Uploaded November 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Wherever you look, money is being re- placed by tokens. Digital platforms are issuing new kinds of money-like things: phone credit, shares, gift vouchers, game tokens, customer data—the list goes on. But what does it mean when online platforms become the new banks? What new types of control and discrimination emerge when money is tied to specific apps or actions, politics or identities?
In this video Rachel O'Dwyer, author of Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform, discusses digital money, inequality, and the future of the economy with Nathaniel Tkacz.
Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform by Rachel O'Dwyer is out now: versobooks.com/products/2957-tokens?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=verso_video
Rachel O'Dwyer is a lecturer at the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. She was a Fulbright Scholar at UC Irvine and the Microsoft Research labs, Cambridge; she is currently a fellow at Connect, the centre for Networks and Telecommunications at Trinity College, Dublin. She is the co-editor of Neural Magazine and has written for outlets such as Convergence, MIT Press and the London Review of Books. She has curated a number of exhibitions of digital practise that explore the intersection of art and the Blockchain.
Nate Tkacz' work focuses on the cultural, political, economic and organisational dimensions of technology, with a specific focus on networked and digital forms. Hos most recent book is Being with Data: The Dashboarding of Everyday Life (Polity Press, 2022). His most recent work is on phone apps, interfaces, data formats, and media and economy.
0:00 Intro
0:45 How did you write the book?
5:05 Airtime payment systems
7:04 What is a token?
16:26 Ancient tokens
21:40 Definition of money
24:50 Research methods
27:46 Twitch tokens
31:22 Banking and technology
39:10 Web3
48:19 Art, blockchain and NFTs
52:42 Dystopias
Wherever you look, money is being re- placed by tokens. Digital platforms are issuing new kinds of money-like things: phone credit, shares, gift vouchers, game tokens, customer data—the list goes on. But what does it mean when online platforms become the new banks? What new types of control and discrimination emerge when money is tied to specific apps or actions, politics or identities?
In this video Rachel O'Dwyer, author of Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform, discusses digital money, inequality, and the future of the economy with Nathaniel Tkacz.
Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform by Rachel O'Dwyer is out now: versobooks.com/products/2957-tokens?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=verso_video
Rachel O'Dwyer is a lecturer at the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. She was a Fulbright Scholar at UC Irvine and the Microsoft Research labs, Cambridge; she is currently a fellow at Connect, the centre for Networks and Telecommunications at Trinity College, Dublin. She is the co-editor of Neural Magazine and has written for outlets such as Convergence, MIT Press and the London Review of Books. She has curated a number of exhibitions of digital practise that explore the intersection of art and the Blockchain.
Nate Tkacz' work focuses on the cultural, political, economic and organisational dimensions of technology, with a specific focus on networked and digital forms. Hos most recent book is Being with Data: The Dashboarding of Everyday Life (Polity Press, 2022). His most recent work is on phone apps, interfaces, data formats, and media and economy.
0:00 Intro
0:45 How did you write the book?
5:05 Airtime payment systems
7:04 What is a token?
16:26 Ancient tokens
21:40 Definition of money
24:50 Research methods
27:46 Twitch tokens
31:22 Banking and technology
39:10 Web3
48:19 Art, blockchain and NFTs
52:42 Dystopias
