How Money Became A Form Of Social Media

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:17)

Tracy, it's time for another episode about one of our favorite topics.

Tracy Alloway (0:21)

Money, it's gotta be money.

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

It's gotta be money, it's always money. I mean, all of our, in a sense, I guess all of our episodes are money, but how could you talk about things about money if you don't even know what money is or where it comes from?

Tracy Alloway (0:34)

I agree that all of our episodes are money in that, what was that 1990s film use of the word money? Vince Vaughn and that guy.

Where people were going, you're so money.

Joe Weisenthal (0:45)

Swingers?

Tracy Alloway (0:45)

Yeah, swingers, that one. Our episodes are money in that sense, but they're also about money.

Joe Weisenthal (0:51)

They are, and of course, there's one of our favorite topics.

And today we have, I think we're gonna explore it with a slightly different angle than we sometimes do. So we sometimes talk about the origins of money. Does money come from the state? Is money inherently credit-based? What are the different kinds of things that we call money? I think we're gonna attack the question from a slightly different angle than we normally do.

Tracy Alloway (1:17)

Yeah, I think this is gonna be a really interesting episode because it's actually going to bring together a lot of the different discussions we've been having about specific types of money. So cash versus cryptocurrency or different types of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin versus something like Libra, the currency that Facebook is currently working on and what the different use cases are for each of those, but also what the different sort of, I guess, societies that they create actually are, if that makes sense?

Joe Weisenthal (1:46)

Yeah, I like the way you put that, societies that they create. And of course, like money is just like really interesting because obviously people pay for things with money, but people will do new things with money that they hadn't always done. So it's like people pay in Venmo to their friends and they leave funny messages along with their Venmos. Like that's a new thing. That wasn't always the case. So within this thing of like payments or money, how we use it, what its role in society is, how it connects us, it's always evolving.

Tracy Alloway (2:17)

Yeah, absolutely. And there's a big inclusion discussion to be had there as well. So who has access to different types of money? So I'm interested in touching on that as well.

Joe Weisenthal (2:26)

So today I'm really excited.

Once again, we have a past guest we had, I think it was probably a couple of years ago now, but we have her back. I'm very excited. We're going to be speaking with Lana Swartz. She's the Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.

She's also a fellow at the Bergruen Institute, and she is the author of a recent book called New Money, How Money Became Social Media. So I think it'll be interesting at a different angle than we've typically had, but Lana, thank you so much for joining us.

Lana Swartz (2:55)

Thanks for having me.

Joe Weisenthal (2:57)

You know, so like we said, we like this topic. What is money? Money, but there is some question that arises sometimes, I think, which is why bother? Like, why do we talk about this question? Like, why is it interesting or why is it important? From your perspective, tackling this question from a different angle, and we'll get to the content of your book about money as social media.

Why is it even a thing worth studying in the first place in your view?

Lana Swartz (3:24)

Well, I know for me, so I started my PhD program right kind of in the aftermath of the last global financial crisis. So I was really in this moment of like, I was entering into a moment of scholarly study when it seems like the whole world was asking that question, you know, what is money? Why is money? Why do governments and traditional financial institutions have like the say over what gets to be money? And that kind of like post 2008 moment was when we saw, I would say, like really the emergence of what we now call fintech, what we now call the sharing economy, what we now call, you know, the gig economy, like all these different ways of doing money differently. Oh, of course, the crypto space. And so it suddenly seemed like everybody was asking that kind of question. And so I became really interested in it at a time where I could also study people who were really interested in kind of questions of moneyness.