Carola Westermeier: Money as a digital technology

From contactless payments to mobile wallets and cryptocurrencies, the way we handle money is becoming increasingly digital. As monetary systems fundamentally shape social relationships and the organisation of modern societies, the differing modes of transacting digital money alter these relations. Everyday transactions are processed on platforms provided by Tech Giants instead of banks, raising concerns about data privacy and market dominance. Digital money is increasingly recognised as a technology that can be innovated and enhanced. As a reaction, central banks around the world develop their own new forms of digital money to counter attempts by Tech Giants to issue their own currencies with potentially global reach. Central Bank Digital Currencies, such as the digital euro, link monetary sovereignty to issues of digital autonomy and aim to provide a (public) infrastructure for financial relations in light of increasing geoeconomic tensions.
Analysing money as a technology thus shifts our attention towards new questions: Which relations are technologically enhanced, which are excluded? How is the data generated by digital financial transactions handled and how are they stored? Who has the ability to enable and sanction (international) payment transactions?
Carola Westermeier is a Fellow at the Institute of Sociology at TU Darmstadt, supported by the Young Investigator Programme of the Centre Responsible Digitality. She is on leave from her position as a temporary academic counsellor at JLU Giessen for the fellowship. She leads research projects on financial infrastructures and geo-economic security and money as a data carrier. Her research addresses the connections between technology and political economy, for example with regard to the relevance of data in the digital economy and for political security. Another focus lies on the question of how financial infrastructures influence the international financial and security order and how geopolitical tensions affect the development of new financial technologies.
The event took place on 3 July 2024, 6pm, at WZB.
The moderation was done by Tobi Müller.
Jeanette Hofmann gave an introduction.
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