From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BOOKSHELF
Bartering Up to a Better Life
How the heck did Kyle MacDonald parlay a paperclip into a house?
Two years ago, Kyle MacDonald was a 25-year-old marketer of Table Shox, a shock absorber meant to prevent restaurant tables from wobbling. Sensing the signs of a limited career path, Mr. MacDonald, a Montrealer, faced an obvious choice. He could get serious and send off résumés in quest of a real job or he could take one of the red paper clips binding his résumés together and trade it on the Internet for something "bigger and better," with the idea of eventually "bartering up to a house." Naturally, he chose the second course. "One Red Paperclip" is his story.
As soon as the clip was advertised on Craigslist, two women from Vancouver--Rhawnie and Corinna by name--offered a fish-shaped pen in exchange. Before long, in return for the pen, Annie from Seattle gave Mr. MacDonald a ceramic doorknob sculpted to look like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial after a rough night out. And on it went, from a neon Budweiser sign to a recording contract put up by a Toronto student with access to a studio, which Jody Gnant, an aspiring recording artist, snagged by offering Mr. MacDonald a rent-free year in a house in Phoenix.
But Mr. MacDonald was looking to own, not rent, and so he kept going. It turned out that rock star Alice Cooper has a restaurant in Phoenix. An employee at Alice's restaurant, looking to live rent free, offered an afternoon hanging out with her boss. Mr. MacDonald promptly traded quality time with Mr. Cooper for a snow globe branded with the logo of the rock band KISS. Enter the actor Corbin Bernsen, who starred in the TV show "L.A. Law" years ago and now appears on the series "Psych." Mr. Bernsen owns more than 6,000 snow globes. He offered a speaking part in his new movie in return for Mr. MacDonald's.
Then, in July of last year, the town of Kipling, Saskatchewan, entered the barter-sequence. It gave Mr. MacDonald a renovated 1920s house on Main Street in return for the film role, which it then raffled off in a local "American Idol"-style audition won by a town resident named Nolan Hubbard. Mr. MacDonald and his girlfriend, Dom, moved to Kipling, having achieved their goal of turning a paper clip into a house. Mr. MacDonald, by the way, now has a movie deal with DreamWorks.
Mr. MacDonald is a likable dude, always getting "pumped" or "stoked" by his adventures, which he relates in an amusing and breezy way but without much analytical rigor. That's a shame, because he has inspired any number of imitators who barter-off the detritus of their lives. A young man named Aaron Todd did quite well recently with 500 poker chips embossed with an image of William Shatner's kidney stone--which Mr. Shatner himself had auctioned off to the casino that issued them.
True, some of Mr. MacDonald's trading partners did actually want the goods being offered. Ms. Gnant and Mr. Hubbard were happy to pick up the recording contract and the movie role. But in such cases, it's really the traders themselves who are the goods; their goal was to become known. Mr. MacDonald warmed to this aspect of his endeavor, too, becoming ecstatic when "Good Morning America" gave air time to his exploits. Even Annie was delighted when her local ABC affiliate allowed her to publicize her views on "challenging the concept we have of value."
So is the world of the red paper clip a kind of labor market, in which the participants offer up their talents? Not really. The people who won the recording contract and movie role merely had something wacky to trade, not necessarily talent. And Mr. MacDonald and Annie were offering just themselves--as fodder for content-hungry media.
So if the world of the red paper clip is neither a typical goods nor a typical labor market, then what is it? Perhaps it's the world of another Alice, the world through the looking glass. On one side of the mirror, the side where most of us live, we each make our way in the marketplace based on our own unique bundles of ability and work experience. The object of our quest--money--is just the opposite. It is utterly interchangeable; a dollar is a dollar, and we don't know or care about where it's been or what it's done.
On the other side of the looking glass, the world of one red paper clip, things operate in reverse. Here it is individuals who become interchangeable and their past experience irrelevant. Content is content, and anyone can fill the bill for a recording contract or film role. The objects of the quest, by contrast, are unique or idiosyncratic--fish pens and doorknobs come across in Mr. MacDonald's book as having more personality than their owners--and are valued precisely for where they've been and what they've "done." Why else would Rhawnie and Corinna hang onto the paper clip? It's because, as Mr. MacDonald says, it has "a great story."
Ultimately, Mr. MacDonald wants us to marvel at the fact that he exchanged a paper clip for a house, and so we do. Still more marvelous is the exchange that made it possible: between the qualities of people and of the objects they possess.
Mr. Stark's latest book is "The Limits of Medicine" (Cambridge). You can buy "One Red Paperclip" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
