Digital Monies

In recent years, the proliferation of digital monies has reshaped how people across the globe pay, save, and invest, from stored-value cards to e-wallets and cryptocurrencies. Far from being peripheral, global majority contexts play a central and often pioneering role in these transformations, with cases from China to Brazil shaping technological designs, regulatory models, and everyday monetary practices. Crucially, these developments are associated with multiple, often competing political projects. Digital payment systems have been promoted as tools of financial inclusion, promising broader access to inexpensive, efficient, and reliable financial services, a narrative often exemplified by the mobile money pioneer M-Pesa in Kenya. At the same time, digital infrastructures underpin alternative currency projects that emerged in response to growing distrust in hegemonic banking systems after the 2008 financial crisis, seeking to bypass established financial intermediaries, most prominently in the case of Bitcoin. Simultaneously, digital monies have opened up new means of governance, particularly in the fields of welfare and migration policy. Welfare benefits distributed through local e-currencies, such as the Arariboia in Brazil, or through state-issued payment cards, such as the Bezahlkarte for asylum seekers in Germany, enable novel forms of monitoring, restriction, and differentiation. Yet the effects of these governmental efforts remain empirically contested.

Digital monies thus operate between promises of unbureaucratic freedom and the precise enforcement of punitive welfare, between claims of inclusion and effects of exclusion, both intended and unintended. Expanding digital financial infrastructures does not automatically translate into broader accessibility, as barriers such as uneven access, digital literacy, and regulatory constraints continue to mediate who can participate, under what conditions, and with what degrees of autonomy. At the same time, these systems depend on technological infrastructures that are frequently designed, owned, or operated by private actors, including globally dominant companies such as Mastercard and Visa as well as fintech firms and platform providers, thereby reconfiguring relations of dependency between users, states, and corporate intermediaries. Moreover, like all payment systems, digital payment services entail transaction costs that are often levied disproportionately on small-scale transactions, reinforcing existing social inequalities along lines of class, migration status, gender, and geography. Finally, they generate new forms of value extraction through extensive data on users’ payment behaviour, raising questions about data ownership, surveillance, and the appropriation of informational value by infrastructure providers and public authorities alike.
 
In this 1,5-day workshop, we aim to engage with the dynamic field of digital monies from an interdisciplinary social-science perspective, bringing together empirical case studies and theoretical reflections. Rather than treating digital monies merely as technical innovations, the workshop approaches them as socio-technical infrastructures that organise power, value, and social relations. The workshop foregrounds digital monies as infrastructures of governance, inclusion and exclusion, sociality, and future-making, and asks how these dimensions intersect across different empirical and regulatory contexts.

Organized by

• Fabienne Hansen (Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies and Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology),
• Tobias Jäger ( Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies and Götz Werner Chair (GWP) of Economic Policy and Constitutional Economic Theory),
• Dr. Mechthild von Vacano (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Freiburg)