The Vergecast - How money and payments have become social media

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to Lana Swartz, assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia about her new book New Money: How Payment Became Social Media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey everybody, it's now on from the Burchcast. Really fun interview show today, really eye-opening. I talked to Lana Swartz, who's a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.

She's got a new book out called New Money, How Payment Became Social Media. It's a book about the history and future of money and how it has always been and now has definitely become a communications medium that acts a lot like social media. So we talked about the history of money, how Western Union used to be a transportation company that's now synonymous with payments. We talked about Bitcoin, of course. We talked about what Apple and Facebook are doing. Facebook failed with Libra. We talked a lot about the underlying systems of money, the networks that move our money around, the ones that we know about, that we talk about a lot like Bitcoin and the ones that we don't see at all, like ACH,

which is how you get money in and out of systems like PayPal. Lana is just an incredible person to talk to. She's so deep on this stuff. So funny, so thoughtful. I really enjoyed this conversation. Check it out. Lana Swartz. She's the author of New Money. how payment became social media. Lana Swartz, you're a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, the author of a new book called New Money, How Payment Became Social Media. Welcome to the Vergecast. Thank you for having me.

It's great to have you. I got a chance to read through the book. It is super interesting. I want to start right with a claim in the title. You've written a book about money. We've got to talk about Bitcoin. We've got to talk about Libra. We've got to talk about all this stuff.

But how payment became social media is a really interesting place to start. Just explain what you mean by that. Yeah, so I'm a professor of media studies, and that's something that, you know, sometimes surprises people when they find out I study fintech, I study money. But I really came to money through the lens of thinking about media. And, you know, I was doing my PhD in the middle of the kind of financial crisis, and it seemed like everybody, you know, the last financial crisis. And it seems like everybody was rethinking money and what money could be and what money could do and, you know, rethinking the economy. And some of those things we see today, you know, some of the money technologies we see today kind of directly grew out of that moment, like Bitcoin, like Venmo, like what we used to call the sharing

economy and we now call the gig economy. And so it was this like time when everybody was rethinking money, including myself. And I brought to it this idea of, you know, I was thinking about media. And I was like, you know what? In many ways, money is a media form. If we look at the technologies of money, they map perfectly alongside the technologies of communication and media. So if we think about paper money, that does many of the same things. Historians talk about print currency as doing. It creates this kind of nation state as a vector of identity. It's covered with iconography and that tells particular kinds of histories and projects particular kinds of futures. So, you know, it's one of the most ubiquitous forms of print media that we come in contact with

even today when there's a coin shortage. And then, you know, it moves to the telegraph, which we think about, you know, Western Union, primarily as a money technology, but certainly started its life as a communication technology. You know, we think about how the very same kinds of computers that were used to build the early internet were also used to build the Visa MasterCard network in the 70s. And even, you know, I'm not that old. I'm like an elder millennial, but even I can remember a time. when I was shopping and they couldn't process my card because someone was on the phone, not I guess

my mom's card, because someone's on the phone. And the card had to go through a dial-up modem. And then, you know, so many new money technologies today are mobile, are, you know, internet-driven. So, you know, every step of the way we think about how money and media really kind of track alongside each other. And so I thought, you know, what would it look like to rethink money as a media technology? And what would it look like to rethink all the changes that are happening with money in the, you know, last financial crisis and its aftermath through the lens of media studies? So, you know, other people in my field think about things like, what are the politics of Facebook? What are the implications of media change and, let's say, you know, fake news or whatever, for

everything in our life? And so what would happen if I brought that same lens to look at the history of money and the future of money and we can kind of rediscover a whole new kind of communicative politics that people don't usually think about when they think about money? When they think about the politics of money, they tend to think about who has it, who doesn't, which is really important. But I also want to think about, you know, who makes the media and communication systems

that make up our money and what are the implications of the decisions they make. And then in terms of social media, you know, clearly in the last 10 years, Silicon Valley has turned its attention to doing money. There's Bitcoin, of course, but there's also Venmo. Nearly every major social media platform has tried mostly unsuccessfully to do money.

And increasingly, you know, financial technologies and banks are trying to look more like social media. So I'm trying to really understand those changes in the book. That's super interesting. That is right in the strike zone for the Vergecast. I'm very excited to talk about all that stuff. But the title is focused on payment, on the transactions between people, between people and corporations. What is it about payment specifically? Why call that out there?

Yeah. So as a media study scholar, I'm, you know, just really interested in what the politics that money takes on when we look at it kind of in its payment form. So, you know, traditionally economists and like the old, like early 20th century economic textbooks would say money's functions are a matter of for a medium, a measure, a standard, a store. So, you know, it's a I could break all those down. But it's really the first one I'm interested in, which is a media, a medium of exchange. and, you know, money, we don't just use money as a mean of exchange magically. It has to be made by someone, whether that's cash and the federal government or whether that's Venmo and Silicon Valley. So when we look at how payment happens, that's where I think kind of some of the unexamined politics and meaning and culture kind of lies.

And then, you know, payments is a huge industry. It's something we all use every day, many, many, many times a day. and we don't even notice unless, of course, you know, something goes wrong, something is broken. You know, I've read accounts that industry measurements that say that, you know, the payments industry generates more revenue than global Hollywood, more revenue than the pharmaceutical industry. It's sometimes thought of as, or historically has been thought of, is kind of a backwater in banking where like kind of all the flash and exciting things happen on Wall Street trading floors and payment is kind of this like consumer and commercial services wing.

but it's really the place where we're seeing all the innovation and where Silicon Valley has, you know, found, you know, the most interest. So this vast infrastructure, this vast information and communication infrastructure, we all use every day that's super important that can mean life or death. You know, if we can't access our money, that's basically the same thing as not having it. And yet it's largely unexamined. And something, you know, people, when I talk to people about it, they're like, oh, wow, yeah, I never even noticed it was that. there. Something I learned from reading the book, which I had never considered before, is that the ACH network is run by the government and is, like, heavily subsidized. And that idea that there's some sort of big standard network that everyone relies on that enables businesses. I mean,

that's just like a core idea that we talk about all the time. What is ACH? Why is it central? Why does the government run it? How much do they subsidize it? What is going on there? I'm so glad you brought up the ACH. So few people even know the ACH existed. And it's kind of one my, you know, favorite little unsung heroes of the payment system. So basically, the ACH is a system partially subsidized by the Federal Reserve, partially administered by the Federal Reserve, and largely administered as a utility, so not really a profit center by a bunch of member banks. And what it does is that it allows very, very inexpensive settlement and clearance of checks and electronic checks. So most of our payroll goes through the ACH.

Of course, checks do as well. And actually, many of today's kind of fintechs, starting with PayPal, use the ACH in order to do all their underlying settlement and clearance. So yes, maybe if I send you something, if I send you a PayPal payment, it will be taken for my PayPal account and added to your PayPal account right away. So like inside the loop of payment. But if you or I want to put money in to the PayPal account or take money out of the PayPal account, you would do so using the ACH. And if you want to use something else like a credit card or whatever, then there's usually a fee associated with that from PayPal. So PayPal kind of simulates an almost all other similar purse-to-person payment systems simulate a same-day ACH because ACH is slow, clunky, cheap. and kind of we never see it.

But the ACH has a super interesting history. So most people don't realize, but it was once quite onerous to cash checks or for banks to kind of like figure out, like take money out of my check account, put money in your check and account, because checks had to be physically transported, right? So thinking about the kind of like communicative elements

of paper media, you know, a bank physically had to take a check and bring it to the check. on which it, to the bank upon which it was drawn. And so, and they, they didn't have like, you know, dozens of, like, lift drivers or tax rabbits or whatever to, like, move those checks around, like, multiple times, hundreds of times a day. And instead, they tended to move between networks of correspondent banks, which meant, like, there's this classic story of a bank, of a check that was drawn from a bank in Sag Harbor and deposited on Long Island and deposited

at a bank in New Jersey, but because there weren't many in common correspondent banks between those two banks. It had to travel all the way down the East Coast and back up again along this kind of network of correspondent banks before it finally arrived back in New Jersey. And so that was like very costly, very onerous, took a very long time. Banks had to kind of take a risk on whether or not they wanted to cash checks. And so they very often sought to charge customers in order to be able to cash checks. And one of the things that the federal government did in the early 20th century is it said, you know, we think that we should take on the cost of having an economy, basically,

take on the cost of the right, like provide a public infrastructure with which to do business. On the one hand, of course, that's pay per currency. But on the other hand, it was this forming of a network that said, all right, all right, all checks are going to clear at par, we're not going to allow banks to charge money on every single check that's cashed. And instead, we, the federal government, the Federal Reserve, are going to absorb part of the cost of, or a large amount of the cost of that settlement and clearance of those kind of correspondent banking relationships and centralize it rather than expect that it travels along this, like, very circuitous bank-to-bank route. And then in the 70s, that network was

informationalized, you know, was basically computerized and became the ACH. And people don't really realize it, but one of the main functions of the Federal Reserve is to maintain and facilitate a kind of healthy functioning payment system with the ACH and with some of these kind of centralized clearinghouse systems at its core, kind of in cooperation with the banks. So whenever I, you know, I travel in some weird circles when I, you know, doing, research on money. And whenever I hear people talking about and the Fed, I'm like, but don't you know, the Federal Reserve provides an important public utility that allows us to have a functioning payment system and serves as the backbone to every aspect of our economy. So, yeah, ACH. Fascinating

history. The reason I want to ask, like, first of all, an undercover network that enables a range of startups, I mean, that's what we do here. So that to me is really interesting. But it provides a pretty fascinating contrast to what I think of is the private networks and the sort of quasi private networks like Bitcoin. So the next thing I want to ask about in terms of just networks we don't think about, like, you know, I see the Visa MasterCard logo everywhere. And you've got this anecdote here that the founder of Visa, D. Hawk, his sort of initial rhetoric about what Visa could become sounded exactly like Bitcoin because he was building a privatized currency transfer function. What was the idea there? How did it grow? And what stopped that from happening? Yeah. So,

D. Hawk is one of the most fascinating kind of unsung tech figures of the 20th century. He was a bank manager in Northern California, like above the Bay Area, you know, kind of backwater of Bank of America in the 70s. It's amazing, by the way, to think that Bank of America was a backwater bank in the 70s. Yeah. So Bank of America at the time. So, you know, before banking deregulation, banks couldn't have branches across the U.S. And Bank of America was a California regional bank founded, as I've heard it explained, founded mostly by Italian immigrants. And it was called Bank of America as opposed to Bank of Italy. So it was absolutely a regional bank, just like dozens of others that have all kind of consolidated and gone away. But even within that, he was

kind of a backwater branch of Bank of America. And he had a vision for a payment system. that would enable, so lots of banks were trying to do bank cards, basically trying to allow people to pay with cards. But again, there was a really hard time, a really big challenge related to communication, right? So banks communicating with each other. How is a merchant able to accept a card payment from a customer if they don't share a kind of shared third party bank? So Hawks' kind of vision for the Visa Network, which later became the Visa MasterCard Network, was to create a system of standardized messages, kind of an information network that would allow the banks to send standardized messages to each other rapidly over a basically

modem network. So, you know, quickly send a message that says, hey, I'm pinging your bank. Is the money in there? And then my bank would, you know, respond, yes, the money is there. Okay, let's authorize it. So that's kind of the first stream of messages. And then on the back end, the second stream of messages would say, okay, now let's take the money from one account, put it through the network, and apply it to another account that is part of a different bank entirely. So figuring out a way to allow banks to communicate with each other, even though they have no shared relationship.

So this, you know, people in the banking industry call this like co-opetition because it's a form of cooperation in order to compete. And Hawk is a super interesting figure because he had this vision he writes about in his own biographies or rather memoirs, which I highly recommend. He's written two memoirs that are just absolutely fascinating. He's a very, very quirky and brilliant in some ways person. But he says, he writes things like, now that we know that money is nothing more than standardized messages to say, pay or not pay, you know, settle up or don't settle up. And those messages can be encoded as alphanumeric characters and sent via electromagnetic signals. So he's like very enamored of the technology of the time.

Now that we know this, suddenly we are enlightened, right? Suddenly we can see that money is nothing more than information socially guaranteed to be valuable. And then the infrastructure is used to, you know, arrange and transmit and share it. that information. So now, he says, banks and traditional governments, traditional banks and traditional governments no longer have a monopoly on the production and maintenance of money. That's some straight Satoshi shit right there, right? Oh, absolutely. Except crucially, you know, Hawks' book is called, you know, his memoir is called The Chaotic Age and Chaotic, I know, you have to read it. Everybody has to read it. He's so fascinating. For him, Visa,

and this kind of revolution about money has the potential to usher in what he calls the chaotic age, which is a portmanteau of chaos and order, where everything is kind of chaotic and we have gotten rid of hierarchy, but at the same time, we are committing ourselves to order. We are deciding to govern ourselves via a set of kind of chaotic agreements. So it's kind of like Bitcoin, but Hock was not, is not. He's like 94 and living on the

Huget Sound and like, and he's like this sage that sometimes people from startups come or from Bitcoin come and talk to him and try to, you know, get his input. But, and we have to keep him safe from the coronavirus. So don't go visit him. But anyway, you know, he wasn't antagonistic to order. He wasn't an anarchist or an anarcho-libertarian. You know, he really, he saw this as the potential for humans to commit themselves to cooperation in order to free ourselves from hierarchy. So he's a fascinating figure. I honestly could write a whole book just about D.Hawk. And actually, towards that end, I would also strongly recommend one of my good colleagues, Dave Stearns' book, which has a very boring name and is very fascinating books. It's

called like something like Visa, the origins of electronic payment. And it's just kind of like a straight history of the early days of Visa. Very detailed, really fascinating. And one of the things he really chronicles, which I summarize and cite in the book, are the kind of early battles Hawk had with the banks. So Visa at various points in its life has had different kinds of like formations. Like at some point, it's been a nonprofit that's largely just owned by its member banks. And at some points it's been its own corporation with its own, you know, profit generating motive, et cetera. And at different points, the banks that were the members of Visa had lots of power. So it was kind of like decentralized power.

And then at other points, Visa kind of centralized its own power and set rules for those member banks. So there's like fascinating political struggles that have gone back and forth. It's kind of like Game of Thrones, but very boring. And one of the earliest fights that Hawk had was that Hawk wanted anything. not just money defined as either kind of debit card or money in the form of debt via credit cards to be able to be transferred via the Visa Network. He had a vision for a variety of different kinds of financial instruments, including kind of

like store loyalty, but also kind of other kinds of financial instruments to be able to be used to pay for things and to be traveled over the network. So for Hawk, anything that can be manipulated. via standardized messages can be money. And it was the banks, the member banks, who fought for money's definition, you know, in terms of what could be sent over the Visa network, to be much more strictly defined.

So had those kinds of political skirmishes gone differently in the 70s, we could potentially have a very different everyday monetary ecosystem where all kinds of things are sent over the card networks and are authorized kind of with a swipe or a tap or a whatever button push. A double click on the side? Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that's super interesting because you think about, you have a long section about the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, which is its own kind of signifier. They ran out of the metal to make it, right? There's this conversation about whether or not the fee is worth it. There's like an ecosystem of websites that are just there to convince you that this, that one card is better than the other. Shout out to the points guy. Yeah.

Right. Like there's a whole world out there of people just to evaluate credit cards that are built on top of Visa MasterCard American Express. But they are transmitting that secondary value in different ways. Like, Chase Rewards points are money. Like I can just pay for stuff on Amazon with them. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's, you know, I really, if I weren't so busy with the research project about the PPP right now, I would really be interested in interviewing people. So if this is you, shoot me an email. But I'd be really interested in emailing people. Who can, you? considered their miles and their points that they got from traveling for business as like an important part of their compensation package because there are many people for whom that is absolutely a perk of their job and an important aspect of their financial lives that have suddenly been kind of scuttled or suddenly been devalued during the pandemic. You know, all the, what am I supposed to do with all these points and all of my, the rewards I used to generate from traveling and then apply towards travel or other things? But yeah, There's been a, in the last 10 years, there's been a real concerted effort to try to differentiate

the card market. You know, it's when we swipe our cards, they all look the same on the surface. But in reality, with every swipe, it kind of activates many different layers of difference and inequality, where some people are actually paying every time they paid, you know, prepaid cards come with tremendous fees, you know, up to, you know, dollars. per swipe. And then some people, if you have a Chase Saffir Reserve, you're making money every time you swipe. So these things that all look the same, there's all of this kind of different submerged underneath it. And there's been tremendous effort in the last 10 years, as I was saying,

to try to free up some of those rewards to kind of make them more fungible, make them more like money, make our, you know, make us able to use them for more and more different kinds of things. and if we can imagine what would have happened if that had gotten started kind of sooner in the 70s and it would look less like this kind of niche thing that only, you know, certain segments of society who care about things like Chase Sapphire Reserve and care about having like the status of like the hottest new credit card are privileged enough to care about and kind of what kind of monetary cacophony we might actually see. And yeah, that's something that's pretty important to my book, which is this idea that, and we talk about, you know, the idea of social media is, you know,

social media is in contrast to the idea of mass media. So if at one point we all were using the same kinds of money, the same, you know, basically simply using state currency, denominating in state currency, thinking in the state currency, and now we're facing this uncertain future where all different kinds of monies are circulating, whether that's Bitcoin or whether that's something like Chase Safare Reserve Points. And historically, it has actually been more common for there to be lots of different kinds of money happening all at once than for everyone to kind of use this like one solidified national currency. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere.

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That's a good way to put it. But between rewards points, Bitcoin, private payment networks, you've got this quote from former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. which is incredible. I'm just going to read it. And I just want to ask you why he thought this would be real. Howard Schultz said, I don't believe Bitcoin is going to be a currency today or in the future. Rather, he anticipated soon enough there would be one or two digital currencies,

which would be produced by companies like Starbucks. That to me is like, okay, I'm going to take the Starbucks rewards program. I'm just going to turn it into a competitor to the dollar, which is on its face insane. but based on what you're saying, maybe not. How did he get there? Yeah, I mean, I had a lot of fun on Twitter. All my kind of weirdo money friends had a lot of fun with this on Twitter.

But then I was like, you know, actually, why is it any crazier than Bitcoin? And, you know, we now live in a world where, you know, Howard Schultz makes a comment like that. And like the CMO of Duncan, donuts, has to respond. and be like, well, you know. And her response was like, you know, we live in this kind of post-Trump, post-Bitcoin, you know, anything can happen world. So like, maybe, maybe? And it is true, okay?

So it is true that Starbucks's app, payment app, is the most ubiquitous, most commonly used, most successful mobile fintech system in the United States. far more people use it than use Venmo or PayPal, that sort of thing. And they use it very often every day. And if we think about what a bank does, one of the reasons why people like to advocate for postal banking is that it has tremendous geographical reach, right? Like by necessity, one of the things we value about the post office is that it provides kind of rural service and gets to all the places the mail needs to go. And one of the only companies that has that kind of reach is Starbucks, you know, like there are more Starbucks. Like I think I have the numbers in the book, but offhand I don't remember. But, you know, I would be interested to see what the ratio of Starbucks are to post offices in the United States. And then they do have this functioning rewards program, which is a store of value that people really do care about. So it sounds crazy. It is crazy. However, also, however, there, however,

some basis to it from Starbucks's point of view. And also, you know, I'm, again, I'm a media study scholar. I am in a field that studies things like the history of the internet. And if you look historically at the history of the internet, you know, in the 70s or 80s and 90s, everyone was talking about this like radical, anarchic, libertarian or collectivist vision for cyberspace, right? We would all be homesteading on the electronic frontier. We would be living in a kind of hybrid world, a cyberspace world where traditional governments had no real remit, no real ability to make laws or legislate. It was this, you know, how Starbucks or the cyberspace would kind of untether itself from the kind of petty governments of the meat space, as we would

say in a very like 90s way. And the vision was truly kind of utopian. But we don't, we live in that world today, right? We're not homesteading on the electronic frontier. We don't have fully alternative governments that are outside the reach of traditional, you know, state-based governments. Instead, we basically live our online lives through platforms, through corporations, through Facebook, through Google that look very little like the kind of utopian anarchism of early visions of the internet. And I see some of the kind of utopian, libertarian, some cases collectivist visions of for Bitcoin as being, you know, quite aligned with what we heard in the early days of the internet. And I see no reason why, if we untether

money from states, why it would become this kind of utopian crypto-anarchy thing as opposed to a corporate thing? Like, why is it less likely that the future of non-state-based currency is going to be cryptocurrency rather than corporate currency. Rather than Starbucks. Yeah, right. I mean, maybe not Starbucks, although why not Starbucks, considering it has everything it needs? This is a kind of bold thinking that led Howard Schultz to his successful nomination in the presidency of United States.

Well, so that brings us to Bitcoin. I mean, Bitcoin is, is every, it's a meme. It is a very lucrative game for people to play. it is a foundation for tons and tons of startups. You know, we watch sort of Jamie Diamond, the CEO of Chase, start from screw Bitcoin, this is dumb. I'm not even think about it to I have a Bitcoin. Right. Like, it has overtaken the conversation about money and payment in a very meaningful way.

In a context of your book is thinking about money as media, like it feels like Bitcoin is central to the entire moment. How do you view that, right, thinking about networks, thinking about, you know, You have this line that you know something's infrastructure when you don't pay attention to it unless it's broken. Like Bitcoin, you have to pay a lot of attention to it right now. Is it on the path to becoming infrastructure, to becoming just another mode of media? Yeah. So I will just quickly just plug myself and say, Bitcoin could have easily taken over my book.

And I felt like there was a lot of things that needed to be said about money infrastructure and payment infrastructure. It's histories and it's like actual present. you know, a lot more people care about their frequent flyer miles than actually have a meaningful crypto portfolio. A lot more people are impacted by decisions that get made by Venmo or by Chase Sapphire Reserve than, you know, issues about whether or not Bitcoin is scalable or whatever the most recent drama is. So I wanted to make sure that I paid attention to all the things that weren't Bitcoin that didn't just go towards the shiny object. However, I do have some journal. articles that are available for free on my website that are much more squarely about Bitcoin.

So I would, you know, I would love it if anyone, you know, their academic articles. They don't tend to have a huge audience, but I would, I would love it if anyone wanted to take a peek. All that being said, I think, you know, if we take DeHawks definition, which I think is as good as any, I've heard, that money is information socially guaranteed to be valuable. and then we look at the technologies that sustain that value and sustain that guarantee. There's no reason why something like Bitcoin wouldn't become a important money form or money infrastructure. All it takes is shared belief instantiated as technology and instantiated as shared technology and standards over time and enough kind of power to kind of support those

technologies. So I always there's, I often start my undergraduate classes with an article from the onion from like 2010 that says something like like nation's economy grinds to a halt as everyone realizes money is nothing more than a shared delusion. That's true. It is. However, it's a shared delusion that has so much infrastructure built around it. We can switch on and off our beliefs, but we can't switch on and off infrastructure. So the more the infrastructure gets built around Bitcoin, the more power and more kind of long game it has. However, I was talking to someone from a Bitcoin publication a couple of months ago, and we were talking about kind of the, you know, 10 years or more than 10 years of Bitcoin and, you know, what has Bitcoin achieved in its first

generation? And she was asking me about Bitcoin in its first 10 years, first decade. And she was asking me about Bitcoin and the pandemic. And whether or not now, you know, now that that everything is digital. Now, people aren't leaving their house. We're doing, we're ordering grubhub and we're, you know, doing our grocery shopping online. You know, is this the moment for Bitcoin. I was like, you know, Bitcoin has not, the Bitcoin community has not really developed a good infrastructure for everyday payments, right? Like, this should be the moment, but it's not in terms of people actually using it in their everyday lives. Of its, it's infusion of our, you know, kind of everyday, you know, money worlds.

And that's because Bitcoin, you know, from the beginning was sort of by its kind of of officinados was seen in kind of two ways that were sometimes compatible and sometimes not at all compatible. One as a form of digital cash, right? So payment, anti-surveillance, free-flowing, untethered from government's payment. And the other as digital gold. So a speculative commodity that sustained its value from markets. And the Bitcoin community has very much developed great.

infrastructure for Bitcoin's use as a speculative instrument and not at all for its kind of usefulness in everyday life. And so I think that there's definitely the possibility that Bitcoin could fulfill some of its promise as this kind of anti-surveillance, free-flowing payment infrastructure. But I think it's really hard to do something, to use something as payment if you're having to like calculate capital gains tax, like every time you like have a winner loss or if it's like value is wildly fluctuating and maybe you should just like hoddle until, until it's, you know, worth more than it is today. And that's something that, you know, again, the Federal Reserve or, you know, states have always been had their eye on, which is like stabilizing the money supply and

creating good infrastructure so that people can use it to like have an economy, to buy coffee, to pay their babysitters to get paid. So, you know, I think Bitcoin has been so, it's so flashy and attention getting in its kind of rise and fall and value, and it's so interesting as a speculative commodity that we haven't really, the Bitcoin community hasn't really bothered

to think about the boring stuff and when they have, that hasn't really gained much traction. So I don't think it's going anywhere, but I don't know what it will be and what its place will be in the kind of coming monetary cacophony. Do you think that's true of Bitcoin specifically or Bitcoin generally as placeholder for

cryptocurrencies? Yeah. I mean, I think I say Bitcoin sort of as a placeholder for cryptocurrency, but we're also in a bizarre world where Bitcoin is like the least scammy. Cryptofer is like it's the most stable, least scammy. The Ethereum people are coming for you right now. Oh, I, well, I mean, yes. So, I mean, Ethereum is a wholly different matter.

But again, like, Ethereum is also fascinating and it has absolutely put more of an emphasis on infrastructure, but where's the adoption? You know, like where, how do we drive it into everyday life? And how do they, I think there is a different set of tensions around speculation in the Ethereum community and kind of maybe a different balance of power between the infrastructuralists and the, you know, speculative gamblers. but even Ethereum doesn't make headlines and certainly didn't make headlines in the early days without its value being discussed. In relation to dollars. Yes, right.

So I want to end by where you actually begin the book, which is Facebook, and I do want to talk about Apple because they represent, I think, two very different ends of the spectrum. Facebook, like Libro is like a delightful thing to talk about because it's such a flaming wreck. And there's Apple, which is very successful with Apple Pay. which effectively just leverages all of the existing infrastructure. So let's start with Facebook.

You literally begin with Libra the same kind of lofty claims that everyone makes about their payment networks. Why did Facebook rush into it the way they did? And why do you think it failed so spectacularly? Libra is actually an absolute delight to talk about because it was a total flaming mess. And it wasn't anything it said it was going to be. And it made big, ridiculous promises. And it made a super cringy launch video. But Facebook pay is a lot more boring and has the real potential to kind of wield more transactional power if Facebook can ever really manage to, you know, get any kind of market dominance.

And I do think it's kind of important to note. And I kind of, you know, my book, my whole kind of academic career is dependent on people being interested in new money forms. But I do think it's important to note that payment systems haven't changed all that much in the last 40 years. years. I was at the Smithsonian in the coin gallery and I got to get a tour of the back vault, which was really awesome. That's one of the perks of being an academic. And I saw credit cards that belonged to various U.S. presidents. And elsewhere, I saw a credit card that belonged to Elvis, right? And they look exactly like today's credit card. The same mag strips, some of the details of the embossing have changed. But essentially, if Elvis's card had a functional account attached to it,

it would work if we swiped it in most today's modern systems. And so for the most part, they really haven't changed. They haven't changed because despite some of some crucial failures, which I do talk about quite a bit in the book, for the most part, our money systems as they exist work. The only real place that they break down is person-to-person payment. It's hard to receive electronic payments as an individual, but really kind of PayPal figured that out in the 90s. And everything else has been kind of like variations and trying to perfect that form. So all of the, there's this potential for, you know, Google and Facebook and the kind of big social media companies, we're kind of afraid of getting too much power. You know, they're constantly trying to do payment and they're constantly

failing. So as much as I think we need to really think about this kind of future of monetary cacophony and its potential problems. I also think, you know, it's probably going to move a lot more slowly than a lot of evangelists would like us to believe. I mean, that brings me, I think, right to Apple, which is the most successful and then also just flatly the most traditional. They improve the user. I prefer Apple pay. Like, it makes a nice sound. There's a good haptic. It's very convenient. It's, like, built into my phone. I don't have to touch anything, which is, like, a big advantage right now. But I mean, that is, it's a, it's built on the credit card network. Chase literally shows me the terms and conditions when I added my card to it or whatever. Like, so does Bank

of America or American Express or whoever. Apple is just skimming fees off the top of the interchange. Like, it is as basic as it gets. And now they have a credit card, which is an actual just master card. Why is that, is that just refining the edges is the recipe for success? Like, why did Apple get it right? I think so. And I mean, one thing I always tell my students, you know, I say teach undergrads at the University of Virginia, and I say, raise your hand if you have an iPhone, and everyone except for maybe one will raise their hands. The coolest one. Right.

Well, yeah. It's me, usually also raising my hand. But I have to remind them that while it seems like everybody they know lives in an Apple world, that is absolutely not true globally. And it isn't even true in the United States. You know, I mean, Apple just doesn't have the market dominance that it's easy for us to kind of imagine that it does. And I think Apple Pay is great. Like, it's pretty traditional.

It works really well. It adds a really nice extra layer of security that we somehow manage to totally bungle in the migration to chip an signature instead of chip and pin. You know, it's a great product. But most people, I can just flat out saying most people don't have it. Most people can't afford an iPhone. You know, most people in the world absolutely cannot afford an iPhone. And, you know, Apple in general is a company that has built itself on being a steward of the data and the, and of the kind of digital lives of the global elite, you know, where, you know, we get to have some of our data protected.

You know, Apple has said that they are not interested in data because they don't have to be, you know, we're willing to pay a lot of money for their beautiful. devices and that's their main profit center rather than data and that's their main profit center rather than all the like little interchange fees. So yeah, absolutely some people in the future and now will be living in an Apple world where they're able to pay for a relationship with a company that will steward their financial and kind of data lives. And some people won't. And those who don't will be using devices and using payment systems that are much more predatory that are much more interested in getting money from them or monetizing their personal data and are much more careful stewards of their, you know, transactional relationships.

So yeah, I mean, Apple, it's great if you can get it. And it's important to note that we just, it's just not the case globally or even the U.S. So that's a big spectrum of change. I do like this idea that there's a cacophony of money and such a vivid image. What should people be looking for? Right? I mean, we are at home. We are spending more and more of our lives mediated by screens and devices.

The idea that money is fake seems to just be like on the rise. Like it's just bits somewhere. And whether those bits are controlled by a distributed leisure or by a guy to bank, like some bits. What is the next change do you see? What is the next inflection point? You know, I started looking at money and looking at, as I mentioned, you know, looking at all this stuff. in the aftermath of the last global financial crisis.

So really about a decade ago. And at the time, there were so many ideas. And, like, if we remember thinking about, like, Occupy Wall Street, like, Occupy Wall Street was a place where people, like, got together and just, like, talked about ideas. Some of them really interesting. Some of them really stupid. Some of them really, like, high-minded.

Some of them really dangerous. And it was kind of this, like, you know, just really rich, fecund ideation space. And a lot of what we see today has kind of directly grown out of that, whether it's Bitcoin or, as I mentioned, sharing economy, et cetera. You know, and it was, there was a lot of talk at that time of, you know, how we can, like, rethink the economy, make the economy more human, make the economy untethered from traditional actors. And in this current crisis, like the pandemic, we're all sitting at home, I've been seeing a lot less of that, you know? I've been seeing a lot less. I've been actually doing, I mentioned this research project.

interviewing small business owners about their use of fintech and about how they how basically every small business becomes an online business, how to become an online business overnight, like a local online business and navigating the PPP, et cetera. And there doesn't really seem to be the same like churning of ideas of like building a better new future, a radical crazy new economy that will function fundamentally differently than what came before, it seems like it's, it's just less of a rich ground for imagination. And so at first, you know, just kind of thinking through this research project, that kind of scared me a little. Like, are we, after a decade of imagining, are we just so exhausted and so frustrated by some of the,

like, bad ideas that we've imagined and brought to fruition that we just now are in, like, kind of this, like, crisis of imagination? Or is it that maybe we've come to a point where, like, radically reimagining things isn't the most pressing or with regard to money. You know, radically imagining things isn't the most necessary or pressing thing, but rather kind of like working out the bugs and really discovering, you know, the right way to do the things we've imagined. So I think the coming decade will be a time of, you know, rather than just like crazy, free-thinking imagination, it will be.

like honing and zeroing in on, you know, what actually works. And hopefully what actually works will be something that, you know, does the most good for the most people. But, you know, that remains to be seen. Yeah. It's funny. This pandemic moment, the amount of imagination we hear about everyone will work from home forever or people will flee the cities. It is interesting that the flip side of that is we are seeing kind of the biggest companies get bigger and more powerful. And I think the tension between that is super interesting. It's something we're definitely going to pay attention to. Yeah. I've taken up so much every time. Thank you for joining me. The day this comes out is the 18th. The book is out today is the thing I can say. Oh, yeah. Tell them again what it's called and where they can find it. It is called New Money, How Payment Became Social Media out from Yale University Press, available wherever books are sold, Yale University Press website, Amazon, or your local bookstore. Direct Bitcoin payments to you.

Or direct Bitcoin payments to me. That's great. Well, Lana, thank you so much for. joining us. It was a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. All right, my thanks to Lana Swartz, the author of New Money, How Payment Became Social Media. Go check out her book. It's a really fun read, really eye-opening. We'll be back on Friday of the chat show. There's just a lot of tech news going on lately, so we'll keep up with that. I love your feedback on the interview show. Tweet at me, I'm at Reckless. Who do you want me to talk to you? What do you want me to look into? It is so useful as I figure out what guests we should have on the show. I love your feedback. So tweet at me. Talk to you soon.