LANA SWARTZ
Lana Swartz is assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (2020). Spanning cash, cards, checks, apps and cryptocurrencies, Swartz’s book reframes money not as a neutral medium of exchange, but as a pliable media technology whose contested form has major social and political consequences. She is currently working on a new book that seeks to understand – and trouble – the cultural meaning of financial scams in the digital age. TANK spoke to Swartz about how the 2008 financial crisis broke money, Bitcoin millenarianism, and the rise of the hustle economy.
Interview by Guy Mackinnon-Little
Guy Mackinnon-Little Money doesn’t quite feel less real, but it does feel newly weird in recent years. What are some of the reasons for this?
Lana Swartz When I began teaching at the University of Virginia in 2016, I always opened my courses on money with a 2010 story from the Onion with the headline, “US Economy Grinds to Halt as Nation Realizes Money Just a Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion”. By 2016 – and indeed even by 2010! – we were already emerging from the financial crisis saying, “Money isn’t real, but we have to live with it anyway.” All sorts of strange experiments in money appeared in the long aftermath of the financial crisis, from artists, activists and entrepreneurs: Bitcoin, fintech, the sharing economy. It’s been interesting to watch the evolution of these experiments. It’s easy to forget now, but the early sharing economy was very much infused with this vision of peer-to-peer collaboration as a new way of organising the economy. Many of the people building these start-ups were at least giving lip service to feminist and community-centred alternative economic arrangements. Of course, the sharing economy very quickly morphed into the gig economy, deepening rather than alleviating the precarity of the financial crisis. Bitcoin has had a very different but similarly complex trajectory to the mainstream. While the results may not quite bear the politics of its originators, there were a lot of strange things going on with money in the parenthesis between 2008 and the present crisis of Covid-19, and a lot of resources and hype being poured into that experimentation. So when Covid-19 entered into the frame and everything, money included, started feeling very strange indeed, that strangeness was falling on the fertile soil of all the efforts to rethink money that had been going on for the decade since the last crisis.
GML How do these moments of major macroeconomic upheaval translate downstream into radical shifts in the everyday concept of money?
LS Money is fundamentally a technology of shared record-keeping. We don’t always think of dollars, pounds or other currency notes as full of technological features, but they absolutely are. To be this durable, circulatory object that lives in public and sometimes occupies space in one person’s wallet and then goes back into circulation is a tremendous technical achievement. Cash and other token money are a form of externalised memory: I give you a currency note, and now you have it and I don’t write it down. It’s a record-keeping system, but a vast distributed, invisible one. In the decade since the last crisis, people began thinking about money not just in terms of monetary policy or whether they had it or didn’t, although they absolutely were thinking about those things, but as a technological form. Infrastructure-studies scholars often say that the mark of infrastructure is that it is invisible until it breaks. So when money broke down in 2008, it revealed itself as something plastic and open to redesign. The 2008 crisis also coincided with and contributed to the shift toward the tech industry as an imperial force over more and more domains of everyday life. But people were also thinking with tech, which became a ready-to-hand model for interfacing with many aspects of life, including money. Crypto is one example of this. Once we saw money as a designed technological system, it became denaturalised, demystified, and therefore open to reimagining.
GML You’ve said that money is also always a technology of future-making. What kind of futures emerge from the reimagination of money that took place after the crisis?
LS Money’s future-making might unfold on a very short-term basis, where I only accept a $1 bill because I have faith that someone else will accept it tomorrow, but it also operates on a much longer timeframe. Anytime you invest in anything, you are imagining that that investment will one day pay off. You’re staking your claim in a possible future. I’m very influenced here by the work of anthropologist Jane Guyer, who draws a connection between long-term capital management and millenarian Christianity to describe the evacuation of the near term in our present imagination. It’s very difficult under both capitalism and certain forms of Christianity to do anything in the near future. In both cases, we imagine either the here and now or a far-off future when we at last receive our dividends, unable to think about what happens in the meantime. I’ve used this framing to characterise the ideology of certain early Bitcoin aficionados who imagined themselves as preppers for an imminent apocalyptic future, wherein governments of the world are either too inept to produce and maintain a stable monetary system or too authoritarian, so some kind of sub rosa alternative is required. For this prepper class of Bitcoiners – who I should say are one among many – the apocalyptic future is always arriving. It’s not here yet, but it’s always coming. Covid-19 has brought this sense of apocalypse ever closer and sent this apocalyptic subject position mainstream. The 2008 global financial crisis was extremely disruptive of course, but produced nothing like the everyday mundane disruption that Covid-19 has. The affect of collapse has become infused into everyday life. Bitcoin’s structure of feeling going mainstream in the way it has is a result of this perfect storm, where a decade of futuration around money has met its moment in the disruptive crisis of Covid-19.
GML These new technologies and currencies connect to your more recent work on scams through their shared reliance on an act of faith or buy in. Why is “scamminess” so pervasive today, especially in the cryptocurrency space?
LS There is the sense that all the institutions that structured our way of life are withering, but we’re not stepping into a vacuum. Rather, there are many competing efforts to articulate a persuasive vision of how the new system of things will be organised. If all money is a bet on the future, then all investments are a solicitation to participate in a collective act of future-making. But the future can’t be promised, and there is a fine line between good-faith attempts at collective futuration and vapour. Once you get into the business of promising your vision of the future and asking others to invest in it, you get into the realm of scams. Scams are particularly important to understand right now because the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate forms of capitalism seem to be in flux. We’re told not only that the old ways are withering, but that they are scams: the 9-to-5 job, the 30-year mortgage, retirement plans. All the blueprints for a normative way of doing middle-class life not only seem untenable in the face of an increasingly volatile future, they have also been revealed to have not served most of us very well in the first place. They’re the vapour. Only a dupe would continue to put their investments in a future that no longer exists, that maybe never existed. But this analysis is often offered up as a predication to jump ship into activities that are equally scammy and just as unlikely to produce the promised future. Instead of a nine-to-five, instead of a college degree, instead of a retirement plan, we’re compelled to enter into this variegated portfolio of hustles, whether that’s foreign-currency trading, cryptocurrency investing, becoming an influencer or joining a multilevel marketing scheme. If the old system tended to posture as respectable, promising due reward for appropriately following the rules, a guarantee that no longer feels credible, then the new scam economy makes no such promises. It valorises risk-taking and hustling. The term “hustle” suggests that there’s some reward borne out by hard work, but it also suggests being savvy and beating the system. Much of this links back to the early visions of cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin, which dreamed of an economy without guarantees, where everyone was responsible for their own actions and their outcomes. Bitcoin from the beginning valorised a caveat emptor attitude. Some of the earliest applications of cryptocurrency were outright scams, but if you look back on the discussions that were happening back then, people were annoyed that they lost their money, but ultimately they admired the hustle. They understood that this ethos was endemic to the techno-economic culture they were building together. So I’ve found it useful to think about scams as a collective activity. Traditionally, we talk about scams as though there’s a scammer and a scammee, a con artist and a mark, but many scams today entail entering into a network of scamminess, where it’s incumbent upon you to sell the vision of the future promised and at the same time be very savvy about protecting your own position in a given market. Shills are indistinguishable from true believers, and also indistinguishable from people just trying not to completely destroy themselves financially based on their previous investments. This weird oscillation between total belief and total cynicism persists across a variety of different new economic activities and may just be part of the terms of participation in the digital economy as it continues to emerge.
GML If you can’t distinguish between a cynic and a true believer, can you then distinguish between a scam and a meaningful bet on the future? Can we escape scamminess entirely, and is it wise to attempt to do so?
LS I always come back to Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence Man, published on April Fool’s Day in 1857. It takes place aboard a steam boat called the Fidel travelling on the Mississippi River, and it’s all just conversations among passengers, most of whom are trying to scam each other. There are beggars who may not be what they seem; there is a guy dubiously raising money for “widows and orphans”; there’s a sketchy stockbroker pushing a too-good-to-be-true investment opportunity; there’s an employment agent trying to recruit and place inexpensive and impressionable teenage labourers; there’s a “herb-doctor” selling elixirs that will cure what ails you. They’re all having these conversations with each other, trying essentially to sell each other on whatever their hustle is. Everything is blurred: commerce and con game; con artist and chump. Ultimately, it’s unclear to whom the “confidence man” of the title refers. While the novel was intended to be a satire of commercial life written in a moment when commercialisation and its shadowy other, scams, were a key public concern, the only person on the steamboat who is truly miserable is a character described as the miser. He refuses to scam or be scammed, but he is also fully alone. He’s unwilling to trust anyone because he’s unwilling to have that trust be taken advantage of, and he’s unwilling to ask anyone to trust him because he doesn’t want to be imbricated with his fellow passengers in any way, shape or form. He is not just a miser of money, but also of attention, time, engagement, sociality. As the historian Jonathon Levy says of the novel, “It is better to take the leap, and trust the confidence man, including our own inner confidence man” because “anyone who hoards his confidence – refusing to trust others – is isolated and miserable.” I’ve been trying to understand if today, as for Melville, being willing to enter into scamful relations is a precondition for social life itself. ◉