Abstracting Money: Cryptocurrencies, Cybernetics and Contradictions

Unevenly since then, money-as the dominant and dominating medium of exchange-has repeatedly transformed, with a general tendency towards increasing abstraction: from coinage forged of precious metals (then later coins forged from common metals to prevent debasing), to credit notes, paper money, before the rise of networked computing-machines and all the complexity that goes with electronic money, from credit cards to crypto-currencies. [...]the 'leveling domination of abstraction', to use Adorno and Horkheimer's phrase (13), involved levelling in two senses; levelling as in crushing-such as the colonial dispossession of deep social relations and place-based practices-and levelling as in adding a new layer upon-with the reconstitution of social relations by more abstracted practices. There the abstracting power of the general equivalency of money is intensified to the point of a qualitatively transformation when it is drawn into networked computing-machines. 1971 was a crucial year in the ascent of e-money as the dominant mode of exchange, with the establishment of NASDAQ, the first electronic stock market, followed by the 'Nixon shock' and the beginning of a global regime of free-floating fiat currencies. Applying this schema, an electronic bank transfer is residual, with the dominance of credit cards being challenged by emergent mobile payments, crypto-currencies, and other block-chain enabled fin-tech.