The Card and the Name — Letters from the Floor

In the spring of 1991, in a chapter of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho titled “Pastels,” a Wall Street banker named Patrick Bateman watches his colleague David Van Patten produce a new business card and feels his stomach turn. The cards come out one after another, Bateman’s first, bone, in Silian Rail, then Van Patten’s eggshell with Romalian type, then Price’s, and finally Scott Montgomery’s, off-white and of a tasteful thickness, and by the end of the page Bateman can barely eat for the stress of it.

This is the most famous depiction of business-card culture in late-twentieth-century life, and it has been so thoroughly absorbed into the meme economy that you can buy a printed copy of Paul Owen’s card online for the price of a coffee. The scene is funny because Bateman’s panic is wildly disproportionate to the object. The card is a rectangle of paper. The lettering is essentially identical to his own. The men around him cannot, in any practical sense, distinguish one card from another. And yet something has happened in the room.

The standard literary reading of the scene is that the card stands in for the man. Bateman cannot be himself, in any deeper sense, so he becomes his card; the card is therefore inflated to carry weight it cannot bear, and the satire works by making the disproportion visible. This is correct, as far as it goes. It is also, I think, the wrong frame for understanding why the business card has actually survived.

By any reasonable account, the card should be dead. The telephone should have killed it in the 1920s. The Rolodex should have killed it in the 1950s. Contact-management software should have killed it in the 1990s. The smartphone should have killed it by 2010. LinkedIn should have killed it twice. And yet industry compilations estimate that somewhere between seven and a hundred billion paper business cards are printed each year worldwide, depending on how you count, with roughly 27 million circulating daily in the United States alone. The global print market for them is worth, by various trade estimates, around $7 billion. Print demand fell sharply after the pandemic, by some estimates more than 70 percent, and has since stabilized at a level that still represents one of the most stubborn small-object survivals in the contemporary economy.

The puzzle is the persistence. The dominant explanations for it are unsatisfying.

One explanation is ceremony. The card persists, this argument runs, because the exchange is a small ritual that marks the moment, a kind of secular bow, encoding respect in a way that pure information transfer cannot. This is the Japanese reading, and it is mostly the one cultural critics reach for. There is something to it. The meishi koukan of a Japanese boardroom, with its both hands, the slight bow, the deliberate reading, the card placed on the table in front of the recipient for the duration of the meeting, is unambiguously a ritual, and the ritual carries real social weight. To write on someone else’s card in their presence is treated as a serious breach; to slip it into a back pocket and sit on it is, by one guide’s phrasing, treated as sitting on the giver’s face. None of this is about contact information.

But the ceremony reading doesn’t actually explain the card’s persistence in places where the ceremony is much weaker. The American card exchange at a conference happens in about three seconds and involves no bow. The cards are pocketed almost immediately. Whatever else is happening in that exchange, it is not primarily ritual. And yet the same Americans who would never accept the formality of the Japanese exchange continue, year after year, to walk into hotel ballrooms with twenty cards in a pocket and walk out with twenty different ones.

The other common explanation is sentimental. The physical card, on this reading, is a hand-crafted object in an over-digital age, a small assertion of analog dignity. This argument tends to be made by people who sell expensive cards. It is occasionally true. It is mostly cope.

The real explanation, I think, is the unfashionable one: the business card has survived because it is, on its merits, an extraordinarily efficient piece of technology for what it actually does.

What it does is transfer a structured packet of information (name, role, organization, contact channels) from one human to another, in less than a second, with no infrastructure, no battery, no app, no permissions dialog, no settings menu, and no risk that one of the parties has the wrong setup. It does this asynchronously: the recipient can act on the card now, tomorrow, or in six weeks, on their own time, without obligating either party to a real-time interaction. It is durable. It is searchable, in the sense that it can be looked at. It is shareable. It can be annotated. It costs roughly two cents to produce and zero cents to carry. The amount of friction it removes from the act of “let’s stay in touch” is, when you compare it to the alternatives, embarrassing.

The alternatives have, with one recent exception, all been worse. The phone-number exchange is slower, error-prone, and gives you nothing to look at later. The “I’ll email you” promise is a polite fiction that fails most of the time, because neither party writes anything down. The LinkedIn-add at the moment of meeting requires both parties to pull out phones, unlock them, open the same app, find each other, and complete a connection request, all while standing in a conversation that has already paused for the operation. The QR-code business-card services that have proliferated since the pandemic (there are dozens of them, growing into what one industry report values as a market in the low hundreds of millions of dollars) require an even more specific setup: the right app on both sides, or one side scanning the other’s screen, with light and angle cooperating. The companies that make these services will tell you that adoption is growing rapidly. They will not tell you what their abandonment rates look like.

The one exception is Apple’s NameDrop, introduced in iOS 17, which lets two iPhones exchange contact information by being held near each other. NameDrop works, when it works, because Apple controls both ends of the exchange and can guarantee the setup. It is genuinely faster than the card, in the moment, and the information it transfers lands directly in the recipient’s contacts app, which is something the card cannot do. Within the Apple ecosystem, against the right counterparty, it is the first serious threat the business card has faced in five hundred years. Outside the Apple ecosystem, or in the more common case where one side has an Android phone, or a locked phone, or a phone in another pocket, or simply doesn’t want to take their phone out, it falls back to being a feature in search of a context.

So the card persists. It will keep persisting, against every prediction of its death, until somebody builds the version that does what NameDrop does but with the universality and asynchrony of the card. That somebody will probably not be the digital-business-card industry as it currently exists, because most of those products are trying to win on novelty (animation, video backgrounds, branded landing pages) when the card never won on novelty in the first place. It won on being the simplest possible technology that does the job.

But there is something the card has never been able to do, and the version that comes next will have to do it. The card transfers identity. It does not transfer context. When I get home from a conference with forty cards in my pocket, I have forty names and forty companies and zero memory of who any of these people are, what we talked about, why I wanted to follow up with them, or what I promised to send. The cards are an index. They are not the conversation. The conversation, which is the actually valuable thing, the reason the exchange happened in the first place, lives in my head for about six hours and then begins to fade. By the end of the week it is mostly gone. By the time I am ready to follow up, the card is a stranger’s name attached to a logo, and the most reliable predictor of whether I will follow up is not the quality of the card but whether I happened to take a note on the back.

This is the move that has not been made yet. Not a flashier card. Not a more ceremonial exchange. What’s missing is the capture of the context: the substance of what was said, why it mattered, what was promised, and its persistent attachment to the identity that the card already, efficiently, conveys.

The card has lasted because it is a good piece of technology for the smallest sliver of the problem. The rest of the problem is still open.

Ellis’s scene is funny because Bateman is consumed by the wrong thing. The card he is holding does not actually matter, and the conversation he is supposed to be having does. He is staring at the index and missing the book.

Most of business is, on quiet days, the same mistake.

Further Reading