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Money after Money: disassembling Value/Information Infrastructures

This book is a journey through coexisting, emerging or speculated about, types of digital value transfer infrastructures. Using digital value transfer infrastructures as a central case study, this thesis is concerned with unpacking the negotiation processes that shape the governance, design and political purposes of digital infrastructures that are closely linked to the public interest and state sovereignty. In particular, the papers that are assembled in this manuscript identify and inspect three main socio-technical developments occurring in the domain of value transfer technologies: a) the privatization and platformization of digital payment infrastructures; b) the spread of blockchain-based digital value transfer infrastructures; c) the construction of digital value transfer infrastructures as public utilities, from the part of public institutions or organizations. Concerned with the relationship between law, discourse and technological development, the thesis explores four transversal issues that strike differences and peculiarities of these three scenarios: i) privacy; ii) the synergy and mutual influence of legal change and technological development in the construction of digital infrastructures; iii) the role of socio-technical imaginaries in policy-making concerned with digital infrastructures; iv) the geography and scale of digital infrastructures. The analyses lead to the argument that, in the co-development of legal systems and digital infrastructures that are core to public life, conflicts are productive. Negotiations, ruptures and exceptions are constitutive of the unending process of mutual reinforcement, and mutual containment, in which a plurality of agencies – expressed through legal institutions, symbolic systems, as well as information and media structures – are entangled.

MoneyLab reader 2

MoneyLab is a network of artists, activists, and geeks experimenting with forms of financial democratization. Entering the 10th year of the global financial crisis, it still remains a difficult yet crucial task to distinguish old wine from its fancy new bottles. The MoneyLab network questions persistent beliefs, from Calvinist austerity, growth, and up-scaling, to trustless, automated decision making and (anarcho-)capitalist dreams of cybercurrencies and blockchained solutionism.We consider experiments with digital coops, internet-based payment and network-based revenue models as spaces of political imagination, with an equally important aesthetic program. In this second MoneyLab Reader the network delves into topics like the financialization of art; love as a binary proposition on the blockchain; the crowdfunding of livelihood; the cashless society; financial surveillance of the poor; universal basic income as the real McCoy or a real sham; the cooperative answer to Airbnb and Uber; the history of your financial dashboard; and, Hollywood’s narration of the financial crisis. Fintech rushes through our veins, causing a whirlwind of critical concepts, ideas and imaginaries. Welcome to the eye of the storm.

Social payment, betalen na afloop voor de reiswereld? Recap online betaalcongres (online article)

Outreach work for threatened eviction

This book, ‘Outreach work and imminent eviction: RAAK research’, is a report of the results obtained from the examination of these innovations. The first chapter contains a description of the pilot projects, which brought together care workers from the Blankenberg Foundation and Dynamo for early intervention aimed at preventing threatened evictions. In these interventions, they tried to stay a step ahead of a crisis by getting involved early on the basis of information housing corporations had about their residents’ payment problems. Chapter 2 is a report of a later investigation of the long-term effects of these interventions. The third chapter describes the pilot projects developed by Dynamo and PuurZuid, which made use of the expertise available in the general public, specifically the network of family, friends and neighbours surrounding people with rent payment debts. The expectation was that care workers would be able to provide more effective help using the decisionmaking model of the Family Group Conference. Additionally, the Family Group Conference would add to the strength of the client perspective, offering scope for a range of definitions for problems and their solutions. Chapter 4 describes knowledge and methodology aspects of innovation research such as were involved in this project, specifically, the new knowledge of innovation processes and outreach work that this research has brought to light. The project has also helped to define the De Karthuizer centre’s core activity more precisely, describing how it can provide support and solidarity for developments in the field that will lead to innovation that will transcend the boundaries between social work institutions. Finally, Chapter 5 will address the lessons we have learned during the course of the project.

Distributed Ledger Technology and the Future of Money and Banking

Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf outlined an alternative to the current monetary system in which banks are replaced by a peer-to-peer system to issue and transfer digital money: the Bitcoin. While Bitcoin has attracted a substantial investment volume, the system has not achieved the status of a viable alternative monetary system. However, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) underlying the payment system is being applied successfully by financial institutions and is likely to have important implications for the future of money and banking. In this paper we therefore focus on the most advanced distributed ledger application in the financial industry: R3 Corda. This paper is structured as follows. In the first section, we relate the debate about systems of money creation to the rise of Bitcoin. Next, the development of R3 Corda is discussed and the lessons learned for monetary reform. We conclude with an assessment of the scope and likelihood of monetary reform as a consequence of DLT applications by central banks.

Alternatives for the unbanked