"Cash continues to disappear from everyday life. Coins and banknotes, still the reference form of money in our imaginations, are gradually disappearing from ordinary gestures. Paying, giving, receiving, lending, sharing, setting aside, counting - all these gestures, like our entire societies, are moving towards a digital, dematerialized form of money.
This issue of Réseaux describes the scope and challenges of the second wave of dematerialization of money.
In an introductory text, the dossier's coordinators, Thomas Beauvisage, researcher at Orange Labs, Aude Danieli,doctoral student in sociology at École des Ponts Paris Tech and Hélène Ducourant, teacher-researcher at Université Gustave Eiffel, distinguish three components of this second wave of dematerialization: the emergence of digital currencies as alternatives to traditional currencies; the emergence of new payment intermediaries, and the success of innovations enabling payment via mobile. The authors identify three areas of research for the study of the transformations of digital money: "The ebb of cash and the heralded advent of cashless societies, money and payment data, and the appropriation of digital money". These three areas of research "are the subject of disparate investments by the social sciences".
David Pucheu, teacher-researcher(Université Michel de Montaigne) examines the ideological roots of cryptocurrencies by exploring the mailing list of the cypherpunks virtual community. Gathered around a core group of Californian hackers, the cypherpunks sketched out the first digital cash projects aimed at equipping individuals with anonymous, untraceable and unforgeable means of online transaction, which gave rise to cryptocurrencies. Part of a vast project for social change with utopian overtones and informed by radical currents of libertarian political economy, digital cash heralded, for its promoters, the advent of a new era, that of "crypto-anarchy". Assimilating online social and economic interactions indiscriminately to a form of individual freedom of expression over which states and large corporations could no longer exercise any control, cyberpunks invented cryptographic protocols designed to actualize their vision. "A vision that has now been nuanced by the deployment of these innovations in the New Industrial World of digital capitalism.
Tristan Dissaux, researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and Maxime Duval, consulting director at Stratéact, discuss the process of institutionalizing the digital euro currently being planned by the European Central Bank. A systematic analysis of communications on the digital euro published by the ECB shows how it operates a particular framing: ECB communication tends to invisibilize the social and political implications of the digital euro project by approaching it in a mainly technical way, anchored in economic and particularly financial concerns. Tristan Dissaux and Maxime Duval compare this approach with that of alternative projects carried by civil society players, and discuss, in conclusion, the practical and theoretical implications of this situation for the conduct of the digital euro project, as well as for central bank governance.
Aude Danieli examines the way in which means of payment "equip the commercial link in the context of small local shops". Around the means of payment and their material supports, she observes a network of constraints, socio-technical frameworks and norms - sometimes surprising - that guide exchange in different ways. The study suggests that the plurality of means of payment "takes the question of payment out of the transaction, to irrigate the entire exchange, upstream and downstream". Payment methods also renew the question of the balance of power in the commercial relationship. "The consumer generally imposes his or her vision of payment (mostly by card), even though all cash payments had to be accepted from a legal point of view, placing the merchant between domination and consent. Everyday transactions, which are highly instrumented, become small, highly ritualized commercial entities, but above all they are framed by recourse to the law, which (more often than not) brings harshness and arguments to force this or that means of payment".
Marine Al Dahdah, sociologist (CNRS), Nicolas Lainez, researcher at the Centre d'études en sciences sociales sur les mondes africains, américains et asiatiques, and Isabelle Guérin, Director of Research (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, IRD) question the promises of digital money as a "development solution" and a "lever for financial inclusion". Linking ethnographic observations on a micro-scale to global structural trends, the authors offer an analysis that is both critical of digital money and attentive to its ambiguities and ambivalences. " In line with research that highlights extractivism and the reproduction of inequalities, we propose to question the promises of digital money with regard to examples of money and credit platforms in Africa and Asia. Adopting a bottom-up approach attentive to the uses and effects of political and moral economies, their analysis is based on the notion of appropriation, "taken in its dual sense of ownership and adaptation".
Since 2010, dozens of local currencies have been created in France, initially in the form of paper coupons. Now, some are also circulating digitally. Mathilde Fois Duclerc, temporary teaching and research associate (Sciences Po Bordeaux) examines the case of the eusko, created in the Basque Country in 2013 and given a digital form in 2017. After tracing the main stages in the introduction of digital means of account and payment, the author shows how this process of digitization in the institutionalization of the local currency operates a double normalization of the currency, "through the adjustment of its operation to the common uses of money and through a certain recognition of digital tools by the regulatory authorities of the banking sector". This marginal entry into the payment services sector is accompanied, for those in charge of the currency, "by work aimed at preserving the currency's militant roots and the nature of its political project".
Among digital currencies, some are already at the heart of many consumers' practices, such as video game currencies. Renaud Garcia-Bardidia, Senior Lecturer (University of Lorraine), Caterina Trizzulla, Senior Lecturer (University of Lorraine) and Sarah Maire, Professor (IESEG School of Management) analyze these practices in FIFA's online competitive mode, FIFA Ultimate Team. Based on interviews and participant observations, this study sheds light on the differentiated uses of FIFA points and credits in this game, and their contribution to the structuring of differentiated styles "responding to a triple imperative of efficiency, ethics and playful pleasure".
Contents :
- Thomas Beauvisage, Aude Danieli, Hélène Ducourant: Bytes in the wallet; Investigating digital money and its devices
- David Pucheu: Digital cash. The past future of cryptocurrencies?
- Tristan Dissaux, Maxime Duval: Central bankers' digital money. The euro between evolution and revolution
- Aude Danieli: Payment in small shops. Between cash and dematerialized money
- Marine Al Dahdah, Nicolas Lainez, Isabelle Guérin: Digital money, a new development solution
- Mathilde Fois Duclerc: Digitization, standardization and institutionalization of a local currency. The case of the eusko in the Basque Country
- Renaud Garcia-Bardidia, Caterina Trizzulla, Sarah Maire: Social uses of currencies in video games. An analysis based on the case of FIFA Ultimate Team
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