 we thought we would kick it off with a few questions for Lana about tracing the trajectory of the book where it comes from and how her thinking has evolved. So that's all right, should we get started, Lana? Sure, yeah. I mean, the other thing just by way of introduction, I wanted to say was when Asim and I talked about this, we were initially imagining it just as we understood it as kind of a closed group conversation with CMS students, which I'm totally excited for all kinds of people, some of whom I know, some of whom I don't to be here. But we do, because we're both alumni of CMS, we do want to make sure that our initial and primary audience are the graduate students, so we're going to have that lens in mind. And we want to also be sure to answer questions and talk both about the book, but also about the trajectories of both of our careers as to CMS folks from two different eras, really, and different eras from the present who have made academic careers and are now in the same department, somewhat quite fortuitously. So yeah, so in addition to the book, I do want this to take this opportunity to have a kind of broader conversation. One of the reasons why I asked when to be my interlocutor on this is that we are colleagues now, and I really respect his work, and I think he will bring kind of an interesting other flipside to the conversation. But also, when I was a CMS student, we got the word that Aswin had just gotten a tenure-track job, and he was the first CMS alum, as far as I knew, to get the tenure-track job and is part of our process in selecting, working up to the thesis. We were asked to read papers, read prior theses from previous CMS students, and one of the ones that I read was Aswin. So I was always, I've been a big fan of Aswin since before he had a tenure-track job and since I was a CMS student. So I hope we can do some meta stuff here, but not too much, I guess. I think that'll be a lot of fun. Already instructed Andrew to delete every possible copy there is of my master's thesis. No, it's so good. Yeah, let's get going. So I guess one of the two ways in which CMS really shaped my thinking, and I'm sure the same for you, Lana, is A, to think comparatively, which meant, quite simply, to think across media forms, to think across historical moments, and to think across cultural contexts. And the other key sort of phrase that has stayed with me is to think about media always as in transition. So with those two things in mind, I thought we could open the conversation by having you reflect a little bit on the conjuncture in terms of when you began thinking about this topic itself as a project you wanted to pursue and sort of have a temporal bracket of sorts. So it was around 2007, 2008, when you started actively imagining this as a dissertation project and eventually a book, coming out of the financial crisis that we were plunged into at that moment in the US. And now here we are in 2020 at a very different political conjuncture, but which has also some serious financial and political ramifications as well. So with these two bookings in mind, could you just start off by telling us a little bit about how that moment led to your even beginning to imagine this as a viable long-term project? Yeah, I absolutely agree and have found that the term media and transition, which when I was in CMS, I was sort of like, yeah, media and transition. It's the name of the books that Thorburn and Henry wrote and that's the name of our conference, blah, blah, blah. What does it even mean? But then again and again, it's something I come back to. And this kind of analytical tool that says, OK, let's look at moments of media change. We're not interested so much in new media for the sake of newness. We're interested in moments of disjuncture and shifting. And if we really zero in and focus in on those moments of change, what do we learn? And that really is the primary analytic for my entire book. There is one kind of big historical chapter that looks at moments of media change and looks at money as a payment or rather looks at money as media and then kind of touches down at key moments of change. But then every other chapter that follows examines the moment of newness, but also all of the things that kind of led up to that moment of newness. So absolutely, I think, and I think we'll likely kind of circle back to that as we chat. But to answer your question, and I think this kind of is interesting to think about the kind of historiography of transition. So you mentioned that I started conceiving of this as a dissertation project around 2007, 2008. And that's actually not true. I started conceiving as a dissertation project probably closer to 2011, 2012. So I finished CMS in 2009. I had written a thesis on counterfeit luxury goods and regimes of ownership and authorship. And then I started my PhD the following year, 2009, 2010, probably wasn't in the thick of it of thinking about dissertations for another couple of years. But it's absolutely the moment that the dissertation is born out of is the 2008, 2007, 2008 financial crisis and a variety of other media changes that happened at that moment. And it really is only retrospectively, and this is why I speak of historiography, that 2008 becomes 2008. So 2008 probably wasn't 2008 until 2010, although maybe 2020 might already be 2020. So thinking about when we become aware of moments as being moments. All that being said, I started thinking the year 2007, 2008 marks an important moment for thinking about money as a communication technology because of a few interrelated factors. So we did, as you mentioned, had the 2008 global financial crisis, which I really believe ignited a moment of kind of rethinking money. So suddenly we had broad-based global movements that sort of said, why should traditional governments and traditional financial systems be the primary producers of money? Are there other ways to do the economy? And of course, thinking about Occupy and those sort of things, that wasn't really until 2012, 2013. So the way history moves is interesting. And so yeah, so we have this moment where we were kind of collectively rethinking the economy. I always go back to this one Onion article, which sometimes proves to be true that Onion kind of speaks the truth. But that says it was a headline that said the US economy or global economy grinds to halt as everyone realizes that money is nothing more than a shared delusion. And this article describes this sudden awakening just rippling across the populace where suddenly a bank robber is like, why am I robbing a bank? This is so dumb. And someone about to have their house foreclosed upon is like, oh, I don't have to leave my house. That's awesome. But then they're like, well, cool. Now that we know this, what are we going to do? And there's just a moment of like, oh, wait a minute. Money actually serves a pretty useful purpose for deciding how to broker goods and services and how to figure out how to communicate in an economy. And so I kind of think there's this moment of awakening, but then this moment of like, OK, when the rubber hits the road, how are we actually going to think about building new systems that might be alternatives to the thing that we suddenly realized maybe we don't want? So there's that factor. And then also 2007, 2008 was the emergence of the iPhone, followed quickly thereafter by Android. So suddenly we were carrying around in our pocket these what had previously been like fairly sophisticated computers that do a lot of the things that we need to kind of do money with. So have some kind of universal address book hat, like such as Facebook, which that year is also the year when Facebook kind of has the tipping point of becoming this truly kind of mass scale system. And keep account of records. So if you have an Excel spreadsheet and you have a way of transmitting information and you have a way of contacting someone, you kind of can do money. And that's pretty much all you need in many ways. And then the hard part is the system for authorizing and making that information kind of socially guaranteed to be valuable. And then, of course, we have M-Pesa, which was the first large scale mobile money system. So there had been attempts to do mobile money and mobile payments for a long time. And most in Kenya, but also in other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, we had the proof of concept. And so I trace that as a moment where a lot of the innovations that kind of became fintech, became crypto, became all the things I kind of study in my book were kind of born. So by the time I finished the dissertation, which was in 2014, when did I finish? Yeah, in 2015, I had been able to kind of follow along with the cohort of people who were trying to rethink money from a bunch of different angles who all got interested in it around the same time I did. So it's a fortuitous time to study transition as it happened. Yeah, I mean, that's a great start. And I think what you've captured is the difficulties involved in mapping a moment as it unfolds. But then when you finally get to the end of a dissertation and you turn it into a book, you have that space to then step back and carefully historicize it and then move up to that moment, which you do beautifully in the book. And I'm just going to read out a couple of sentences as a way to get deeper into it. So at the very beginning, what I really like is the way you set things up, offer a very clear argument at the beginning. And then you offer this wonderful structure for the whole book. You said this is a book about the cultural politics of transactional technologies. It offers a new way to think about money as a communication medium dependent on particular technologies. And then you go on to say that each chapter takes up an essential mechanism of payment and explains how it works, which you do beautifully, how it got to be that way, how it's changing, and what implications those changes may have and for whom. And I read this and I thought, especially in what you just explained, it could not have been obvious as a PhD student in a media and communication department that you could very quickly and easily situate the question of money and payment within media and communication studies. It's not obvious at all to begin with. And you turn to James Carey and some other domains of media theory as a way to then think through a structure, give it a theoretical scaffolding. So could you then take us to that next step, which is once you propose to dissertation, did your advisor say that's crazy? And then B, how did you sort of, how did you work your way through different disciplines to then come up with this framework and ground yourself in media and communication studies instead of going off into cultural anthropology or sociology or so on? Yeah, so I, so as I mentioned, I was coming off of a CMS thesis where I was studying counterfeit luxury goods. So like fake bags, fake Louis Vuitton bags and shoes and that sort of thing. And I was studying the fan communities who come together, who are really kind of connoisseurs of the fake, mostly entirely online. And they, these are people who use global, really kind of interestingly like global supply chains. Today they're using things like WeChat and Taobao to like order direct from folks in China who are making like the best fakes. And in many ways, these fakes are like better than the real. And they say things like, because they have like better stitching, they're actually handmade, whereas the reals are no longer actually handmade. And they say things like, anyone can walk into any, anyone with $2,000 can walk into a Louis Vuitton store and buy the real version. Only I, because I have the social network, the technical savvy and the depth of expertise to understand what makes a perfect fake can buy the perfect fake. And I'm part of this community, et cetera. And so I was really interested at that moment in studying kind of marketplaces as a culture and kind of the, and the online communities that come up around markets. And also the, oh, and I'm quite familiar with the Reddit group that just got posted. There's a few of those. So I need to do, I would love to do an update to that project sooner rather than later, but we'll see. And also kind of the technologies that people use to kind of do markets. So I was really attuned both through CMS but also through an interest in kind of STS, science and technology studies and infrastructure studies to look not just at the way ideas, information, communities circulate, but the actual infrastructures that allow them to circulate. So I became pretty interested in economic anthropology at that moment and was reading quite broadly in the kind of ideas around the culture of economic practice. And then was attuned to thinking about, what those infrastructure, like how infrastructure played a role. Fortunately, I went to the University of Southern California at Annenberg School for my PhD. And fortunately, I happened to be co-located just about an hour away from Bill Maurer who's an economic anthropologist at UC Irvine who had been studying payments and was really kind of the, like I became really interested in payments and payment systems and the infrastructures of economic practice. And then just an hour away was the only other person in the world who at that moment was actually interested in it. And we met and we were able to just be like, have these long intense sessions where we were just geeking out about the things we knew about the Visa Mastercard Network or the intricacies of the way various payment infrastructures worked. And at the time, we sort of talked about ourselves as like a field of two that is no longer true and that wasn't even true at the time, but it was the people we knew. So, and then the other thing I really had to do though, and Mary is very sweet to say, that's kind of official pedigree of like who's anthropologist who's not. I did have to say though, I'm not an anthropologist. My training is not going to be primarily anthropology. My training is going to be primarily in communication. And then the question of like communication versus media studies is another one, but nevertheless I had to really almost use my training and use the title of my PhD as an oblique strategy to think about what kind of contribution I could make. So what I came to think about was this idea that money is fundamentally communicative. A transaction is a trans moving action, a movement across, a movement from one account to another. And whether that happened, and then we have to attend to the media or the kind of infrastructures or technologies that allow that transaction to take place or enable that transaction to take place. And then ask questions like, what are the politics of those infrastructures? So while Bill and others are thinking about it from like, at one point Bill and I were having kind of these conversations and I realized he brought to bear all of this. I was always intimidated because he's a very senior scholar, super genius. And he knew all this stuff about the anthropological record and I didn't. But then I realized, oh, wait a minute, like he's not thinking about it in this kind of media studies and communication way. And I actually am. And all the ways that I had kind of been taken for granted about my training were a totally new way to kind of think about this. So, yeah. Especially when you say that one of your goals in this book is to move beyond the taken for grantedness that money is something that's symbolic and expressive. And it's really fantastic how you take what you just said, the transaction. And then you work it out in each chapter and just for those of you who don't have the book yet, each chapter works out a different dimension, a different sort of logic of transaction, let's say, with one chapter offering a really wonderful short history. I mean, this is really a model for how to write a short history. And then you go through and say, questions of identity, politics, memories, publics and then finally futures. And what I like is the real nice narrative thread you have with this notion of transaction and you draw so fruitfully on James Carey. And what you actually managed to pull off, which is brilliant, is to achieve a sort of synthesis between the ritual and the transmission views of communication that we all sort of cite endlessly, but never quite bring those two things together in our own analytic frame, which you do really well. So I guess that leads to the next question. And there are places which have bookmarked in my copy, which I'm gonna return to every now and then. You talk a little bit about infrastructure, but I wish, I hope we can talk a little bit about the citizenship part that you really get into. And there's one bit on page 107, where you have this really evocative line about getting paid. The task for those who hope to design how we get paid in the futures to figure out how to maintain all the things that cash and so on. Now I was wondering if we can talk, given our current context and also 2008, 2009, have you also had a chance to reflect on not getting paid and how that also figures in these kinds of transactional spaces that we all inhabit, given the global financial crisis and given what we're all sort of dealing with now? Yes, and I think that that question really points, helps me point really specifically to what I hope is one of the key interventions of the book, which is we tend to think about the politics of money, the politics of getting paid and not getting paid in terms of quantity and distribution. So who has money? Who has not enough of it? Who has too much of it? And these are sort of economic questions, but there are also kind of communicative questions we can ask about the technologies of money that we only really see if we become attuned to thinking about money as media, money as a technology. So I argue in that chapter about getting paid that not having access to the money that you have and not being able to use the money that you have is as good as not having any money at all. And so, and I use the example of a, and I think this is a case I had to write about because I kept coming back to it again and again, but so I'll just kind of briefly tell that story. A story of a woman named Eden Alexander who was a cam girl online sex worker who had a medical emergency, very catastrophic reaction to a very common medication and found herself unable to work essentially. And she didn't have health insurance. This was before the Affordable Care Act and found herself kind of in pretty dire straits in the kind of American healthcare system. And so what her community did, which is what communities have always done is they kind of passed the hat to try to raise money to defer the costs of her crisis. And it being the 20 teens, it was done through a crowdfunding campaign. And the platform is one that is no longer exists, but was specifically geared towards healthcare expenses. And so because she was minor celebrity, had plenty of Twitter followers, she was able to raise money fairly quickly. And one of her friends who was personal community tweeted, I will offer a free pick set, meaning pornography, to anyone who donates $100 or more to Eden's campaign. Eden's own Twitter account, there's some question about whether or not Eden was the one who tweeted it because she was in the hospital, it doesn't matter, retweeted that. And then suddenly Eden got a ton of messages stating that she had violated the terms of service of the platform and all donations. And her campaign had been suspended and all donations had been refunded. And then there was again kind of a huge backlash. She had enough Twitter followers for it to be the kind of cause of the day. And another crowdfunding campaign stepped in and said, oh, we'll be happy to help you. We'll step in and that one also no longer exists, but they were trying to kind of make their name off of being the helpful platform, the good platform in this kind of moment. But that's not something most people have the ability to do. We're not all able to kind of wield an army of Twitter followers to do customer service on our behalf. So when people were sort of examining and offering various hot takes around what had happened, Eden supporters somewhat rightly said, kind of blamed that the crowdfunding campaign is being like a group of tech bros who felt like it was their right to make moral evaluations of who should be able to get money and who shouldn't. And then the crowdfunding campaign said, oh, we will try to say like what actually happened was when she retweeted the offer for pornography, it became a transaction for pornography rather than a transaction for crowdfunding. So it became this kind of financial moment. And we are required by our underlying payments processor to not accept and allow donation or transactions for pornography. That's part of a thing we're like a taboo list. And then the payments processor, WePay said, oh, actually we're not the ones prohibiting it. It's our Visa MasterCard network underneath us prohibiting it. So it's this kind of passing the buck of who made the rules that ultimately prohibited sex work from being transactable on the site. And so what I did and what I think was really important and my kind of training allowed me to be able to do this was to say, okay, what really happened here? Why are the rules the such as that they are? And what I learned is that basically in the kind of old system of payments acquiring merchants are able to acquire payments. Well, I'll say acquirers, meaning like the banks that serve merchants are able to kind of acquire payments on behalf of merchants according to a particular set of risk logics and risk appetites. And if you are considered a high risk merchant meaning high risk for chargeback, meaning high risk that the customer that you have is gonna say, I want my money back, then you will get charged more for your payments. So there seems to be belief. I have not seen any actual evidence. This is actually true that the selling of pornography of any kind produces a higher rate of chargebacks. And the reason for this might be that people say, like, oh, it wasn't me that bought that subscription. It was my kid or sorry, boss or spouse. I didn't make this transaction, et cetera. Or it could be that historically pornography, especially online pornography is pretty scammy and you might like sign up for, you might think you're doing a one-time payment, but it winds up becoming this recurring payment. But for whatever reason, it has received wisdom in the payments industry that if you want to receive payments for pornography, you have to pay more. But in the platform economy, everything sort of becomes one size fits all. And rather than there being this kind of bespoke risk model on an individual merchant basis that creates a market for risk in the payments acquiring system, it becomes what becomes like a way of pricing, variable kinds of transactions, becomes a one size fits all prohibition as inscribed in terms of service. There is no real way for any kind of platform to write a bespoke kind of or even variable governance system, it seems. So they just say all the things that used to be a little bit more expensive or a little bit strange or a little bit outside the norm for the way we do payments are just gonna be completely prohibited. So it's this importing wholesale without really considering it of one risk model into a new kind of risk model that created this misalignment that created what could have been a quite catastrophic situation for this person, for Eden. And indeed is a catastrophic situation for countless people who suddenly and without any real ability to predict it, suddenly lose access to their payments. So for me, I really have been interested in how people are not just denied money, like just don't have enough money but rather are denied access to the money that they have and what are the reasons, like actual reasons that that happens for. I mean, another example is like in the United States under using EBT, which is our kind of welfare cards, you can only use your EBT payment card to buy certain kinds of merchandise. So if you walk into a store, you can't buy a hot chicken, even though Richesbury chickens are a loss leader for supermarkets and are really great for, you know, some a working person who may have a family they want to feed, you know, such as most people who receive welfare, they often, you know, so you can't buy a hot chicken, but you can buy a hot chicken that has been chilled and placed in a chilled refrigerator system because that is no longer hot food, that becomes cold food and therefore you're able to buy it using your EBT card. So what interests me in kind of thinking about the kind of like social justice questions or political questions of payments is not, or of money is not just how you have money or if you have money, but how the money you have works and how the way it works re-inscribes or produces new kinds of injustices, new kinds of inequalities and thinking about those inequalities as questions of access and questions of kind of informational and communicative, you know, sticking points. Yeah, you have this really evocative line at one point in that chapter where you talk about the profound implications of what you call losing the citizenship of a transactional community. And that line really gets to the racialized and gendered sort of dimensions of what you just laid out so wonderfully well. And I was wondering if, given that you started this project in LA and you were going back and forth between Irvine and other spaces and LA itself was a space, this notion of losing the citizenship of a community of transaction of moving across spaces and moving over time. I was wondering if there's a link between migrants, migration, human systems that were part of your thinking at the time where others perhaps in your community of economic anthropology meets media studies where others working on it or how have you seen that emerge? And I asked that in part because there's this really amazing piece that you have about memory and you say money is memory. And those three words, money, memory, migration really come together in very powerful ways for me. And I wanted to ask you to reflect a little bit on those three keywords. Yeah, so when I think about money is memory, I come at it from a few different perspectives. So I think about, it's interesting that the idea that money is memory is something that occurs across many different fields of scholarship who are not at all in communication with each other. So for example, economists that kind of game theoretic economists talk about money as memory because in a kind of game theory context and kind of an economic experiment, you can either have a tally system. So like a system of keeping accounts that everyone can see a kind of memory system or you could have a money system meaning tokens that people exchange. And in a economic experiment, either way, whether you have a memory system or a money system, it kind of produces the same outcomes in gameplay. So in that sense, like money is a literal like exo memory which is a term that actually Nancy Bame, I got from Nancy Bame, a science fiction book, Nancy Bame wrote but it's this kind of collective memory or external memory system that we use to remember in a economic sense our transactions. I have, we have transacted, I have paid you, now you have the money and I don't and we both remember that that transaction has occurred. But then anthropologists who are not at all in communication with this particular stream of game theory will also write that money as memory. And they mean that, yes, it is this way of keeping track of our interobligations but they mean that in much more of a kind of sense of kind of socio, the kind of sociocultural dimensions of that. And so Viviana Zellzer and economic sociologists talk about these kind of like spheres of exchange and networks, well, they all, there's like some people, there's like, some people say networks, some people say spheres, some people say circuits, et cetera, but the way that money kind of traces the tessellations of our interobligations to each other. And then thinking about the question, I mean, I would love to kind of hear your perspective and just because you have thought so many fascinating things about this, but I'd love to kind of hear how it intersected for you on the question of migration. But I will say that many economic anthropologists have studied money systems as they relate to remittances and as they relate to kind of like development and very few, very little attention had been paid to the kinds of meaning and politics of payment systems in the United States. As though the, unless I think it's an error that, so we tend to repeat again and again as scholars, but as though economic transactions in primitive societies are more meaningful and economic transactions in the West are, so much more economic and so much more uncoupled from social aspects. And so I wanted to kind of re-socialize Western money and Northern money and demonstrate the contours of the kind of inequalities inscribed therein. So yeah, I want to hear what you have to say. I can chime in as well, but even before we get to that, I'm also mindful of the time and the career take questions. So keeping in mind that we wanted this to be oriented towards CMS grad students and other early career scholars and PhD students listening in, one of the other bits of your book that I thought was worth reflecting on a little bit was the sheer range of methodological tools you had to pull together because you were crossing across these different theoretical domains. So in one sense, as a good media studies scholar, you really pull together different kinds of artifacts and read them as texts. You do these really close thematic analyses of advertisements like credit card sort of surfaces like these that I'm holding up to the screen, but you also sort of trace process. So it's almost like I read it as a process geography kind of book, where you're going through the lifecycle of a certain kind of transaction that gets going and then you're gonna follow it through its lifestyle and along the way, you're gonna do deep dives into different moments of interaction and which institutions, which actors are then coming to play, which networks get activated and so on. So could you say a little bit about that dimension of your project? What were some of the challenges? Did you have to learn new methods or did you have to re-tool some methods to bring, as Tarleton said in the chat window, to bring this communication perspective to a very new object that media and KimKom studies has not tended to take into account? Yeah, so I mean, in some ways, I think this circles back to the question of learning about an object as a community formed around it. So I came to thinking about money at a time when a lot of people were thinking about money and kind of a lot of people were re-imagining the infrastructures of money. I mean, the term fintech basically came of age during the writing of my book. Certainly cryptocurrency and all of that emerged during the writing of my dissertation and then book. And so I was, I effectively thought of myself as an ethnographer, but I was an ethnographer of communities who were rediscovering or rather were discovering the genealogy and the history of the thing that they were interested in. So like me, lots and lots of entrepreneurs, artists, activists said, we need to re... I'm fascinated by money, I'm not sure why, but I'm fascinated by it and I'm desperate to rethink it. And so let me, now I have to suddenly learn everything about the way the Visa MasterCard network works or the way the automated clearinghouse works. And so like them, I thought, okay, how do people, how do people in this industry learn about these really boring systems? And the answer to that was they go to industry boot camps like where you spend one week doing a super deep dive in how these kind of legacy systems work and everybody else around me was either employed by a legacy system, like a big bank of Visa MasterCard, et cetera. And they were, I was literally doing the employee training that people who work in this industry do or they were learning about them because they wanted to disrupt and revolutionize them. And I was sort of there learning about the thing but also doing an ethnography of all the people around me. And then like many of the people around me, there was the opportunity to kind of discover histories. I joke that I am unfortunately, or for better or for worse, like probably one of the world's experts on the Diners Club card, which was the first third party, universal third party payment card that emerged in the 1950s and 60s. And to kind of, and so Diners Club still exists. It's more popular in some countries than in others, but it has gone through a number of different mergers and acquisitions and is now, I think, most recently owned by Discover. And it was purchased by Discover for its international network. But during many of these kind of transitions, its company archive was lost. So another thing that I've learned about is that many large companies have their own archive, have their own librarian, have their own archivist. And those can be tremendous, tremendous sources of information for thinking about the kind of history of technology and history of business. But Diners Club have been lost. At one point it had been outsourced to a company that now I think also no longer exists called the History Company, no, the History Factory, that was meant to be a steward of various corporate archives, but someone who stopped paying the Diners Club bill at some point and this kind of went off and smoke. So I wound up doing kind of, and this is something I've learned a lot about from Kevin Driscoll, who's my partner, but also a media historian, which is the kind of eBay archive, the kind of eBay histories where you set up your eBay alerts and you buy everything for a couple bucks that relates to kind of the early ephemera of the thing you're interested in. So through that, I discovered, for example, that early Diners Club cards had these kind of books. And this is actually, I have a very short piece which I'd be happy to send anybody, which is in my edited collection from MIT Press called Paid about the Diners Club, about the Diners Club, and the way that the card itself was one innovation, but really in order to find how to use a Diners Club, find a way, the only way to use a Diners Club card was to know where it was accepted. And the only way to know where it was accepted was to have these kind of guidebooks that told you where and you could look up like any town anywhere in America and know that your card would be accepted there. And so I kind of began to realize from kind of looking at the books, which I only learned about because I found them on eBay, that they were kind of the key innovation and they were the kind of key wayfinding tool for the transactional community of the Diners Club card. And so in the short piece that I wrote for the MIT book, I kind of compared it to the Green Book, so the Negro Motorist's Green Book, which helped African-American travelers navigate the segregated United States and find safe harbor while on the road. And I then discovered just by kind of pivoting into kind of more traditional historical approaches, just like newspaper archival searches that in the African-American press of the mid-century, of which there were many African-American newspapers, there was a lot of talk about how on the road, there was no way to pay for anything except through like something like a Diners Club card because there were no major bank networks, there were, you couldn't go to Bank of America on any corner and pull money out of an ATM, they hadn't been invented yet. It was pretty hard to get a merchant to accept an out-of-town check because it would be pretty hard to kind of track down. It was easy to do check fraud. And so the Diners Club card basically allowed people to travel and be accepted to kind of book places, pay for hotels, pay for rental cars, et cetera. And in the African-American press, there was a lot of talk about how African-Americans were not really able to take advantage of the innovation of the Diners Club card because they faced a new kind of de facto discrimination when they showed up to pay for their motel room and the clerk said, oh, Diners Club card, well, if you could just get cash, we'd be happy to give you a room. And so these kind of new layers of privatization on top of the kind of transactional technology of money created new opportunities for new and innovative kinds of discrimination and racism. So, and the only way I would have known about that or the only way I was able to figure that out was by kind of circulating around and around through the kind of pivoting between eBay history to more traditional forms of history. And the only way I really began to think about the Diners Club was from pulling from the kind of ethnographic ethnography of industry contexts. So you have to kind of constantly be pivoting between different kinds of approaches and just sort of, I mean, I think back to a piece I actually read in CMS, which was the Fisher, Michael Fisher and George Marcus's like multi-sided ethnography, which just encourages you to think about everything ethnographically, whether it's historical work or other kinds of like looking deeply at documents and follow threads however they need to be followed. I also began to think of myself as doing like an ethnography of PDFs because so many of the standards of these systems, whether they're like the Visa Mastercard guidebook or like any number of cryptocurrency white papers are inscribed as PDFs. So like engaging with that network of kind of non-human actors that guide these spaces was also like a really important part of my work. I'm glad you referred to Marcus and Fisher and that mode of historical anthropology and the idea that I think I read the same article too, I may have been in William Muricchio's class about multi-sidedness, not being just endlessly sort of multiplying the number of sites, but to think of each site in a very, very careful way and how that each site is implicated in a network of other forces and factors, some human, some non-human. And I guess I'll close by saying that one of the real pleasures of your book is you manage to intersect with so many different emergent subfields, platform studies, critical infrastructure studies, media industry studies, critical race studies and so on. And you manage to pull those threads into chapters as and when you need to get into certain crucial conversations that are ongoing, but at the same time, manage to stay focused on this narrative thread about transaction and that is no easy task. So I guess I'll end with this question about writing your first book. It's a monumental thing to do. So congratulations again, it's such a great achievement and to do it so beautifully is really no mean task. And so can you tell us for everybody listening and especially grad students, early career scholars make struggling their way through that first book, what were some of the challenges? What were some of the pleasures? And if you could even give us like a glimpse into those moments of sheer joy where you realize that's it finally, all these bloody years, now I get it after eight long years. Yeah, just tell us a little bit about that process. Well, I'm not sure if I have felt verdict release just that I, oh, I got it done. I mean, I got it done right. I got it done, but I don't know that I always feel that I got it done right. But I mean, I also just have to say, when you mentioned kind of the litany of emergent subfields that I draw from. I mean, a big part of that is the network of people who I have had the tremendous good fortune and privilege of being exposed to some of whom are here today. And certainly kind of Kendall Square between my CMS time and my Microsoft research time has been incredibly important to the kind of formation of my intellectual life and as it emerged in this book. And I guess that both of that happened kind of before and after the dissertation. But I would say I, in the exciting structure of the book for me or one of the exciting ways of untangling a puzzle was to kind of think about following through the actual mechanisms of transaction. So getting paid kind of processing those payments, paying and then the kind of data that emerges and test lights out from there. And then actually being able to look and deeply attend. And I could, I go on for quite some length in the book and could go on in, you know, chattering about it for even longer about the actual material processes that underlie the way transactions actually function in the kind of like baseline Visa MasterCard payment system. And breaking the book down into a chapter that chapters that examine each of those processes and really giving myself permission to not spare or to be willing to kind of give the technical detail as much of a close read as I felt they needed was really freeing. I often am frustrated, frankly, by scholarship that talks about algorithms or talks about technologies as though they were all one thing or as though like, you know, algorithms, what are they? We don't know, but they're bad, which that's nobody here. But I think that that tends to be a problem. And so like really, really digging into the technologies themselves and then exploding them out was something that, yeah, I'm glad there's, sorry, I'm monitoring the thing on the side. You know, that was allowing myself the time and the space to really unpack the technologies and treat them as though they were cultural texts and cultural artifacts, which they are, was something that I was grateful to be able to have had and I'm grateful to readers who are willing to spend the time to actually read some of the boring stuff that I find so fascinating. No, not boring at all. If anything, I think it's the richness of that detail that then allows the reader to then step back and really come to terms with the fact that it's out of these details that the social life of transaction really emerges. And what's held together throughout is what you just said, which is, we said, what becomes newly material? That's another phrase from your book that really stayed with me. And you sort of do the attention to the material dimensions of different processes, like you said, of paying, getting paid, paying somebody, when mowing somebody, something and so on, while not allowing those material dimensions to somehow over determine the social. So both of those terrains remain autonomous in your framework and you manage to do, manage to hang on to both of them without necessarily sort of making facile directionality arguments about this leading to the other. In that sense, it is, I think, an exemplar of doing the kind of conjunctural work that Stuart Hall might say, like have put everything into context, keep the two things together in one frame and see where the story leads you, right? Which allows you to, I think, be really open to new insights rather than going in and saying, this is what Venmo is doing. So yeah, I couldn't recommend this book highly enough. Honestly, this is sort of an exemplar of media and transition. All of you on this, go get a copy. Lana will, when a book tour happens, she will have to come to wherever you are and sign the book for you. I did have someone on Twitter offer to buy a signed copy of the book via Bitcoin. And then, yeah, so I'm open to that. But then in the DMs, they were like, oh, actually can I not give you Bitcoin? Because like, I don't know if you know this, but Bitcoin's pricing is like highly variable. And so why would I pay for a book? I'm like, you're about to talk. So yeah, I will take Bitcoin for the book. Yeah, I'm sure there are lots and lots of questions waiting in the chat queue that Andrew can perhaps moderate or scarred depending on who wants to take that call. But please, everybody join me in congratulating Lana again on this, on this terrific achievement. And yeah, thank you all for, you know, allowing us to do this kind of experimental chat. I hope it was a little bit, you know, I know we all have Zoom fatigue, so I'm going to go ahead and say thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you. I hope it was a little bit, you know, I know we all have Zoom fatigue, so I hope something a little bit more interactive was more interesting. And thank you so much for asking such insightful and very kind questions. Let's see, yeah, let's see. Yeah, let's see what else is there. Let's keep you with the spirit of this. Let's start with, see whether there are questions from the students first before I go to the chat list or the QA. Is that Thomas? Do you have your, is that, you raising your hand? Yes, go ahead. Hi, I'm Thomas. I'm a first year CMS grad student. And so I'm interested in, well, obviously you look at me in transition, which is what we most of us do. And I'm interested in how do you study the shift between like novelty and continuity? I feel like sometimes we're like saying everything is new. And at the same time, we're saying like everything is the same, always. Yeah, so a phrase that I had to excise from the book because I used it too many times was, but there is a longer history here. And so I do think that kind of looking at the new and then situating the new or looking at this moment of transition, which knew at any given moment. And then doing this kind of genealogical work to kind of figure out what are the necessary histories that need to be known. And then I have found it really useful. So I think about money, one of the analytics that the kind of money money as a object of study has gotten me is to think about the way money creates kind of shared futures. So we only use a form of money and accept a form of money because we believe it'll be worth something tomorrow or the next day or the next day. And that is a kind of performance of the acceptance of the authority of whatever bodies authorize that value of that money. So I might feel a lot of anxiety about the death of American democracy, but I'm still willing to accept and use US dollars as payments because I don't feel that much anxiety about it. But nevertheless, I get questions from interviewers. I've gotten questions from multiple different journalists this week about people moving all their money into Bitcoin ahead of the US election. So that kind of analytic, that kind of way that money creates a shared future or a sense of a shared future among those who use it became a way for me to kind of think about future. So how do the people who use a shared money form understand a shared past? What do they not know about that shared past? What do I need to know about the shared past to understand this moment of change? And then how does that give an object project into a future? And what kinds and what array of possible futures are made available by the object of study and the community that surrounds it? And so whatever your topic is is going to be very different, but I think whatever your topic is will yield its own ways of structuring shared pasts and shared futures and understanding these kind of like shared presence. And as long as you are able to endeavor to think analytically about all of that, you'll kind of, I think that's like a pretty useful way to kind of deal with that question. Great, thank you. Diego, I see your hand up. Yeah, thank you, Lanna, and ask me for the conversation. I have a question as somebody who is also interested in the kind of like intersection of media and economics. And so how does somebody from the US studies engage with economics? Because economics is this really well-fence field or at least it seems to be this really well-fence field that is really worth it, but the practitioners and scholars in that field. And at least in my experience, it seems to me that they see kind of like media studies as okay, there are these like scholars that they are only looking at the cultural dimensions of the economic practices, right? But there is more to it, right? I think that what I get from your conversation is that there is all this like material semiotic dimension of the practices of economics, right? And that this dimension have like actual consequences in our economy, right? But how do we show them that this dimension is important, right? That's what I keep wondering about. Yeah, I mean, I guess my answer to that, to use the language of economics is to say, what is the utility of convincing them? And there may indeed be utility. But then ultimately they kind of, what is the outcome that you want to have? Like to what extent, you know, I've definitely had the feeling that I really wanted to be more respected by the economists that I've interacted with, but I ultimately don't get anything of that much use to me from being respected by economists. And then if the question is okay, economists have tremendous power and they've been able to marshal their kind of like weird non-empirical way of doing theory into a kind of like political power. You know, maybe that's useful, but then do you have to go through them to get what you need or to do what you need to do? So I think it's like, you know, figure out what you want to get out of it and then, you know, go on from there. I will say for me, and this is unique to my case, economists, a very small group of economists are some of the only people who have historically been interested in payment systems because they're interested in two-sided markets. And so there are like people who want to geek out about payment systems who are in the field of economics and they're excited to talk to me because I'm one of the only people who shares that interest. So, and who is like reading their papers from 20 years ago. So I do think that you find common ground that you want to stand on with those disciplines and then you figure out why you want to interact with them beyond that. I mean, I don't know, I might be too early in my career to give you more of an answer than that, but I think kind of like living in and performing your confidence. Some of you will know what I'm talking about here, but I know I have met economists in my life literally who are, who I have now turned this like, there's a particular economist that I know and I turn this mantra where I say, what would, his name is not Aswin, but let's pretend his name is Aswin, where anytime I do anything in life, I say, what would Aswin do? What would Aswin expect? What kind of like privilege would this economist expect to be like dropped at their feet? And then that gives me the power to say, you know, like what, I try to use that to empower myself to behave as an economist would. So, and, you know, it doesn't always work, but most of the time it doesn't work, but it's important to kind of destabilize the kind of accepted regimes of academic authority. Kelly. Thank you for the talk. I have kind of an analogous question, which is what has been your interaction with the like tech enthusiasts, Silicon Valley dudes who want to remake payments and have, have you had any discussions about your work and do you hope to like change minds? And if so, how? Yeah, that's an interesting question. So I started, as I've mentioned, like in this space, when the space was kind of gearing up and early on, you know, there weren't that many people interested in this kind of, I mean, there were, but it was a smaller community. And so early on, I was invited to give lots and lots of talks to like fintech groups and Bitcoin groups and that sort of thing, some of which sat at the intersection of academia and activism and some of which didn't. And the, that was like a important like ethnographic opportunity for me to kind of try to figure out how to be a critical expert in this space when in fact I was quite early on in my work and it sort of speaks to the question of like empowerment and authority where like they didn't know what they were talking about either. So I could kind of like marshal my own ability to, and also really think about what could be interesting for these groups? Like what could I bring to bear? And then an interesting thing happened which is I wasn't saying anything that was like monetizable or that was like fed the hype machine. And if anything, I was kind of a hype killjoy early on and they were like, oh no, don't invite her again. And then a kind of interesting thing happened where like we all ride these like waves of hype cycles and suddenly it's like cool to be critical about these things again. And so now fortunately corresponding with my book but also unfortunately corresponding with a global pandemic, I'm now getting lots of new invitations to kind of be the kind of critical voice which they kind of now decide that they need to have. Just cool. And then the other piece is that like asking the question like sincerely asking the question like what do industries and what are activists and people who want to try to make change from one direction or another, what do they actually need to know has proven to be a really useful analytic for me. Like I found myself studying industries but the industry isn't very interested in learning about themselves. And so I had to kind of think for whom is learning about this industry interesting? Is it interesting to people? Is it interesting to users of payment systems whether which we all are? And then I had to think like maybe not really. So like what is interesting and to whom and then how do I kind of use that to kind of put it all together to create a book that is kind of interesting to someone. And so now it's an interesting thing where I think the industries are interested in hearing critique but they're also interested in hearing about history. And then I do hope that the kind of like users at large are interested in learning about how these kind of systems actually work and thinking about ways that people who kind of sit at the intersection of user and perhaps like change maker can kind of think past the kind of easy stories about like all good, all bad and kind of dig into some of the kind of details. I think one of the most important things to me to kind of communicate to at least the kind of startup community and the kind of crypto community has been to really attend to you and really think about how much human labor. And of course, you can hear traces of all the interlocutors that are somewhere in this room that I've had over the years, but that new kinds of disintermediation of financial transactions via things like blockchain don't suddenly make things happen by magic but rather when they work, if they work which they usually don't, they're the outcome of a lot of like human effort and to try to get the industry to think about how discovering hidden systems and how important they are through the process of remaking them doesn't have to mean re-submerging them as though all of the kind of infrastructural care work that went into producing them was instead kind of this like the outcome of technological magic, if that makes sense. So yeah, I think like always keeping in mind who would care and like what your different audiences are and what you can tell them and then think about and then also think about like what the key takeaways would be for the kind of most empowered stakeholders might be for you. But yeah, having to be like what do I really am I bringing to anybody has been like a really, really useful way for me to figure out what I could actually bring to anyone. Thanks. Unless I see another question from a student for the sake of, since this is recorded it's sort of my job to sort of read questions out loud just so that they get heard. The chat, by the way, is full of your fans and all sorts of, I'm not surprised all sorts of sort of enthusiastic, supportive comments. I actually sort of, do you see one genuine question there from Mary Gray, which is do you consider platforms like venue as re-socializing of money? Yeah, so if we think about Venmo. So Venmo is talked about as, you know for almost probably most of you know what Venmo is oftentimes when I talk to international audiences or you know older like adult audiences, you're adults but you know what I mean. Yeah, I have to kind of explain what Venmo is because it's something that's like very widely used among people under 30 in the United States but not at all used beyond that. And it's basically just makes payments into a social feed so you can, you attach annotations to your payment. And then you can also surveil the payments that other folks in your network are making or in public are making. So it is often talked about overtly as a payments, I mean as a social media system as the end this attempt to make money into something that is social sort of make money social. And in fact, I remember having a conversation with a very well-known payments consultant at a big payments industry trade show and she was like, you know people have been trying to make P2P kind of peer to person to person transactions happen for 20 years and who knew all it would take would be to be able to add emojis to it. And I was like, yeah, but also you're right. Like who knew that money sort of like wanted to be social and that by like allowing us to kind of surface the sociality of money would kind of make it something that would people actually wanted to do and use. At the same time, of course, when we say money is social it can kind of only be social in the kind of Silicon Valley meaning of the term. And so when you hear people in those industry spaces talk about money as social what they really mean if they're like saying oh, we're doing social payments. What we really mean is that they're doing payments whose main monetizability comes through social media data. So there's this like interesting intersection where, you know, Silicon Valley rediscovers that money is in fact social only through the process of enclosing that sociality as something that can be commoditized in one way or another. I am though, I will say and I just wanna give a quick plug to this. I am really excited about Tim Hwang's new book about I forgot what it's called but it's basically about how social data might be the next like big bubble because like there's only so many ways we can do predictive analytics to drive more advertising and that, you know, it might be kind of like the big lie that undergirds like all the systems that we like and enjoy. So I'll be very curious to see if we ultimately do have some kind of crash around that. And then, you know, what happens? How do we think about the sociality of money and sociality of other, you know, other platforms that we've invested so much of our lives in if they suddenly are discovered to be less profitable than we imagine, yeah. Yeah, and the, I mean, to Mary's question also sort of prompts the observation that the default publicness at the heart of platforms like Wenmo and many others and default publicness has been written about quite a bit, right, is that something that becomes the focus for you when it comes to thinking about both the challenges but also the real risks of that mode of publicness? Yes, yeah. And what's at stake when communities that aren't in the Wenmo ecosystem don't get, don't become part of the imaginary of Silicon Valley tech growth, right? And so here I'm thinking back to our brief back and forth about migration meets payment systems. And I'm wondering if there's, I don't know this much but I'm wondering if there's a real opportunity there to do some deep historical work where boundary zones and I'm looking at Vivek Ball's work here in a sense that when a group of migrants land on the shores of some space and when there is simply no commensurability between different forms of money that are circulating in that community, both of which happen to be marginalized within the American racial system, what happens then? So I'm wondering if that sort of deep historical work is also crucial if we are to recognize the very real limits of the imaginations of Silicon Valley, other kind of tech spaces like Accra in Kana, Bangalore India or sort of state driven initiative. So yeah, not to put you on the spot. No, well, so in terms I'll just give a quick shout out to an art piece called Public by Default by an artist named Hamdouthi Duke which is referenced in my book where she looks at kind of the humans of Venmo where and she downloads like all Venmo transactions from 2017 using their public API and uses it not to find terrorists or stop fraud or whatever but instead to kind of paint these portraits of people and the kind of human lives behind the Venmo transactions. And I think that her piece is meant to be cautionary. So it's meant to say, look at all the things I can learn about you through Venmo and hear all these compelling reasons and so easy to just change your settings. So just do it. But at the same time, the piece like really straddles this line where she shows how kind of like poignant and like real these like moments of transaction are and it perfectly for me oscillates between the very real sociality of payment and money but also the kinds of dangers of living in this like newly public way of kind of publicly doing transactions. And the other piece I wanna mention about that though is that for me in some ways the advertising pieces is the main way we think about monetizing the internet but actually the primary uses of payments data at least for payment apps winds up being operational so like predictive analytics that like the kind of eating out Xander story I told prevent against alleged fraud, alleged violations of terms of service and that kind of thing. So they wind up being these kind of like like they are used the ultimately transaction data is used to power and animate the transaction systems themselves. And so then the problem then becomes these moments when they stop working, they break down you can't access your money you can't pay with your money and so and those ruptures happen because of the data produced by the systems themselves. So I think in some ways like it's not so much that the data is or the transactions are viewable or surveyable but then like how they're used and who makes sense of them. I mean, if you think about Venmo Venmo is the most public of transaction systems. It's the only one that I know of that has like a really solid public API whereas others like Facebook and Google tend to be more like data hoarders. So like kind of what happens like what kinds of what kinds of degrees of publicity and privacy are useful if and for what ends but to your question about transnationality this isn't exact I do think I absolutely think more work needs to be done along the historical lines you described but the thing it reminds me of is two anecdotes that wound up in the book which is the way that people continue to use money systems that are based in one place even as they transit to another place. So my students always tell me about how when I teach class called money meeting technology where we lay all of this out and again and again they say it's so interesting I've heard this exact same story again and again that when I was in study abroad or when I went abroad for the summer my friends and I and my friend group had one designated person who handled the money meaning handled the money of whatever locale they were in trafficked in euros or pesos or whatever whereas we all settled up in the background using Venmo. So we were all living in the kind of this micro-transactional community and we had one kind of envoy into the transactional world around us. And so this kind of experience of being this like fumbling maladapted user of foreign money was something they didn't really get to experience because they were primarily living within the kind of safe harbor of something they understood which was Venmo and all of those Venmo transactions were settling up on cloud computers that were assigned to United States and therefore they may have left the United States but their money never did. And similarly there are with WeChat if we think about China there is a Chinese restaurant across the street from the University of Virginia where WeChat is accepted and WeChat Pay is accepted and Chinese students will look at WeChat to see the kind of moments to see the specials of the day and transact entirely with WeChat in this with this restaurant and amongst themselves. And similarly WeChat can be used at all Caesar's own casinos in Vegas. So when I was at these money trade shows in Vegas I saw large groups of Chinese tourists transacting entirely in WeChat except for with gambling because you're not allowed to use it to buy gambling chips that's the one prohibition. Fully remaining within the kind of communicative world and transactional world of China even as they traveled beyond. So I'm really interested in how payment and this kind of goes back to the diners club thing thinking about like payment as a wayfinding tool payment as a tool of geography remakes geographies in ways that don't simply map to territoriality like what does it mean to be somewhere and what does it mean to be somewhere even as most of your communications including your financial communications are happening somewhere else. So to speak. No absolutely there's a history to be told there's a story to be told about like you said with the person who handles money for all the study abroad students mediating personas perhaps who are money handlers. And I'm thinking about the grocery stores that I relied on and the grocery store owner who could mediate for me basically remittances for through the 90s which have now disappeared from a certain kind of cultural geography and the geography of urban cities with WhatsApp with WeChat and so on. So this is interesting said that that's what I meant when I said how do we recover that those kinds of imaginaries of relationships across space being sustained by networks of payments that tech boroughs in Silicon Valley in either have the interest nor the inclination to grasp that form of sociality, right? So that's why I was turning to Vivek and wondering if Bengali Harlem has stories about payment and money as a crucial form of sociality for the kinds of people who landed up in Harlem at the turn of the century, right? Anyway, sorry. Yeah, well, one thing I will say about Harlem I just wanna say one thing about Harlem at the turn of the century rather Harlem in the well Manhattan in the post-bellum period is that in the United States the state issued currency was not fully consolidated until well after the Civil War. So if you were entering Manhattan whether as an immigrant from the hinterlands in the United States or from anywhere you suddenly had to navigate all very coughiness monetary ecosystem. And David Henkin who's a historian has a really great book called City Reading that's about all the different forms of reading the largely illerate population of major cities had to do and meaning he means New York in the 19th century and being able to say, okay, this banknote is real this banknote is fake this banknote is real but it's from a bank that went out of business this banknote is actually issued from a private bank that would be good in Philadelphia but probably isn't good in New York and having to kind of end or be like this one's probably not good but I guarantee someone else will take it was a crucial way of being street smart. And I think, and this is kind of like a big takeaway that we didn't really talk about from the book is that, you know, people often ask me what the future of money is and I don't think state issue currencies are going anywhere I don't think cash necessarily is going anywhere but what I do think where we'll be seeing is a new period of monetary plurality where we will be having to negotiate many, many different forms of money both in the kind of rails the systems that power them but also like these mediated forms that they take but also the kind of tokens of, oh, it's my I need to not look at the chat. Okay, so, and so how do we live in a world of plurality? How do we negotiate that plurality? How do we deal with deprecated money forms? I underline those sentences. You say that plurality could mean your transactional life is very gated, omnivorous, constantly shifting between different monies, different communities. Yeah, absolutely. And I think learning to live with plurality will be the kind of key political question of our kind of monetary lives in the next, in the coming decades. So we have two very thoughtful questions in the Q&A. Do you guys have time to stay past 6.30 or do you need? Let's do, can we? So I should probably go for family reasons but maybe if you can just read the two questions and we can say like five more minutes but if anybody needs to go, please don't. I won't, you know, bye. Thank you so much for coming. Yeah. Thank you. I have to disappoint in 6.30 but the questions, one is from Radu. It's when studying money, I tend to go to the heavy emergence of microtransactions in video games. How can we think of this the same way we regard dollars in society as a way of getting us a product or good or are they a commodity in themselves? So that's one microtransactions. Second question, thanks for a great talk. Sorry for the long question. In exploring money as media, I was wondering about your take on the similarities of oppressive economic sanctions impacting citizens of certain countries, denying them the use of global financial system and the new global social media excluding and de-platforming certain people and views. This idea of legitimized exclusion on the international scale, targeting millions of citizens denying them access to the increasingly centralized forms of transaction, whether it's money or knowledge and of course for access to knowledge one needs to engage in financial transactions as well. I think, I mean, those are both super interesting, really astute questions and I think they really speak to the heart of what I'm trying to argue in the book, which is especially this idea of legitimized exclusion and de-platforming via access to money and financial systems kind of speaks to this idea of not having access to money or to be able to pay and be paid is as good as not having money at all. And so like really, really developing a political imagination around the rails of money rather than just around the economic distribution of money is really important. And to kind of speak to the Diego's question, that's where we come in. Like we don't need to be economists. We need to study the things that we study with the tools that we have because we have really important things to say and economists would never think about the way that it's not simply the sanctions themselves via economic relationships. It's the way that sanctions are enacted via PayPal visa, MasterCard and like banks that do the work of transactional communication via what we call media systems via what we call technology systems. So like look for that, like look for how are we have the ability to ask questions that are being obfuscated or simply treated as like treated as something lesser than the big picture, but reality like that's kind of where the inaction of these policies actually live and what that looks like. So yes, absolutely, I think and I think that that's really complex and we need to like spend a lot more time thinking more about it. And similarly, I mean, I think we could say that micro transactions and video games are actually quite similar. Like what are the ways that new monies are designed as products and the kind of like both the rails of them that transmit them around the information systems that allow them to exist. And then like what are the kind of political economies of money themselves? So if we can use something like micro transactions to inquire after the political economy of a new money form, we can develop an apparatus that allows us to apply that to living with global money plurality as it relates to economic sanctions in the way that they're deployed via particular infrastructures. So yeah, I think oddly enough those are two questions that kind of hung together. I guess. You were brilliant in sort of wrapping them up that well. So yeah. But I mean, the final thing I'll say about writing this book is that it's kind of like a first book on a topic and that you have as economics economists would say like a first mover advantage but there's so much more work to be done and kind of like opening it up for more conversation is like a huge part of what I hope the work of the book is. Lots of unanswered questions. Thanks so much. Thank you. Yes. Thank you all. Thank you, Aswin. Yeah, thank you so much. This is so wonderful to have you both back. Yeah, it was really fun. Hopefully in person sometime soon. Yeah, and I hope this format was, you know, was interesting for you guys. So all right, take care everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye.