It's great to welcome Finn Brunton to the program today who is an associate
in media culture and Communication New York University. Uh, so great to talk to you fed.
Thank you so much for having me, David.
So I want to eventually talk about some of the different sort of money related movements
that are going on right now. You have some countries increasingly going cashless. You
have crypto currency and all a of the that that movement entails. But to go back a little
bit, um, there may be a lot of people in our audience who don't know sort of the history
of nonphysical cash payments. When I think about that, I first think of sort of like
credit that was kept on a ledger was the first form of like a non cash payment. But how,
how should we sort of conceive of that?
That's a really good way of looking at it actually. Um, we tend to think about money
as something like cash, but if you want to actually go back into the history of it, most
of money for all of human history has been debt and credit that's been recorded on ledgers,
on tablets, on pirates. That's been circulated in a lot of different ways and indeed a lot
of the money that exists now, even though, again, if I were to, you know, Google money,
the image that would come up would be a pile of cash is actually again, ledgers, systems
of credit and debt, just that they're electronic now.
Yeah. So I guess when did that transition start to happen? So certainly like a paper
ledger at the blacksmith shop is not digital cash in the sense that we now sort of think
about it, but the idea of money being ones and Zeros in a bank account, credit cards
and other forms of digital cash, how far back does that go?
That goes back quite a ways actually like a really surprising length of time. We tend
to think about these things as being very recent. You know we talked about cryptocurrencies
as though they like fell out of the cargo bay of a UFO like all at once, you know, a
decade ago. But the history of electronic money, like banks have been on this for decades
and decades and decades, right? Like they want to have settlement systems that can work
fast, that are reliable. They already had most of their sense of what money is in the
form of writing something down in one document and transferring it to another document. So
we can see mechanisms ranging from like a interbank settlement to cashing checks. A
lot of these things have been electronic for a long time, but it was only in the 1970s
that people began to realize that this kind of money, electronic money, digital money
ones and Zeros, as you say, is going to be everybody's money soon. And that that was
a major social problem.
So now I think that there's the idea that many hold that cryptocurrency in its current
form is completely unique as a phenomenon. And in a sense, I mean bitcoin is a relatively
new thing specifically, but some of the precedent for bitcoin like mechanisms due date back
to the 70s as you're talking about, don't they?
Yes. Oh yeah, absolutely. Partially because people, well, maybe a good way to put this
is that when we talk about a technology like Bitcoin, we're actually talking about something
that has a couple of different agendas that it's trying to serve. And when we look at
where digital cash stuff came from, we basically see those different agendas at work. So the
earliest forms of the underlying technologies that eventually fed into bitcoin were digital
cash projects that were just designed to protect privacy. They weren't designed to like create
a new form of money. They weren't designed to, uh, necessarily let you do all of the,
you know, groovy new crypto currency stuff people do now. Instead it was just a way to
say, I want to exchange money with you. I want to buy something from you. I want to
receive a gift from you that will function like cash so that it will create no record
of the transaction between us. It will not need to know anything about our identities.
It will not enable any form of surveillance or control to happen for that transaction.
And so that's what we first see as the idea of digital cash should be a mechanism for
protecting privacy.
When I look at the sort of genesis of the earlier forms of digital cash and also more
recently the cryptocurrency movement, it seems that there may be, this is a little bit too
simplistic, but there are sort of two political ideologies that seem to be particularly interested.
There's the sort of libertarian side which is about removing the government as an intermediary,
privacy, uh, direct transactions rather than, than intermediate, intermediate transactions.
And sort of like when you look at Peter Teal who was involved with paypal, who talked about,
well maybe paypal could even actually develop a currency that is free from government in
one sense. That's the libertarian side. I also see an, I'm curious whether you agree,
uh, there's the sort of like techno Utopian side, which is just about aside from government
and privacy and all of these other elements. There's the technology is just going to make
everything better. Side question one is do you agree that those are sort of the two political
wings that seem most interested? Number two, are there others and is there overlap between
those two?
Those are excellent questions. Yeah, I think, I think the, um, I think the answer to both
is yes. Um, with question one, obviously one of the most kind of complicated legacies of
the way the digital cash came to be, that still shapes a lot of aspects of how bitcoin
works. A lot of those technology decisions and a lot of the kind of culture that still
takes place in the cryptocurrency space was this interweaving of the libertarian side.
And as you say, like the techno Utopian side. Um, and the libertarian side has its own very
specific way of looking at digital cash, which is a view of the world, which is deeply suspicious
of the notion that the government should have the right to mint money. Um, and that therefore
we need alternative currencies that can, uh, be as robust and reliable as something issued
by a central bank.
Like with that same level of like, I trust that when I received this, I know what it
is. I can verify that it's real, but with additional elements that are really important
to libertarian ideology, like the idea that the currency should function in a way that's
more like a precious metal, you know, it should, it should be issued in ways that become steadily
more difficult rather than mild inflation to boost the economy. But there's also the
techno Utopian side, which is, you know, is often kind of overlaps with libertarianism,
but which has in some ways a deeper attitude, which is what if we could, by changing the
way that money works, what if we could unlock extraordinary new levels of innovation? If
we could change how markets work, if we could change how the circulation of assets works,
what if that could be a spur to a whole new level of investment and invention and transformation
and new businesses and new ideas.
And as you say, like technology plus money would equal better, you know, produce the
kind of world of breakthroughs that we might be hoping for. So those two are still by far
the, the kind of most significant legacies that shaped cryptocurrency. However, there
have always been lots of other interested parties who might want to figure out how these
things work and they're more and more coming to the fore and starting to shape some of
the future of these technologies. So in particular, we can look at the way that a lot of marginalized
groups are very poorly served by the current money system. Whether we look at people who
are undocumented and have to live outside of the normal banking apparatus. If we look
at people who are in poverty, really get people who are on food stamps, like accessing and
interacting with cash is very expensive.
But it's also extraordinarily difficult unless you're a person above a certain social stratum
to get any kind of access to credit or any kind of access to normal banking systems that
are alternatives for that just as their systems that could be alternatives to the incredibly
predatory system for sending remittances for workers who are working overseas. Those things
are life changing opportunities and they have nothing to do with that kind of libertarian,
excuse me. Then kind of libertarian techno Utopian legacy. So being able to see how those
groups are starting to move in. I think that shows us part of where cryptocurrency is going.
Yeah, I mean I think w w you're pointing out is interesting, which is that on the one hand,
uh, there are lots of currently underserved populations by the system that we have. At
the same time, when you're talking about technology that requires some kind of physical hardware
and also sort of like a wherewithal in terms of what your, your awarenesses you. I also
have concerns that going cashless, at least in the current way that it's happening in
many countries is also not particularly good for some of those underserved populations.
So I guess the question is how to implement something like that, a move away from cash
that will not particularly hamper those underserved populations that we're sort of trying to help
at least in some circles.
Oh yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's a really good way of looking at it too, which
is that there's, there's a lot of ways in which the transition into a cashless or at
least less cashed society would p could be, could be a disaster, right? Like there's,
there's a lot of different ways that that could play out. There's many. Um, if you'll
forgive me being a little hyperbolic, there's a lot of hungry wolves out there who have
been waiting for the moment when that transaction stream, right, when the data about transactions
and payments finally gets folded into all of the other surveillance data. Because the
moment you do that, you can start doing all kinds of other things which are deeply discriminatory
and predatory. You can start doing things like, you know, real time price fixing and
red lining. We already see versions of that in our ordinary lives, right?
Like you will get different prices for airline tickets based on what the airline server knows
about you based on the browser and the computer that you're using, right? If you're like trying
to buy these tickets with a browser that carries information on it, that suggests that using
a more expensive computer you have more money to work with, you're going to get a different
price. Imagine that applied more generally to every aspect of our lives. Imagine a system
where the platform has the payment platform has sweetheart deals with other companies,
which when we look at something like Libra, when we looked at something like all the various
pies that Peter Thiel has, his fingers in would not be a huge surprise. So now imagine
the payment platform has sweetheart deals with other companies and suddenly your money
is worth more or less depending on whose product you're buying. Um, you're being like steered
in different directions. This is a dystopian future and it's one that we should bear in
mind as as the the worst possible outcome that could come from the effort that we would
make to create new forms of credit and money that were meant to originally helped the disadvantaged.
So we need to think very carefully about it.
Not to defend airlines. I believe they've denied that that type of information is used
to uh, affect pricing. I believe they claim what is obvious, which is that there's a demand
based system which does fluctuate pricing based on how, how many days until the flight
and what time of day and day of the week you are looking. But I believe they have in the
same way that Amazon has denied that they are using so-called like demographic data,
but this certainly the assertion is there and you have a restated it here when it comes
to bitcoin or some of the other current cryptocurrencies specifically, do these seem like these are
going to be the longterm replacements for cash or do they seem more like intermediate
experiments and that the solution is ultimately going to be elsewhere?
That's a really question. Um, if I were to bet, and I think this is a pretty reasonable
bet, I think we're entering an era of much more diverse forms and types of money. Um,
I think we're going to see not a sort of one ring to rule them all, you know, single fixed
solution that replaces everything. Instead we're going to see a proliferation of different
kinds of vehicles, um, that can range from, well to put it in, in actually very straightforward
terms we can all relate to. We're already starting to live in that world because we're
starting to live in a world that's shaped so much by points, right? Like so many of
us are now used to the idea that we have cards or accounts that carry different kinds of
value on them, some of which can be redeemed for cash, some of which can be redeemed from
miles, some of which can be redeemed from minutes depending on what country you're in
and what circumstances you're under. So what we are already kind of surrounded by is a
much more diverse money system that we don't necessarily think of as being diverse than
just cash and credit. And that's just going to become much more. So we're going to see
a lot more specialized types of money and types of currency for different populations
and different groups. Um, so it's going to be really interesting to see how that plays
out because I suspect that we will start to understand ourselves as living in an ecosystem
of money.
All right, Finn Brunton doing an extremely good job of keeping a his cat out of the shot.
I can tell during the interview into the room, it's like the velocity raptors and the door
Ben as an associate professor of media culture and communication at New York University.
I've been really a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you so much David.