We came across a particularly topical episode on the Fintech Beat podcast outlining a fascinating perspective on the relationship between cryptocurrency and Twitter, and more broadly on the history of financial services as mediums of communication.
This episode welcomed Lana Swartz, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, to discuss cryptotwitter and her book New Money: How Payments Became Social Media.
In his signature style, Dr. Brummer got right to the point when he questioned Swartz about her understanding of cryptotwitter and its very origins. Swartz, a media studies scholar, offered a historical perspective on the phenomenon.
Crypto first originated as a free software project when a group of people came together to build a new digital payments system. According to Swartz, free software projects are increasingly being viewed through the lens of a recursive public. “A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.”
Free software is one instance of what we call a recursive public and is a place where you build something and then talk about it. The talking in turn impacts the building. Free software projects such as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are often combined with message boards and listservs and these technological communication environments are where those recursive public’s take place.
According to Swartz, although free software was primarily envisioned as a technical phenomenon, it is also a communication forum. To stimulate programming, one requires the use of email, a message board, or other communication technologies. The technology behind cryptocurrency is also highly dependent on a communication environment. Within that particular environment, the medium of Twitter carries great significance.
An example of this relationship was offered by Dr. Chris Brummer, who spoke about the origins of Bitcoin in 2008, where you had a link to Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper posted to a cryptography mailing list, followed by the development and release of the software as an open-source code.
The question remains though. Why would this recursive community find its way on Twitter? Why not on LinkedIn or Facebook?
Swartz explained how every communications platform has its affordances and constraints. Twitter offers certain intrinsic features that have aided its path to becoming the perfect catalyst for the crypto world.
Firstly, Twitter was imagined to be and is primarily a public platform. Accessing someone’s feed does not require a log-in. Unlike Facebook, the links don’t require a two-way affirmation either, where you have to add someone and then vice versa, to access their page.
Twitter also allows conversations to happen at a fast pace, and within a public sphere. While conversations on cryptocurrencies took place on message boards and listservs, the broader public was never privy to them. With Twitter, such conversations have become highly portable, enjoying immediate access to many different platforms with a simple link sharing option. This high-speed temporality, the feeling of getting clout through likes, and the rapid-fire 24hr conversations are highly gratifying and well suited to most individuals within the crypto sphere.
Swartz and Dr. Brummer also discussed the polysemic nature of Twitter feeds, which has led to the emergence of meme culture. Meme culture has slowly become mainstream and has in some ways also infected mainstream finance and mainstream politics. This polysemic nature, however, does have its drawbacks. It allows a grey area to develop where pump and dump bots thrive. These bots assist in inflating the price of cryptocurrencies and help gain attention for them. Swartz believes that several meme coins would not have existed, had there not been a platform for them to be marketed.
She also warned of the dangers of adopting Twitter as a proxy for public opinion. There are numerous instances of Russian troll accounts, which have surfaced to influence mainstream media, conversations, and also make hashtags trend. This kind of behavior is rampant within the cryptocurrency world. Therefore, it is important to understand that to gain a more nuanced understanding, it is necessary to be a part of group chats, discord servers, or email lists, where the real action is taking place.
Swartz then provided a holistic view of money as a communication technology, which is also the emphasis of her book, New Money: How Payments Became Social Media. “Paper money is a form of paper media,” says Swartz. It is covered with iconography of the nation-state, which tells us about particular kinds of histories and futures within nation-states. It also produces the nation-state as a community of shared faith.
She explains how the technologies of money have always coexisted alongside and in flow with the technologies of communication and media. Many of the biggest consumer financial service companies, such as American Express and Wells Fargo, began as postal companies. The same computers that built the internet were also used to build the Visa/Mastercard network in the ’70s.
At this moment in time, social media is trying to be money and money is trying to be social media. People using the same monetary media can be considered a community in that they are communicating with each other with money.
Swartz believes that we are now leaving the mass media era of money occupied by large organizations like Master Card and Visa, and are moving towards a niche social media money world, which is much more complicated and therefore niche and barricaded, with complicated transactional communities.
The two academics ended the conversation by raising an important point about the future of fintech systems. They mentioned the importance of creating interoperable payment worlds, which do not reproduce present forms of inequality and racial segregation.
