Home’s short story “The Cripplegate Blockchain Massacre,” a disaffected, capital-obsessed, psychotic cryptocurrency investor loses any semblance of accountability to humanity when his virtual holdings take a nosedive. Total abstraction of value, perhaps, has led to total abstraction from moral values in this fable. A clue to the character’s psyche may be found in Ana Teixeira Pinto’s essay on irony and paranoia in the online behavior of the extreme right. She finds that much of the architecture of the internet, which encourages feelings of both extreme power and extreme vulnerability, has created a kind of fatalism that can only lead to fatality.

But death is not the end: our avatars and AI ghosts will live on. With his video Geomancer, shown within the framework of the 2018 CTM Festival, Lawrence Lek provides a glimpse into the beyond. An artist edition within this publication contains an excerpt from the Geomancer script alongside stills from the movie. In the excerpted scene, the protagonist takes a tour through a future Singapore museum: “a space dedicated to the sacrifice and resurrection of culture.” Immortal artificial intelligences discuss what authentic creation untethered to identity might mean in an era after human-centric society.

The transmediale journal has been published regularly online since 2015. This is the first print edition, published on the occasion of transmediale 2018: face value. It gathers new approaches to understanding value beyond surface-level claims. When blatant hypocrisy has become the norm in much of public life, truth and lie are bound together as the flip sides of the same coin—a coin that has become a fetish. Flipping the coin will never help explain the nature of its value, but will only continue to show its faces, its surfaces. These texts are attempts to melt it down: to alchemically transmute it in order to find, or create, something worth more.

This introduction appeared in the printed version of the Face Value issue and has been written by Elvia Wilk, editor of transmediale journal.

• 1. See: Chuck Todd, “Meet the Press,” interview with Donald Trump, NBC News (July 24, 2016), https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-july-24-2016-n615706.
• 2. IRAP v. Trump, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, No. 17-1351, published May, 25, 2017.