How Money Became A Form Of Social Media

money is or where it comes from? I agree that all of our episodes are money in that what was that film you suppord money n Swan where people were going, you're so money swingers, Yeah, swingers that one. Our episodes are money in that sense, but they're also about money. They are. And of course there's one of our favorite topics, and today we have um. I think we're going to explored with a slightly different angle than we sometimes do. So we sometimes talk about the origins of money? Does

money come from the state? Is money inherently credit based? What are the different kinds of things that we call money? I think we're gonna attack the question from a slightly

different angle than we normally do. Yeah, I think this is going to be a really interesting episode because it's actually going to bring together a lot of the different discussions we've been having about specific types of money, so cash versus cryptocurrency, or different types of cryptocurrency like bitcoin versus something like libra, uh, the currency that Facebook is currently working on, and what the different use cases are for each of those, but also what the different sort

of I guess societies that they create actually are, if that makes sense. Yeah, I like the way you put that society is that they create. And of course, like money is just like really interesting because obviously people pay pay for things with money, but you know, people do new things with money that they hadn't always done. So it's like people paying venmo to their friends and they leave funny messages along with their venmos, Like that's a

new thing that wasn't always the case. So within this thing like payments or money, how we use it, what its role in society is, how it connects us. It's always evolving. Yeah, absolutely, And there's a big inclusion discussion to be had there as well, So who has access to different types of money, So I'm interested in touching on that as well. So today I'm really excited once again we have a past guest we had. I think it was probably a couple of years ago now, but

we have her back. I'm very excited we're gonna be speaking with a Lanta Swords. She's the professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She's also a fellow at the Burguing Institute, and she is the author of a recent book called New Money, How Money Became Social Media. So it will be interesting a different angle than we've typically had. But a Lana, thank you so much for joining us, Thanks for having me. It's good to be back, you know. So, like we said this, we like this

topic what is money money? But there is some question that arises sometimes, I think, which is why bother, like why do we talk about this question? Like why is it interesting or why is it important? From your perspective, tackling this question from a different angle, and we'll get to this the content of your book about money as social media? Why is it even a thing we're studying

in the first place? In your view? Well, I know for me, so I started my PhD program um right kind of in the aftermath of the last global financial crisis. So I was really in this moment of like I was entering into a moment of scholarly study when it seems like the whole world was asking that question, you know, what is money? Why is money? Why do governments and traditional financial institutions have like the say over what gets

to be money? And that kind of like post two thousand eight moment was when we saw, I would say, like, really, the emergence of what we now call fintech, what we now call the sharing a con to me, what we i'll call um, you know, the gig economy, like all these different ways of doing money differently, of course, the crypto space, and so it suddenly seemed like like everybody was asking that kind of question, and so I became really interested in it at a time where I could

also study people who were really interested in kind of questions of money nous um and at a time when people were starting to build new infrastructures to do money and do the economy differently. Um. And of course, my as you mentioned, I'm an assistant professor of media studies, and my background is in thinking about communication media technologies. So I, prior to that point, had been, prior to kind of turning to money, had been looking at the

emergence of social media. UM, you know, what do cell phones? What do social media networks? Um? Mean for any number of different social questions. And I realized that there was almost no one inside the economy, inside academia, inside kind of this field of media studies looking at that communication and technological infrastructures that make money happen, and we're they were undergoing this like kind of tremendous moment of transformation.

So for me, as someone who studies technologies that move information around and um, the kinds of social and cultural dimensions of those technologies, UM, I think it's important and interesting to study money because typically when we talk about money, we talked about kind of the politics or cultural meaning of money. It has to do with questions of like who has money, who doesn't have money, who's doesn't have

enough money, who has too much money? But we don't usually think about the infrastructures that actually move money around and how those infrastructures themselves have meaning and have power, and how they're changing. So talk to us a little bit more about that point. What exactly is the overlap between media and money? Because I think to most people it's not going to be immediately apparent Oftentimes when I say, you know, my book is called How Payment Became Social Media, Um,

people immediately go to Venmo. And of course that's true, like Venmo, such a cliche, such a cliche, immediately wondering, and lots of Venmo in the book. So and I think Vemo is really fascinating. But you know, Venmo is overtly designed to be social media. You know, I've one of my students mentioned once and I think that's even made it to the book. It's like literally Facebook Blue, you know, it's a social stream that you know, turns

money into into a form of kind of media. But if we go back and we think about, you know, the the technologies of money, they have always kind of tracked alongside the money the technologies of communication and media more broadly. Um, so we could go back to thinking about, you know, the way coins, the way tally sticks, um, the way any number, whether you know big rocks that you you know, keep an oral history of of who owns it in the case of the TIV and the well,

the isle of Yap. You know, those are all kind of information systems. And however we kind of keep track of information, whether it's through bits of shell or just kind of oral history is kind of the remit of

what media and communication study scholars are interested in. But if we think a little bit more more recent so, paper currency does many of the same things that scholars in my field talk about paper UM culture print culture more generally doing so, you know, Benedict Anderson, who is a UM scholar of the printing press, talked about how the print and newspapers created an imagined community. It's his term,

like the skies and scale of the nation state. So we kind of learned to think about ourselves as members of nations through the consumption of printed media. And similarly, print currency is covered with iconography of the nation state. It tells us an efficiently sanctioned past, and it allows us to project into kind of a shared future UM

as kind of a community of shared faith. If we then you know, think about okay, like move forward into what you know, the technologies of money have been and so you know, the telegraph, you know, we think about Western Union is being primarily a money transfer service these days, but it's also you know, one of the most important

you know, communication systems. More broadly, moving forward into the twenty later in the twentieth century, the very same computers and in some cases some of the same engineers who built the early Internet. We're also um building the Visa master Card network, which is this kind of you know,

global communication system. So and you can still hear in some like I haven't been to a bar in a really long time, but um, but you can still hear from the back and like the back a t M of some sketchy bar like modem noises coming out of a t M s And it kind of reminds us that, you know, this is an Internet of sorts. You know, I'm old enough to remember that you couldn't you know, you couldn't swipe a credit card or my mom couldn't swipe a credit card when someone was on the phone

at the store in the eighties and nineties. And so now when we talk about new payment systems, we're looking at mobile, we're looking at the Internet. We're thinking about crypto, which is like in many ways, there's a reason why we call it. You know, people jokingly call it magic

Internet currency and that sort of thing. So I try to say, all right, let's rethink money as communication, you know, think about transactions as literal like transactions moving across from one account to another UM and then look at the systems that power that communication, whether they are tally stick paper, you know, UM, telegraph, Internet, whatever the case may be, and say, all right, you know what are the politics of those systems? Who manages them? How do we use

them to create meaning in our everyday lives. It's interesting. You may not know this, but on a recent episode, so Tracy after years and years of skepticism or recent episode turned her into a bitcoin bowl. She she converted anyway, But it's interesting thinking about, like you mentioned, imagined communities and Benedict Anderson in the printing press sort of reifying the state because obviously you look at physical currency, icons of the state, founding fathers, other symbols that sort of

emphasize this. It's interesting to think of like sort of like bitcoin and crypto, is this sort of like post nation state currency which fits with the Internet. Is this sort of like you know, post newspapers posts, sort of like post post print communities. I guess yeah, And you know, I I will say I'm not, you know, hugely bullish

on crypto myself. I've been I've written some academic articles about UM, bitcoin and blockchain going back many years now, I'm old in bitcoin time, I guess, and I do think that a huge part of what UM appeals about about bitcoin or about crypto is the kind of community aspect. So this like sense of being part of a shared future that looks a particular way. UM. You know, I have said, I've written that, you know, all money is a stake. UM. It allows you to stake your claim

in a particular future. Like all money is kind of a prediction market in some ways, because if you're willing to accept and hold money, you're kind of betting on a particular set of outcome. So if you do believe in the future that is as folks talked about in the nineties, like homesteading on the electronic frontier UM, and that you're the pioneer UM, then why wouldn't you kind of put your money where your mouth is, so to speak, and and start thinking about what kind of monetary systems

would that would entail. So my time frame might be slightly off here because I haven't lived in the States for a while now, but from what I remember, like even five years ago or so, it was kind of difficult to send money very quickly to just a random person. Um. You know, you could do a wire transfer, you could do a money order, right, a check, things like venmo or um other sort of instantaneous payment methods, maybe sending bitcoin over the internet something like that. They weren't really

around yet. Why was that the case? Like, what is the justification for making money transfers that slow for so long? Yeah, whenever I speak to, you know, talk with folks in other parts of the world, they're always like, they don't really quite get venmo, because, um, it doesn't quite make sense that we haven't yet had a good way to send friends um money quickly and easily. And the United States has kind of historically been behind in P two

P payments. And I I think there's kind of a couple of different answers to that, for you know, in terms of the reason why, um, you know, one is, as you know, just general lack of public investment UM or general lack of of you know, infrastructural investment that would enable something like that. In a lot of places in Europe, there is just they're more public options for

peer to peer payment UM. But also I think one of the things I write about the book is that the Visa master card network was developed at a time that imagined a much more um kind of dietic economy. So like there were consumers which were people, and there were merchants that were businesses, and there were there wasn't really away for a person to be a merchant um

or and therefore a person to kind of accept payments. Um. And so we have as you may know, and I could really geek out about this for a very long time, but people tell me, um that not everyone is like Super in the credit card acquiring value change. So with credit cards, um, every everyone has a bank that represents themselves, that represents them as they enter the kind of credit card network. So people have a bank that's their issuing

bank that issues them a credit card. UM. Let's say I have a Chase UM Sapphire Cards, so chases my issuer. And then if I am a merchant, UM, I have an acquiring bank who you know, maybe let's say oftentimes it's also Chase, but um, you know, it could be Bank of America Merchant Services, and that acquiring bank, you know, acquires payments on my behalf but also kind of holds

the risk for me. And what that means is that if a customer wants their money back UM, then they will UM ask for chargeback through their issuer, who will then go through the network and then go to the acquirer, and the acquirer, under the rules of the network, typically is mostly obliged to just give them their money back, so UM, so the acquirer essentially pays the issuer and

the issuer then issues a refund to the customer. So then the acquirer has to then go to the merchant and say, hey, I've issued this chargeback, I need money from you. And if the which happens all the time, it's not usually that big a deal. UM. But if for whatever reason, the merchant faces a ton and a ton of chargebacks, or the merchant goes out of business, or the merchant was a scammer, the acquirer is left holding the bag for all of that risk. So acquiring

services are priced according to risk. So if you're an acquirer, one of the ways you make money is by um doing higher risk payments. UM. So anyone who, for the most part, who's an issue, who's a merchant, can find an acquirer who like matches their risk appetite. But historically that has not been so there's no has not been any real way for individuals to have their risk assessed by an acquirer. And there has never been a kind

of acquirer for people. Um So, there has never been a way for people to accept payments through the Visa master Card network. And then you know, the big innovation in that space was PayPal in the nineties. Um And of course PayPal rides the rails not primarily of the Visa master Card network, but of the A C H network. UM So that's why you know, PayPal prefers it when folks use their checking account rather than like having to access and having to pay fees to access the network

the Visa master Card network. So it we never it was built in a time. The Visa master Card network was built in a time in the you know, nineteen seventies when we didn't have as much of a peer to peer economy, didn't have as much as a person to person, we didn't have as much of a press person imagination for how the economy would work. And I think that that has a lot to do with our

media infrastructure. So I mean the Internet in many ways, like allows us to imagine ourselves as economic actors um as people, and so the internet kind of had to figure out a way to allow us to get paid and to pay so and I'm just wondering. So, you know, when Facebook launched Libra, which is sort of like the next iteration of a lot of what we're talking about, there were a lot of cynics out there who were saying, well, this is just a way for Facebook to get additional

data on its users. I'm curious, like how much of these new payment systems are about learning more about the individual to your point, versus you know, just dealing with the merchant. Yeah, I mean absolutely, UM. I think that that like anything else coming out of the tech industry, you know, there is a data imperative, there's a data

play UM. Merchants, as I mentioned, pay to receive payments and if and for the most part, we don't you know, people don't pay to be paid, nor do we UM, nor are we willing to really pay to pay UM. So there has to be some way that like this is being monetized UM. And so for the most part that has been you know, imagined like everything else as and I kind of when I say how payment became social media, A big part of what I mean, is like social the Silicon Valley, since the term which means

that there is a social data component um. And you know, for a long time, folks in this kind of like new payment space talked about like mobile payments as kind of the holy grail of social data sets, because there was this kind of dream that if you could actually finally, um you know, close the loop between targeted message to actual purchase in real space and time, UM, then you would um you know, do something you know, no advertiser

has ever done before. I think that some of the business models have moved away, um to some extent, from the kind of like direct advertising type of targeted advertising type of business model to thinking about things like developing new systems of risk analytics, UM, you know, just kind of applying data to whatever data can be used for.

And and in some cases I've been somewhat convinced by Tim Wong's new book that that basically are argues that it's possible that we don't we can't actually get as much value out of all of these um data sets as we may hope, and then we may see something we may be in the middle of a data bubble. But nevertheless, the kind of Quest for Data, which you guys should have him on the podcast. He's really interesting. We should. I was just thinking, what's the name of

his book is called I Can see it? Sub Prime attention crisis advertising and the time bomb at the heart of the Internet. Sounds good? Is this like how I buy? Like I bought like a new Dutch oven the other day and then now all I get is ads for Dutch as if you were a Dutch oven collector. Wait, if we collector, it might make sense. But if it were, like if it were some theoretically efficient market for data,

someone's getting screwed. Like someone's buying a lot of impressions that probably they wish they weren't, you know, as all of the right exactly, and as all of the almost every major social media company has tried to do payment it's over the last ten years, um, with varying degrees of success, and they've all applied kind of their standard m o um too the what they think they're going to do with it. So you know, Google has imagined that they will sell like AdWords type of thing as

it relates to payments. Facebook has imagined that they would kind of hoard it and figure out what they were going to do with it. Venmo is kind of interesting because Veno has a public api. Um, it's quite easy

to browse Venmo data. There's a lot of interesting art projects that UM kind of ticket exploit this so um that one of my favorites is called public by Default, and that is by an artist called UM but named hand the Duke, and she basically um downloaded all Venmo transactions from the year seen and used it to create

portraits of individual people. She calls them the humans of Venmo, and she profiles like young lovers obviously getting into an argument and then making up and breaking up, and this one woman who's seems to spend an inordinate amount of money on junk food, and someone who is almost definitely a weed dealer. UM, and she kind of and she kind of uses it to to say, like, you know, which the reason why I think this is so interesting is that, yes, she's using it to say we should

probably be making this private. But it also shows, you know, really how like poignant the stories are money tells are and how these are like lived experiences. Yeah. So I know, you say, like it's a cliche and everyone goes to Venmo, but there's obviously a reason for this because it's just so obvious and like I use Venmo, but you know, like I don't put like clever things in my messages. I just like say straight up if I like, if

I'm splitting lunch, I'm splitting lunch. But obviously people do, and they like use emojis or you know, tongue in cheek jokes. Why like why is and you see, like it's kind of weird that it's people are default public or that they let themselves, especially when you can then reverse engineer you can figure. You know, there was some site that I saw it was basically just like every

like trains, yeah, vice mobized yeah Vice. So like why and when when you when people research this, what is it about the desire to make it fun their transactions, or to make it public, or to even reveal a legal activity that people are so comfortable doing. Yeah, I mean I do think that the I do think that money is fundamentally social, Our transactions are, and I think that for a long time, I think that people are

uncomfortable admitting it, um and uncomfortable. Uh, and that's true for scholars, like you know, whether we fall onto the side of being like economists who think like money is pursuing you know, some sort of rational economic interests, or we fall under the camp of being Marxists who thinks that um, all money reduces all the quality in the

world two mere quantities UM. Historically, scholars have given money kind of short shrift, like it's insufficiently social um and and that or that money sociality is an aberration from how it's supposed to act UM. And I think in everyday life we tend to think about money is something we shouldn't talk about UM or something that is we really feel the need to set apart from our social lives, our friendships, and Venmo kind of reveals how deeply social it is and how kind of fun it can be.

You're meaningful it can be UM. But I do think that that sociality isn't so straightforward as like these mirror like I will put a joke that makes perfect sense with the transaction that I'm I'm doing UM. And what I mean by that is when when I talk to young people who are big users of Venmo, they describe the kind of public performance element as usually indeed quite performative.

So you're paying your rent to your roommate, but you're talking, You're putting Margarita emojis to ensure that everyone has a sense that your social life is more interesting than it is, right exactly. And so I do think that that anyone who goes to Venmo data hoping to find some truth um that is very straightforward, is probably going to have to really dig to find these kind of like clear

cut stories. But I do think that what makes the data interesting to advertisers or to you know, the FBI is the um kind of social network, that kind of social graph inaggregate, So it doesn't really matter what I'm saying to you, Um, it's so more so that we can kind of trace the transactions of the kind of

flow of money. So yeah, I mean, I do think I think an interesting part of that data set is that it is so available, but it is definitely one that we I don't think anyone who has really figured out quite yet how um, it should be wielded or how it can be best wielded. Oh. The other thing I'll say about Venmo is that they've tried to sell themselves as an advertising, um, a side of advertising more recently.

So they there's like an ad on the Vemo side as of a couple of weeks ago that shows like to just some guys having a conversation about some pants they bought. So it's like, you know, oh, sweet khakis, bro, and the other guys like, yeah, they fit pretty well, and it's like the most artificial conversation you can imagine. But the the advertising copy is, you know, you know, puts your brand at the center of real authentic conversations

between friends. And when the young people that I interview or my students UM at University of Virginia look at this, they just kind of think it's it's a joke. So it's it's very social, but it might not be um social in the way that people who, you know, the folks who want to make money off of it, hope

that it is. Um There's something that we briefly touched upon that I wanted to go back to and talk to in further detail, and that was the idea that money has historically always been wrapped up in notions of the nation state, and now we're sort of seeing that disrupted. And I think you use in your book this analogy that it's sort of like new media disrupting the old media and the old media would be the state in

this particular case. And you dig into that a little bit more, and what does it actually mean for society if money starts being divorced from the covernment? Mm hmm. Yeah. So in some ways this goes back to the home setting on the electronic frontier analogy. So, UM, you know, I hear people, I've long heard people tell me that the bitcoin is like the Internet in UM. So it's this, you know, the fresh new thing that's open for you know, um,

reimagining all aspects of society. UM. And so I do think that many people who come to designing new money systems UM, specifically new currency systems, are overtly trying to like accelerate the process of the kind of decoupling of money from the nation state. I mean, if you go back and read some of the memoirs of the folks

UM involved in the early days of PayPal. Even PayPal, which was not bitcoin, you know, did not have the same kind of aspirations that bit going does was imagic as kind of a libertarian project that would allow money to move around the world very quickly, UM, that would disrupt some of the traditional state and traditional financial intermediaries, etcetera. UM, that clearly isn't exactly what it became. And even before that, UM de Hawk, who is the kind of like unsung

visionary behind Visa. So he was the CEO UM and founder of Visa. He's a really fascinating person. But in he right he wrote in the seventies that you know, money now is nothing more than alphanumeric information inscribed on a magnetic strip. And therefore, in very soon, UM, traditional governments and traditional financial institutions will no longer UM have

a monopoly on the kind of issue and movement of money. UM. So this kind of like re envisioning what society would be and kind of disrupting state issued currency has sort of been at the heart of financial innovation for a very very long time, and sometimes quite overtly, sometimes less. But then, you know, thinking back to this idea that bitcoin is the Internet, um in I think that you know, we we kind of have to follow what actually happened with the Internet. I mean, the Internet is not a

anarcho capitalist utopia or dystopia as the case maybe. You know, the Internet has primarily been carved up by platforms and corporate behemoths, and I don't think there's necessarily any reason that we would anticipate that the same wouldn't happen for the kind of issue of extra national non state currency. Um. I don't know why we're imagining. We we so often imagine a future, but I mean it's cool that they're trying. Yeah,

I mean, that's the thing. It's like, you know, there's a lot of like hand like it's you know, it's sort of the Internet. I think maybe it's because you know, I'm older, but you know, ten years ago, I thought the Internet was more fun when it wasn't just like Facebook and Twitter and Google and people had individual websites and dogs and all that stuff. And then the Internet gutless cool when those things went away. So it's cool that people are trying, right, Absolutely, I mean it's something

that's not owned by a Silicon Valley trillion dollar unicorn. Absolutely. But I think the question is why did that happen? Um?

You know what did over focusing on say I will I don't want to get too into the question of regulation, but are there ways in which the I that kind of fantasy that the Internet should be divorced from going back to again speak, Um, you know, the like meat space governments, and that the Internet was truly going to be this like heterotopia that existed in cyberspace that was like somewhere else and we should be really hands off about it. Um. Did that allow those platforms to kind

of come in and carve it up? Um? So another question, I guess, you know, another way to put that would be, having learned that lesson, how can we protect, um, the kind of future of the Internet and into the future of the kinds of you know, when it comes to money. So if we're if we're really imagining a future where money is primarily so, I actually don't think state issue currency is going anywhere, but I do think that it will probably live alongside a variety of other currency forms.

And I don't necessarily believe that those currency forms will all be you know, an archo capitalist or libertarian or or however inflected with any kind of values. Alternative money forms. I think that we have every reason to believe that they might be corporate moneys, and maybe we don't want that. You know, everybody joked a couple of years I guess it was about a year ago now, maybe more than that. UM, when Howard Schultz you know CEO, former CEO and uh

of of Starbucks. But this was some time before he launched his presidential campaign. Um was saying he does think that there will be a future of of non state money forms that are based on block chains, but he doesn't think that they will be bitcoin or cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Rather, they will be issued by a few, as he put it, kind of like trusted brands. Um that would you know, steward these money forms. And everyone kind of laughed at him.

It was like a funny little moment of like Twitter schadenfreud for like somebody said something that sounded really stupid. But if you think about it, Starbucks has probably the most ubiquitous, most still most widely used mobile payment system in the United States. Um, we you know, we've Venmo and other payment companies would have been trying for a very long time to get an app on people's phones, and really before Venmo, the only one that was on

anybody's phones was a Starbucks app. Um. They have greater geographic breadth and depth than the US Postal Service. So if we compare them to postal banking in terms of like what a branch network might look like, they're doing pretty good. They are truly global. They do have something like they're you know, loyalty points and all of that that people really do care about. When you get to talking to people about their Starbucks stars, they get, um,

really passionate about it. So I can imagine a future where many of our kind of plural currencies are issued by brands are corporate and you know, we can't stay too focused on the kind of um sci fi vision of the future and instead kind of think about what you know, various forms of utopian dystopia will look like. And historically, I say, we fight for the sci fi version. Maybe it'll happen eventually, I mean you could, but let's

not accept it. Yeah, let's not just let's not preemptively surrender. Well, you know, historically, I mean Tracy mentioned that, you know, money has we're moving away from money, as you know, being tied the nation state, but historically, and in many places in the world, more often than not, money has been quite plural. Um. So you know, of course the

free banking era. But um, you know, one of my favorite books on this is a book called City Reading by David Hankin, who's a historian, where he writes about how in before the Civil War, when people moved to New York City, they had to negotiate all different kinds of monetary media, you know, um, bank notes issued by countless different banks, but also bank notes that were issued by banks that had gone bust, counterfeits real ones, but that you know. So it's like, is your bank good?

And is like the money? Is the bank good? And is the money good? And like and is this money going to be even if it is a real bank? Is it something that someone will take in the city that I live in, Like, maybe they'll take it in Philadelphia, but they won't take it New York. Um. And And to be to be a city liver, the city dweller in um antebellum New York, you had to really know how to add a glance, like decide if you're going to take a form of money, if you could use

a form of money, um. And it was really complicated. People live very complicated monetary lives. And I think so I think that more we're going to have to learn with living in a kind of cacophonous monetary media ecosystem, And in some ways we already are. If we think about things like Starbucks cards, or you know, my Chase Sapphire reserve confers all kinds of uh um benefits upon

me um. If I use an E B T card, I can only I can't buy hot rotisserie chicken, but I can buy because that's prepared food and it is disallowed. But I can buy chick rotisserie chicken that has been taken out of the hot case and chilled, making it

no longer hot food. UM. So I am really interested in the question of, like what is monetary mass media and what happens when we move to monetary social media, which is like, you know, all of these new kinds of systems, but in many cases we're already living in a world where mass media when it comes to money is kind of a myth um, where money is really complicated for people, and we need to kind of pay

attention to that. So that Antebella, New York example reminded me of something else that I wanted to ask you, which is, if we're talking about money as a societal thing, well, societies are about inclusion, but that also means excluding some people. Right.

You can't have a group of people without sort of creating an opposite group that you compare and contrast yourself against and I can see like in New York, making the money system as complicated as possible was probably a very good way of distinguishing New Yorkers from you know, the routs who are coming in from the country or whatever. What sort of barriers are being built into new systems of money and what does that mean for the future.

There are questions of inclusion exclusion. So for example, you know, I'm kind of a soft soft war with this very expensive smoothie store UM here in my town because they refused to take cash UM. And you know, they're like, here's that lady who's coming around again, who wants to talk to us about how we're excluding poor people from our smoothies. But it's kind of true. You know, the kinds of money that we take create various kinds of inclusion exclusion. But I also like to think about the

term predatory inclusion. So you can almost always find a way to pay for something, but what are the terms of that inclusion? So if you think about um, you know, most prepaid cards have tremendous fees attached to them. Um. You know, you have a fee to every time you swipe the card. You have a fee every time you put money on it. You have a fee if you need to cancel it, you have a monthly maintenance fee, etcetera, etcetera.

So whereas someone like me with my credit score is getting paid every time I pay with my Chase aff I reserve, somebody else is actually paying you know they're they're in fact not their payment is not at all clearing up par um. So I think that we do need to look at questions of of inclusion, like can you be involved in the economy, but really like what are the terms of that include as you enter the economy? Um? And how how are they you know, how are these

systems being monetized? So before we go and we have to wrap up, I mean, obviously there are some sort of very blatant examples of money as social media. We talked about venmo very easy to understand. Our cryptocurrencies are social libra, the memo on checks are social. The old Western Union and the telegraph. What's in your book what's the most sort of surprising social money that you discovered or what's the most sort of like weird thing that

maybe people haven't heard of as much. One thing that I think is very interesting. UM is you know, everyone knows about Chase Fire Reserve, and I mean your audience probably does. And how um when it first came out,

there was some and you know, various premium cards. There's always like drama over if it increases access to premium lounges and kind of opens up space to people who might not you know, there was a complaint I think in the New York Times that was, like the premium lounges have become a zoo now that everyone with with a particular credit card can get in. But there are other cards and other loyalty systems that kind of open up access to these like previously hidden or rarefied realms.

And one of the ones that I think is really interesting are UM on their credit cards designed for owner operators of trucks, so like truckers, long haul truck drivers UM and they and like lots of loyalty geared at truck drivers who do in fact ring up quite a bit of interchange, which is what pays for the rewards, because they're on the road and spending a lot of money and swepping their cards many times UM and so rather than there being these kind of like premium airport lounges.

There are premium truck stop gas areas, so if you are a have status as a truck driver, you can enter certain areas of truck stops that you or I don't even know existest that allows you to get gas kind of more quickly. Yeah, get access to showers, that sort of thing. Yeah, I know, I really want one of those cards. Yeah. Well, I think the they're like the kind of gas pumps that are geared for like, you know, semi trucks. So I don't think that even

like work with with normal cars. Um, So they're definitely not geared for us. And I don't think you want to take a shower at a truck stop, um, although you might if we're all driving now that we're not

flying as much anymore, because I show um. And of course, because these are business cards, um, because these folks are owner operators, they're not as um, they're not, they don't face they're not as regulated as heavily as consumer cards, so they they do have perhaps higher credit lines than someone might qualify for as an individual, they're higher interest rates. They can be kind of part of this kind of predatory inclusion if people aren't very careful about how they

manage them. But I did you know, I write about an account of a trucker who talks about, you know, the kind of loyalty rewards from these trucker cards as quote unquote like food stamps for truckers, because they allow truckers to access um a shower access and meal access, like a rest stop when they need to, even if they at the moment don't have the funds. All Right, that was awesome, Laana Sports, thanks so much for coming back on oudlock. Yeah, thank you, Thanks Launa. I really

like talking to Lana. I find this like an endlessly fascinating subject. I love them. I love the reference to Benedict Anderson. I don't know if you've ever read that book, but this idea of like print forming the sort of conception of like community and nationhood and then thinking about what like post print culture and post print money looks like it's just sort of a super fascinating thing with what I think is probably a lot of implication, many

significant implications to that. Yeah, I think the idea of money being sort of wrapped up in communication, which means that it's inevitably wrapped up in communication technology, and it sort of changes along with those new technologies as they're developed.

I think that makes a lot of sense. I also really liked her idea of the price of financial inclusion, because I think we do think a lot about people just being locked out of new payment systems, or even people who aren't able to get bank accounts and things like that, and we don't often think about the flip side of that, which is, you know, when they are included, what are the terms of that inclusion, And once they're sort of embedded in a particular payment system because of

the data aspects that we were talking about, does that mean that they're locked into it basically forever? Like are you always going to be tagged as a person who has this particular credit score or a person who lives in a particular way, And you know, therefore, for the rest of eternity you're going to be getting advertisements for Dutch ovens to your example. But you know, if you're a poor person, maybe for the rest of your life, you're going to be getting pushed loans and financial products

with a higher interest rate than you would otherwise. Yeah, And I thought the question that you asked was I had never thought about her answer before about why our system is so clunky when it comes to two way money, and so why is it, you know, and this idea that there is like at one point it was like the sort of like fundamental difference between a merchant and in a buyer and a purchaser, and that they have different need and that different types of merchants run different

levels of chargeback risks. So presumably there are things there there merchants for whom are always dealing with customers trying to scam them and trying to get their money back, and others for whom not so much, And that that sort of like gradation of risk is a very sort

of like alien concept to the individual. I thought that was super interesting and then sort of like helps to like sort of re contextualize all these different average by like social media companies who like knows so much about us to turn us all into both payers and recipients of money. Yeah, And I guess the big question is whether or not individuals do you start getting risk profiles in that sense sort of like that you know that Black Mirror episode where everything is determined by like your

Instagram profile? Do you remember that? Oh? I don't think I ever watched that. You know what, can I just say I saw the first episode of Black Mirror and I got too freaked out by it, and I've never watched them Alright, this one would freak you out because

this one I could see actually happening. Um. But this idea that maybe like your social media profile or your online profile is eventually going to feed in how you are perceived as a financial risk or financial credit, I think, I mean, I think to some extent we're already on the way to that. Yeah. Well, and also reason the question, I don't know, like if you ever read a stuff J. W. Mason, he's like an economist at John J Here in the City.

He makes this really interesting point in some of his writing, which is that like our bank account, in this weird way, like if you like look at your bank account, you have x amount of money in some sort of like abstract sense, it's supposed to be some representation of all of your historical decisions, right. It's it's this sort of number that represents every purchase and every income you've made,

one minus the other. And so in a way like money is all is on some level, this sort of like measure of our past selves and then thinking about it in terms of like explicitly measuring our social media or monitoring our social media is almost like making been more explicit what money is attempted to do. I don't know if that makes any sense, but no, it does. Money is a source of identity. Yeah, yeah, it's it's a it's a great subject and even um, there's a

reason we always like to talk about it. Yeah, there definitely is. I'm definitely going to read Lana's book now, which is also an audiobook, so maybe I'll be listening to it. Okay, should we leave it there? All right, let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the ad Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Why Isn't Though? You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart, And you should follow our guest on Twitter, Lana Swartz.

She's at Lana, Lana and Chug out her new book New Money, How Money Became Social Media, and be sure to follow our producer Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levi at Francesca Today and check out all of our podcasts under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening to