Theorising international monetary relations: three questions about the significance of materiality

Abstract

1Academics spend a lot of time in the company of electronic gadgets. We read and write on them. We use them to trawl the web. We no longer carry around heavy books and papers but computers, tablets, cell phones and cables. Our ways of working and thinking have been transformed. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that social scientists are paying increasing attention to the ways in which the growing reliance on computers as well as rapid changes in information and communication technologies are transforming society. Sociality, subjectivity, law, military operations, intelligence services, diplomacy, marketing and memory, just about everything, have been investigated with a view to understanding and 945

Money is data – the platformization of financial transactions

“…Adding to the overall topic of this Special Issue, this contribution shows how changes within the material underpinnings enable and prefigure the heterogeneous visions of (big) data practices (Madsen et al, 2016). Taking the materiality of electronic money seriously leads to a reconceptualization of its ontology and political agency, as Anna Leander (2015) has emphasized. For security and policing purposes, it means that the claim to 'follow the money' will increasingly be replaced by 'follow the data', and platforms will potentially require a similar regulation to financial intermediaries (Zetzsche et al, 2017, p.…”