Odd Lots - How Money Became A Form Of Social Media

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

There are many similarities between cryptocurrencies and social networks. And the rise of payment apps like Venmo make the link between payments and social media explicit. But this convergence between money and social media goes back a long time. On this episode, we speak with Lana Swartz, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, about her book, New Money: How Payment Became Social Media.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to OddLots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the podcast, OddLotts on Amazon Music. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, it's time for another episode about one of our favorite topic. Money. It's got to be money. It's got to be money. It's always money. I mean, all of our, in a sense, I guess all of our episodes are money. but how could you talk about things about money if you don't even know what money is or where it comes from?

I agree that all of our episodes are money in that. What was that 1990s film use of the word money? Vince Swan and that guy. 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, I think we're going to explore 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 going to 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, 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, societies that they create. And of course, like, money is just like really interesting because obviously people 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 Venmo. It's like,

that's a new thing. That wasn't always the case. So within this thing of 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 years ago now, but we have her back. I'm very excited. We're going to be speaking with Alana Swartz. She's the professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. She's also a fellow at the Bergruen Institute, and she is the author of a recent book called New Money, How Money Became Social Media. So it'll be

interesting, a different angle than we've typically had. But, Lana, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back. You know, so like we said, 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 the content of your book about money as social media. why is it even a thing worth studying in the first place in your view? Well, I know for me, so I started my PhD program 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? or what gets to be money. And that kind of like post-2008 moment was when we saw, I would say, like really the emergence of what we now call fintech, what we now call the sharing economy, what we now call, 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 moneyness. And, at a time when people were starting to build new infrastructures to do money and do the economy

differently. And of course, my, as you mentioned, I am an assistant professor of media studies, and my background is in thinking about communication and 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, you know, what do cell phones, what do social media networks mean for any number of different social questions. And I realized that there was almost no one inside the economy, inside of academia, inside kind of this field of media studies, looking at the communication and technological infrastructures that make money happen. And they were undergoing this like kind of tremendous moment of transformation. So for me, as someone who studies technologies that move information around

and the kinds of social and cultural dimensions of those technologies, I think it's important and interesting to study money because typically when we talk about money, we talk 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 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, people immediately go to Venmo. And of course, that's true. Like Venmo... I'm such a cliche. I'm such a cliche. Immediately went there. Lots of Venmo in the book. So, and I think Venmo is really fascinating. But, you know, Fenmo is overtly designed to be social media. You know, I've one of my students mentioned, once, and I think this 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 a form of kind of media.

But if we go back and we think about, you know, the technologies of money, they have always kind of tracked alongside the money, the technologies of communication and media more broadly. So we could go back to thinking about, you know, the way coins, the way tally sticks, 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 recent, so paper currency does

many of the same things that scholars in my field talk about paper culture, print culture, more generally doing. So, you know, Benedict Anderson, who is a scholar of the printing press, talked about how the print and newspapers created an imagined community, it's his term, like the size 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 as kind of a community of shared faith. If we then, you know, think about, okay, like move forward into what, you know,

technologies of money have been. So, you know, the telegraph, you know, we think about Western Union as 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 20th, later in the 20th century, the very same computers and in some cases, some of the same engineers who built the early internet were also building the Visa MasterCard network, which is this kind of, you know, global communication system. And you can still hear in some, like, I haven't been to a bar in a really long time, but you can still hear from the back in like the back ATM of some sketchy bar like modem noises coming out of ATMs. 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 80s and 90s.

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. And then look at the systems that power that communication, whether they are tallistic, paper,

you know, 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, a recent episode turned her into a Bitcoin bull. She converted. Anyway, but it's interesting thinking about like you mentioned imagined communities and Benedict Anderson and 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 the sort of like post-nation state currency, which fits with the internet as this sort of like, you know, we don't post-newspent newspapers, post-print communities, I guess. Yeah. Ed, you know, I will say I'm not, you know, hugely bullish on crypto myself. I've been, I've written some academic articles about. 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 appeals 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. I have said,

I've written that, you know, all money is a stake. 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 a future that is, as folks talked about in the 90s, like homesteading on the electronic frontier and that you're the pioneer, then why wouldn't you kind of put your money where your mouth is, so to speak, and start thinking about what kind of monetary systems 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.

You know, you could do a wire transfer. You could do a money order, write a check. Things like Venmo or 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 it doesn't quite make sense that we haven't yet had a good way to send friends money quickly and easily. And the United States has kind of historically been behind. in a P to P payments.

And I think there's kind of a couple different answers to that, you know, in terms of the reason why, you know, one is, you know, just general lack of public investment or general lack 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. But also, I think one of the things I write about the book is that the Visa MasterCard network was developed at a time that imagined a much more kind of diatic economy. So like there were consumers, which were people, and there were merchants that were businesses. And there wasn't really a way for a person to be a merchant or and therefore a person to kind of accept payments. 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 that not everyone is like super interested in the credit card acquiring value chain. Yeah, yeah, go on. Go on. So with credit cards, 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. Let's say I have a Chase Sapphire card. So Chase is my issuer.

And then if I am a merchant, I have an acquiring bank who, you know, maybe, let's say oftentimes it's also Chase, but, you know, 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, then they will ask for a 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 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 that money from you. And if the,

which, you know, happens all the time. It's not usually that big a deal. 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 doing higher risk payments. 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 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. So there has never been a way

for people to accept payments through the Visa MasterCard network. And then, you know, the big innovation in that space was PayPal in the 90s. And of course, PayPal rides the rails not primarily of the Visa MasterCard network, but of the ACH network. So that, 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 MasterCard Network. So it, it, we never, it was built in a time, the Visa MasterCard Network was built in the time in the, you know, 1970s when we didn't have as much of a peer-to-peer economy, didn't have as much as a, you know, person-to-person, we didn't have as much of a person-to-person imagination for how

the economy would work. And I think that that has a lot to do. with our media infrastructure. That's interesting. So, I mean, the internet in many ways, like, allows us to imagine ourselves as economic actors as people. And so the internet kind of had to figure out a way to allow us to get paid and to pay. So 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 a distribution. 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. I think that like anything else coming out of the tech industry, you know, there is a data imperative. There's a data play. 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, nor are we willing to really pay to pay. So there has to be some way that like this is being monetized. 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 in the Silicon Valley sense of the term, which means that there is a, you know, social data component. 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, you know, close the loop between targeted message to actual purchase in real space and time, then you would,

you know, do something, you know, no advertiser has ever done before. I think that some of the business models have moved away to some extent from the kind of like direct advertising type of, you know, targeted advertising type of business model to thinking about things like developing new systems of risk analytics, 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 Huang's new book that basically argues that it's possible that we don't, we can't actually. get as much value out of all of these data sets as we may hope and then we may see some 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 yeah we should I was just thinking that what's the name of his book his book is called I can see it subprime 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 ovens. As if you were a Dutch oven collector. Right. If I were a Dutch oven 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, you know, almost every major social media company has tried to do payments over the last 10 years with varying degrees of success. And they've all of the, And they've all applied kind of their standard MO to 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 Venmo has a public API. It's quite easy to browse Venmo data. There's a lot of interesting art projects that kind of take it exploit this.

So one of my favorites is called public by default. And that is by an artist named Hangdu Thi Duke. And she basically downloaded all Venmo transactions from the year 2017 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 seems to spend an inordinate amount of money.

on junk food and someone who is almost definitely a weed dealer. And she kind of, yeah, and she kind of uses it to say like, you know, which I, 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 our 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 say, like, it's kind of weird

that it's people are in 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 that was basically just like every, like, pot transaction. Yeah, vicomo. On Venmo, publicized. Yeah, vice mo.

So, like, why? And 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 illegal activity that people are so comfortable doing? Yeah. I mean, I do think that the, I do think that money is fundamentally social, um, our transactions are and, and I think that for a long time, I think that people are on. uncomfortable admitting it and uncomfortable. 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 interest or we fall under the camp of being Marxist who thinks that all money reduces all the quality in the world to mere quantities. Historically, scholars have given money kind of short shrift. Like, it's insufficiently social. or that money sociality is an aberration from how it's supposed to act. And I think in everyday life we tend to think about money is something we shouldn't talk about or something that 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 or meaningful it can be. But I do think that that sociality isn't so straightforward as like these mere like, I will put a joke that makes perfect sense with the transaction that I'm doing. And what I mean by that is 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. You're fun.

Right, exactly. And so I do think that that anyone who goes to Venmo data hoping to find some truth 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 kind of social network, the kind of social graph in aggregate. So it doesn't really matter what I'm saying to you. it's more so that we can kind of trace the transactions of the kind of flow of money. So, yeah, I mean, I do 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 has really figured out quite yet how 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 advertising, a site of advertising more recently. So there's like an ad on the VMO site as of a couple 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 advertising copy is, you know, put your brand at the center of real authentic conversations before. between friends. And when the young people that I interview or my students at University of Virginia look at this, they just kind of think it's a joke. So it's very social, but it might not be

social in the way that people who, you know, the folks who want to make money off of it, hope that it is. There is 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. Can you dig into that a little bit more? And what does it actually mean for society if money starts being divorced from the government? Yeah. So in some ways, this goes back to the like homesteading on the electronic frontier.

analogy. So, you know, I hear people, I've long heard people tell me that the Bitcoin is like the internet in 1995. So it's this, you know, the fresh new thing that's open for, you know, reimagining all aspects of society. And so I do think that many people who come to designing new money systems, 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 involved in the early days of PayPal, even PayPal, which was not Bitcoin, you know, did not have the same kind of aspirations that Bitcoin does, was imagined this kind of a libertarian project that would allow money to move around the world very quickly,

that would disrupt some of the traditional state and traditional financial intermediaries, etc. That clearly isn't exactly what it became. And even before that, D. Hoc, who is the kind of unsung visionary behind Visa, so he was the CEO and founder of Visa. He's a really fascinating person. But he wrote in the 70s that money now is nothing more than alphanumeric information inscribed on a magnetic strip. And therefore, in very soon, traditional governments and traditional financial institutions will no longer have a monopoly on the kind of issue and movement of money. 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 so. But then, you know, thinking back to this idea that Bitcoin is the internet in 1995, I think that, you know, 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 may be. 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 extraterational non-state currency. I don't know why we're imagining. We so often imagine a future.

But yeah. Go for it. 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, that's sort of the internet, I think maybe just because, you know, I'm older,

but, you know, 10 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 blogs and all that stuff. And then the internet got less cool

when those things went away. So it's cool that people are trying, right? Absolutely. To build something that's not owned by a Silicon Valley trillion dollar unicorn. Absolutely. But I think the question is why did that happen? You know, what did over-focusing on, say, I don't want to get too into the question of regulation, but are there ways in which the kind of fantasy that the Internet should be divorced from going back to again like 1995 speak, 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. Did that allow those platforms to kind of come in and carve it up? So another question, I guess, you know, another way to put that would be having learned that lesson, how can we protect the kind of future of the internet and 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-issued 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,

anarcho-capitalist or libertarian 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 monies, 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, when Howard Schultz, you know, former CEO of Starbucks, but this was sometime before he launched his presidential campaign, was saying he does think that there will be a future of non-state money forms that are based on blockchains, 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 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, Schadenfreude 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. We, you know, we've, Venmo and other payment companies 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. They have greater geographic breadth and depth than the U.S. 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 their, you know,

loyalty points and all that that people really do care about when you get to talking to people about their Starbucks stars. They get 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 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 cyber. five version. Let's not give in to Starbucks. Maybe it'll happen eventually. Like, I mean, it could, but let's not accept it. I, 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, emerging, being tied to the nation state. But historically, and in many places in the world, more often than not, money has been quite plural. So, you know, of course, the free banking era, but, you know, one of my favorite book, on this is a book called City Reading by David Henkin, 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, banknotes issued by countless different banks, but also banknotes 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 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 in New York. And to be a city liver, a city dweller in Anteum, New York, you had to really know how to, at a glance, like, decide if you're going to take a form of money, if you could use a form of money. And it was really complicated. People lived 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 benefits upon me.

If I use an EBT card, I can only, I can't buy hot rotissory chicken, but I can buy because that's prepared food and is disallowed. but I can buy rotissory chicken that has been taken out of the hot case and chilled, making it no longer hot food. 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, where money is really complicated for people.

And we need to kind of pay attention to that. So that antebellum 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 groups 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 here in my town because they refuse to take cash. 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 and 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, you know, most prepaid cards have tremendous fees attached to them. 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, et cetera, et cetera. So whereas someone like me with my credit score is getting like paid every time I pay with my Chase FI Reserve, somebody else is actually paying, you know, they're in fact not, their payment is not at all clearing at par. So I think that we do need to look at questions of inclusion. Like can you be involved in the economy? But really like what are the terms of that inclusion as you enter the economy? And how are they, you know, how are they, you know, How are these systems being monetized? So before we go, 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 how 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 is, you know, everyone knows about Chase Sapphire Reserve and I mean, your audience probably does and how 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 a 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 on their credit cards designed for owner operators of trucks. So like truckers, long haul truck drivers. 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 reward. because they're on the road and spending a lot of money and swiping their cards many times. 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 exist 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 cars. Yeah. Well, I think they're like the kind of gas pumps that are geared for like, you know, semi-trucks. So I don't think that would even like work with normal cars. So they're definitely not geared for us. And I don't think you want to take a shower at a truck stop. Although you might if we're all driving now that we're not flying as much anymore because of COVID. Once COVID's over, I'll take a shower. Yeah. And of course, because these are business cards, because these are business cards, because these folks are owner operators, they're not as, they're not, they don't, 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. Their 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 a shower, access a 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. Lana Schwartz, thanks so much for coming back on Abla. Yeah, thank you.

Thanks, Lana. I really like talking to Lana. I find this like an endlessly fascinating subject. I love the reference to Benedict Anderson. I don't know if you've ever read that, 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 is just sort of a super fascinating thing with what I think is probably a lot of implicate 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, 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 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 there was

like this sort of like fundamental difference between a merchant and a buyer and a purchaser and that they had different needs and that different types of merchants run different levels of chargeback risk. So presumably there are things, they're merchants for whom they're 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 recontextualize all these different efforts by like social media companies who like know 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 start getting risk profiles in that sense. Sort of like that, you know, that Black Mirror episode where everything's determined by like your Instagram profile. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. I don't think I ever saw that on. 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 never watched none of the one. All right, this one would freak you out because this one I could see actually happening. 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 a financial credit. I mean, I think to some extent we're already on the way to that. Yeah.

Well, and also raises the question. I don't know like if you ever read this stuff, J.W. Mason, he's like an economist at John Jay here in the city. He makes like this really interesting point in some of the. 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 even 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 a great subject. And even 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 audio book, so maybe I'll be listening to it. Okay, shall we leave it there? All right, let's leave it there.

This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Wisenthal. 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 check out her new book, New Money, How Money Became Social Media.

And be sure to follow our producer, Laura Carlson. Laura M. Carlson. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast Francesca Levy at Francesca Today, and check out all of our podcasts under the handle at Podcasts. Thanks for listening.