Rachel O'Dwyer, "Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform" (Verso, 2023)

Rachel O'Dwyer, "Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform" (Verso, 2023)

Platform capitalism is coming for the money in your pocket. 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? Tokens opens up this new and expanding world. Exploring the history of extra-monetary economies, Rachel O'Dwyer shows that private and grassroots tokens have always haunted the real economy. But as the large tech platforms issue new money-like instruments, tokens are suddenly everywhere. Amazon's Turk workers are getting paid in gift cards. Online streamers trade in wishlists. Foreign remittances are sent via phone credit. Bitcoin, gift cards, NFTs, customer data, and game tokens are the new money in an evolving economy. It is a development challenging the balance of power between online empires and the state. Tokens may offer a flexible even subversive route to compensation. But for the platforms themselves they can be a means of amassing frightening new powers. An essential read for anyone concerned with digital money, inequality, and the future of the economy. Long-listed by the Financial Times' Best Business Books of 2023 even before publication, Rochel O'Dower's Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform (Verso, 2023) tackles the proliferation of alternatives to central bank-issued money through an enagaging and easy-to-access narrative. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

How can cultural industries survive in the twenty-first century? In Opera Wars Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future Caitlin Vincent, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Industries at the...

9 Tammi 40min

Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified c...

8 Tammi 51min

Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)

Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)

A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth centuryA popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is so...

7 Tammi 45min

Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism with Thea Riofrancos

Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism with Thea Riofrancos

Lithium, a crucial input in the batteries powering electric vehicles, has the potential to save the world from climate change. But even green solutions come at a cost. Mining lithium is environmentall...

6 Tammi 1h 13min

Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" (Oxford UP, 2023)

How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and statu...

5 Tammi 1h 9min

Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora, "Screening Precarity: Hindi Cinema and Neoliberal Crisis in Twenty-first Century India" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora, "Screening Precarity: Hindi Cinema and Neoliberal Crisis in Twenty-first Century India" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

Screening Precarity integrates a cultural analysis of film texts and history, industry transformations, and the violence and crises of political economy infrastructures, to study post-liberalization s...

4 Tammi 53min

Julia Elyachar, "On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo" (Duke UP, 2025)

Julia Elyachar, "On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo" (Duke UP, 2025)

On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (Duke University Press, 2025) by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereig...

4 Tammi 36min

Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta, "Policing and Violence in India: Colonial Origins and Contemporary Realities" (Speaking Tiger, 2025)

Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta, "Policing and Violence in India: Colonial Origins and Contemporary Realities" (Speaking Tiger, 2025)

Why does Indias police force, created under British rule, still echo the priorities of a bygone empire? And what is it about this institution, tasked with maintaining the law and order, that has led t...

3 Tammi 46min

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