It is Along Ways: Global Payment Infrastructure in Movement

Abstract

This work reveals movement in infrastructure development through an anomaly in the global payment infrastructure. The anomaly is that while the global payment infrastructure develops without precedent, the infrastructure takes time to develop and does not easily leave anything behind. Based on abduction, the research builds a data corpus of past, present, and future global payment infrastructure, 1973–2030, including accounts of global payment organisations, historical reports, and narrative interviews. By juxtaposing these data with studies on infrastructure and following the work of Heidegger and Bateson, the research reveals movement through what the author terms infrastructural ways. The global payment infrastructure forms and develops because there are infrastructural ways for global payment to be objects, pass as real, and result from action. Granular homogenisation, irreversible validation, and ubiquitous causation are such ways. Moving along, hurtling, swaying, and rippling are the infrastructural ways for global payment to be objects passing as real, pass as real with action, and result from active objects. These findings clarify through movement how the global payment infrastructure develops. In doing so, this work contributes an ontological approach that revisits the predominant assumptions about infrastructure development, which emphasise the persistence and change of infrastructure.