The New Gold Rush: mobile payments
“Interoperability is a Social Fact: Extraction and Reimportation in
Experiments with Mobile Money”
On Thursday 30th April, Bill Mauer from UC Irvine offered a special
lecture at the Center for Future Banking.
ABSTRACT: A new “payments space” has emerged in the past five to ten
years that promises to bring access to funds transfer, banking and
financial services to millions of “unbanked” people in developing
countries and in the diasporas that remit funds to them. This payments
space is characterized by the innovative use of new information and
communications technologies. Payment and communication technologies
from the developed world are merging with the informally developed
systems of migrants and the poor around the world. At the same time,
the economic crisis in the industrialized North is now leading
engineers, designers, financial service companies and nonprofits to
explore the possibilities of “reimporting” new payment systems from
the Third World to the First, as more and more citizens of developed
countries become unbanked themselves.
In listening to people involved in creating new mobile payment systems,
I am struck by how much their activity is about “finding ways of doing things”
(as Jan Chipchase of Nokia puts it) with devices that were not built into the
design of the object. I am also struck by how much this activity of “finding ways of
doing things” explicitly mirrors practices that designers are
observing out in the world, through their own forms of participant
observation. Finally, I am interested in how “finding ways of doing
things” is itself a way of doing things for those charged by their
employers with creating such new systems in situations where they are
bound by non-disclosure agreements not to talk to their colleagues
working for other companies. When you can’t talk, you find other ways
of doing things, often with material objects. After providing an
orientation to the payments space, this talk asks after the
affordances in objects that are not built into them by design. It also
begs the question of other modalities of instituting markets or market
devices besides the performative modality emphasized by social studies
of finance.
BIOGRAPHY: Bill Maurer is a cultural anthropologist who conducts
research on law, property, money and finance, particularly new and
experimental financial and currency forms and their legal
implications. He has written widely on the anthropology of money,
finance and property.
MIT MediaLab, Center for Future Banking.