Tokens Is Money the Future of the Economy?

The future of money in the age of platform capitalism

Wherever you look money is being replaced by tokens. These are digital assets, issued by the platforms, that can be traded, but also offer news types of relationships, forms of ownership as well as governance. Bitcoin, Dogecoin, facebook’s proposed Libra, as well as other forms of value such as air time, special access, data are the new money within an evolving economy.
 
Platforms are now paying in tokens rather than cash – Amazon’s Mechanical Turk offers gift cards, M-Pesa trades in phone calls. But is this a liberation or a dangerous warning of the future?

What does it mean when Platforms become the new banks? Tokens opens up this new world and warns that we are unwittingly welcoming new forms of surveillance and discipline. O'Dwyer argues that this challenges the balance of power between on the online empires and the state. In effect, the platforms determine the value and the methods of  exchange, or allow the value of the asset to be speculated over. They are siphoning vast wealth and power with few regulations.
 
In response, O'Dwyer argues that money's really transformative power comes when we consider it as a 'commons', produced and held collectively.

Rachel O'Dwyer is a lecturer at the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. She was a Fulbright Scholar at UC Irvine and the Microsoft Research labs, Cambridge; she is currently a fellow at Connect, the centre for Networks and Telecommunications at Trinity College, Dublin. She is the co-editor of Neural Magazine and has written for outlets such as Convergence, MIT Press and the London Review of Books. She has curated a number of exhibitions of digital practise that explore the intersection of art and the Blockchain.