Money generates, transforms, destroys ties between people and people, people and things, things and things. This has always been the case. Acceleration is increasing, the market ticks in real time and trades with the future: nowhere is the digitalisation of the world more striking than in the economic sphere. Cryptocurrencies are replacing bank accounts; alternative payment systems are challenging the power of states, which in turn are trying to counter the competition from global technology and platform corporations.
The total virtualisation of reality promises its equally total commodification. Everything – real and virtual objects, memories, feelings, care – becomes a potential carrier of value, a possible object of speculation, a token.
Money is a relational tool. It creates relationships: of debt and guilt, of dependencies, of prosperity and poverty. It irrationally rationalises the world. It is used to compare the value of things, activities, relationships, but also of people. Money is the face of capital, fetish, metaphor and machine, threatening and desirable.
The Market for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge traces the developments of money, looks at what it makes possible and what it does by adopting the refrain of investigative journalists and marriage swindlers: Follow the money!