A new vision of money as a communication technology that creates and sustains invisible—often exclusive—communities
“In an engaging and timely work, brimming with fascinating anecdotes and historical and literary references, Lana Swartz brilliantly illustrates how financial technologies are quietly transforming how we socialize and what it means to belong.”
—Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It
One of the basic structures of everyday life, money is at its core a communication media. Payment systems—cash, card, app, or Bitcoin—are informational and symbolic tools that integrate us into, or exclude us from, the society that surrounds us. Examining the social politics of financial technologies, Lana Swartz reveals what’s at stake when we pay.
This accessible and insightful analysis comes at a moment of disruption: from “fin‑tech” startups to cryptocurrencies, a variety of technologies are poised to unseat traditional financial infrastructures. Swartz explains these changes, traces their longer histories, and demonstrates their consequences. She shows just how important these invisible systems are. Getting paid and paying determines whether or not you can put food on the table. The data that payment produces is uniquely revelatory—and newly valuable. New forms of money create new forms of identity, new forms of community, and new forms of power.
Reviews
“Our daily transactions—cash, credit, points, or promises—commit us to communities, identities, and politics on the most powerful social media platform of all: the payment system. Money talks, and Swartz’s book reveals its conversations, declarations, commands, and lies.”
—Finn Brunton, author of Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency
“New Money is an insightful, well-researched, and well-written history of the nature and uses of money. Swartz shows the profound effect the Fintech revolution will have on society and each one of us.”
—Dee Hock, Founder and CEO Emeritus, VISA, Inc.
“In an engaging and timely work, brimming with fascinating anecdotes and historical and literary references, Lana Swartz brilliantly illustrates how financial technologies are quietly transforming how we socialize and what it means to belong.”
—Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It
”In this groundbreaking social history, Swartz illuminates the hidden histories of payment systems and the cultural politics of transactional technologies. She reveals above all that money is a medium of communication.”
—Bill Maurer, editor of A Cultural History of Money
“A masterful, grand tour of the communities and imaginaries that shape our transactional lives and the many identities we carry around in our wallets. New Money forces us to consider who is in control of our financial identity and who sets the rules for how our money works.”
—Patrick Murck, Co-founder of the Bitcoin Foundation
About the Author
Lana Swartz is an Assistant Professor in Department of Media Studies. Most of her work is on money and other media technologies. Her research on topics like bitcoin, mobile wallets, and historical money technologies like the Diners’ Club Card has been published in leading journals, including Information, Communication and Society; Theory, Culture and Society; and Women’s Studies Quarterly.
She is the co-editor of Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff, which was published by MIT Press in 2017. It is a collection of essays on money objects and other “transactional things.” Paid has been reviewed positively, including in Financial Times, New Media and Society, . It was recently optioned for translation and publication in Chinese.
Lana’s book, New Money: Community, Currency, and the Future of Payment, is forthcoming Spring 2020 from Yale University Press. It is based on years of research: interviewing people about how they do money in everyday life, surfacing the largely forgotten history of payment technologies and industries, and participating as a critical expert in the emergence of the Fin-Tech sector.
She has been featured on the Today Show, All Things Considered, Explained, and BBC Newshour. She particularly loves the short animated video UVA Today made about her work. She has been an invited speaker at many academic and public events in the United States and abroad, including at the Filene Institute, University of Toronto, Money Lab in Amsterdam, Border Sessions in The Hague, Aarhus University, Trinity College Dublin, the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris, Open University of Catalonia, and University of Sydney.
Before joining the faculty, Lana was a post-doctoral researcher in the Social Media Collective of Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, MA and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Lana earned a Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where she was the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication, Technology, and Society Fellow. She earned an S.M. in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. She also attend the Summer Doctoral Programme at the Oxford Internet Institute.
