Virtual money

Win-win imageries in a soap bubble world: Personhood and norms in extreme work

“…Put differently, as money was deregulated in the wake of abandoning the gold standard during the early 1970s, we have increasingly moved away from money’s grounding in material reality (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2002: 7; Papilloud and Haesler, 2014: 58). Money has become ‘virtual’, so to speak, which we witness in phenomena such as the globalization of finance and the digitalization of money via credit cards and so on (Bek-Thomsen et al, 2014: 2). According to Papilloud and Haesler (2014), virtual money in late capitalism facilitates dynamics which are very similar to pyramidal schemes: they promise win-win-scenarios to everybody through highly abstracted investment and credit procedures.…”