Money’s infrastructures

This book explores blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies to develop an infrastructural theory of money, and it demonstrates how payment infrastructures provide an analytical site where social studies of money and finance and science and technology studies can be fruitfully combined. The book utilises the blockchain and interoperability firm Ripple as a 'revelatory case' for investigating the entanglements of materiality, desire, space, and power that pervade all of money’s infrastructures in cross-border payments and remittances. First, money’s infrastructures have material dispositions: they enable and hinder users’ behaviours, and unevenly distribute resources among users. Second, money’s infrastructures have spatial dispositions: they produce and inhabit spatialities and chrono-topologies that take four forms – pyramids, rhizomes, platforms, stacks. Third, money’s infrastructures have libidinal dispositions: money as infrastructure is shown to be shaped significantly by enchantment and desires. Fourth, money’s infrastructures have political-economic dispositions, between seamless interoperability and transaction- and friction-replete platformisation.