A person who is passionate about theory trading cards has a subtle obsession. The Gathering is not magic. Not Pokémon. Michel Foucault cards. Stuart Hall-related cards. Formerly, theory.org.uk, a website that somehow made cultural theory feel like something you could put in your jacket pocket, hosted small, printable PDFs.
That website was created years ago by David Gauntlett, a British media scholar best known in UK classrooms for his research on identity and pick-and-mix culture. He eventually produced a set of twelve official Theory Trading Cards, which is the part of the story that still perplexes readers. Free. Downloadable. In a style that truly resembled a collectible card, each one summarized a prominent figure in media, gender, or cultural studies. Teachers adored them. For editing, students took pictures of them. They were circulated by the internet in its specialized and devoted areas.
The website then went dark. Gauntlett himself responded to it with his usual candor: the material was between twelve and twenty years old, he wrote, and it was probably time to let it go. The majority of people agreed with this. Some didn’t.
What transpired next is the kind of thing that probably ought to make headlines but doesn’t. The published physical version of the Theory Trading Cards, published by AltaMira Press, increased the set from twelve to twenty-one cards. Someone, whose identity is still unclear and who is more fan than scholar by most accounts, noticed this. Nine additional thinkers. carefully chosen from the larger field of cultural, media, and artistic theory, as stated in the book’s description. There is a printed deck. It was examined. It was listed in a catalog. However, for many students who depended on Gauntlett’s free PDFs, it might as well have been printed on the moon because it was never freely accessible online.
Depending on your point of view, the difference between twelve and twenty-one is either a small publishing footnote or a real gap in the public record. Once you know it’s there, it’s difficult to ignore. At twelve, the official online set came to an end. The actual set went farther. The theoretical thinker who made the cut for print but never showed up in the free digital version that most people actually used is what enthusiasts have begun to refer to, only half-jokingly, as the rarest Gauntlett card.
Thus, one was created. A recreation that is essentially constructed to resemble the originals’ tone and style. It’s genuinely unclear and probably irrelevant whether it accurately conveys Gauntlett’s intentions. The cards were never intended to be final declarations, but rather as places to start. Gauntlett appears to be aware of this; his whole theory of identity and media consumption is predicated on the notion that individuals remix, reinterpret, and reconstruct meaning for themselves. He refers to it as “pick and mix.” If he objected, it would be nearly contradictory.
This has a larger irony that is worth considering. For decades, academic theory has been concerned with access: who can obtain knowledge, who can afford textbooks, and whose curriculum is influenced by what a publisher chooses to print. Gauntlett’s initial cards were a modest but sincere effort to challenge that. Free, visual, and intended for students without access to university libraries. It seems less like an act of piracy and more like a continuation of the project itself that a fan felt obliged to fill in the gaps in the official record.
The cards are still in circulation, both new and old, official and not. They are still being printed by teachers. Students continue to take pictures of them for their revision notes. In its particular and obstinate manner, the internet would not allow this specific thing to completely vanish. That may speak to Gauntlett’s work, but it speaks more to the peculiar persistence of things that genuinely aid in learning.
