Philos. Technol.
DOI 10.1007/s13347-017-0261-7
R E S E A R C H A RT I C L E
Towards a Philosophy of Financial Technologies
Mark Coeckelbergh 1 & Quinn DuPont 2 &
Wessel Reijers 3
Received: 29 March 2017 / Accepted: 27 April 2017
# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017
Abstract This special issue introduces the study of financial technologies and finance
to the field of philosophy of technology, bringing together two different fields that have
not traditionally been in dialogue. The included articles are: Digital Art as ‘Monetised
Graphics’: Enforcing Intellectual Property on the Blockchain, by Martin Zeilinger;
Fundamentals of Algorithmic Markets: Liquidity, Contingency, and the Incomputability
of Exchange, by Laura Lotti; ‘Crises of Modernity’ Discourses and the Rise of Financial
Technologies in a Contested Mechanized World, by Marinus Ossewaarde; Two Technical Images: Blockchain and High-Frequency Trading, by Diego Viana; and The
Blockchain as a Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies, by Wessel Reijers and Mark Coeckelbergh.
Keywords Financial technologies . Philosophy of financial technology .
Ethics of financial technologies . Cryptocurrencies . Algorithmic trading
This special issue introduces studies of financial technologies and finance to the field of
philosophy of technology, bringing together two different fields that have not
traditionally been in dialogue.
The authors of this introduction, and the editors of the special issue, are listed alphabetically and made equal
contributions.
* Mark Coeckelbergh
mark.coeckelbergh@univie.ac.at
Quinn DuPont
isaac.q.dupont@gmail.com
Wessel Reijers
wreijers@adaptcentre.ie
1
Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Universitätsstrasse 7 (NIG), 1010 Vienna, Austria
2
Rutgers University, Rutgers–New Brunswick, 7 College Ave, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
3
ADAPT Centre, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland
Coeckelbergh M. et al.
In recent years, the emergence of innovative financial technologies, such as algorithmic trading, online banking and payment, and cryptocurrencies has left a decisive
mark on our contemporary world. In popular culture, questions have therefore been
raised concerning the impact of technologies on our financial world, ethics, and
politics. How do high-frequency trading algorithms impact the occurrence of Bflash
crashes^ (sudden stock market crashes that happen partly due to irregularities in
algorithmic trading), and how can we regulate these potentially Bimmoral^ practices
(Smith 2014)? How could the blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies
such as Bitcoin, change the relations between governments and citizens, and our notion
of contractual obligations (Shubber 2016)? What role does algorithmic trading and the
development of Bfinancial robots^ play in the world of big money (McGee 2016)? In
parallel, the acknowledged importance of financial technologies has produced a revival
of academic studies into the workings of the financial world across many different
disciplines, such as anthropology (Graeber 2011; Maurer 2015), sociology (Dodd 2014;
Ingham 2004), and political economy (Bjerg 2014; Karlstrøm 2014). These studies
have produced a rich tapestry of new scholarship, including investigations into the
diversity of monetary technologies, the global adoption of new payment methods, and
the impact of digital technologies on economic and political relations.
The revived interest in the workings of money and finance represents a recovery
from what Ingham framed as Bone of the most serious casualties^ of the separation and
fragmentation of the social sciences (Ingham 2004, p.197). Prior to this new multidisciplinary interest, money and finance had been the almost exclusive domain of
economic sciences, tied to and constrained by established economic models. Indeed,
it was principally the ruptures preceding the 2008 financial crisis, which the economic
sciences failed to predict or understand, and the devastation of the crisis itself, that
prompted renewed interest in this thematic. Suddenly, scholars were trying to understand and open up the black box of money and finance to lay bare the specific cultures,
power structures, and materialised models of the world it contained.
This special issue presents five articles that interrogate the connections between
financial technology and philosophy. The authors investigate novel conceptual frameworks for understanding financial technologies, discuss specific financial technologies
such as Bitcoin and high-frequency trading systems, and offer novel historical and
social perspectives to think about the role of financial technologies in our social world.
The included articles are: Digital Art as ‘Monetised Graphics’: Enforcing Intellectual
Property on the Blockchain, by Martin Zeilinger; Fundamentals of Algorithmic Markets: Liquidity, Contingency, and the Incomputability of Exchange, by Laura Lotti;
‘Crises of Modernity’ Discourses and the Rise of Financial Technologies in a
Contested Mechanized World, by Marinus Ossewaarde; Two Technical Images:
Blockchain and High-Frequency Trading, by Diego Viana; and The Blockchain as a
Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies, by Wessel Reijers and Mark Coeckelbergh.
The thematic of money and finance has as yet only been scarcely touched upon in
the field of philosophy of technology, despite the fact that money and finance represent
an intricate and significant part of our technology-saturated lives. We engage daily with
financial technologies, in visible and sometimes invisible ways, through e-commerce,
cash withdrawals from networked ATMs, and, more opaquely, the management of
subjectivities through biopower produced by secret financial algorithms (Pasquale
Towards a Philosophy of Financial Technologies
2015). Despite the insistence, pervasiveness, and ubiquity of these technologies, only a
few philosophical inquiries have been aimed at understanding the interplay between
our monetary, financial, and technological worlds. In line with Simmel’s claim that
money is Bthe purest example of the tool^ (Simmel 1900, p.225), we believe that
inquiring into the intricate relation between money, finance, and technology from a
philosophical point of view leads to important new insights, both for the purposes of
understanding our contemporary world, and for practical insights to create a more
responsible and informed ethics and politics of money and finance.
This special issue testifies to the kinds of insights about financial technologies that
can be gained through the lens of philosophy of technology. First, it sheds new light on
the ontology of financial technologies—on their status as mediators of human interactions and the ways they shape the meaning of the concepts that capture our social
reality (such as liquidity, financial flows, and the circulation of money). The papers of
Lotti, Viana, and Reijers and Coeckelbergh contribute to this type of novel insight
concerning financial technologies, each exploring the ontology of financial technology
in an innovative way. Second, this special issue demonstrates how seemingly unrelated
aspects of social life, such as the arts, commerce, and law become entangled through
the use of financial technologies. Zeilinger discusses art’s entanglement by exploring an
emerging blockchain technology used to monetise digital art objects (such as digital
images). Third, this special issue illuminates the importance of considering financial
technologies and their impact on the history of ideas. Ossewaarde elucidates this
connection, linking the philosophical thought of classical social thinkers Comte and
Tocqueville to the contemporary debate on financial technologies and their role in the
Bcrises of modernity^.
Work on the nexus between finance, financial technologies, and philosophy may
also benefit social theorists, media scholars, and philosophers who study the impact of
technology and new media. The contributors to this special issue show that work on
money, finance, and computation can stimulate the exploration of new avenues in the
ontology and politics of technology. These works draw from and complicate existing
philosophical investigations of social phenomena, such as information (Floridi 2011),
media and mediation (Verbeek 2005; Zielinski 2006), social ontology (Searle 1995),
and artefacts (MacKenzie 2008; Winner 1980). Revisiting these theories also requires
the contributors to this special issue to look beyond traditional domains for inspiration—for instance, to the domains of art, media, and algorithms. Moreover, this special
issue introduces a number of less common authors to the field of philosophy of
technology, such as Flusser, Simondon, and Ricoeur. Through financial technologies,
the contributors leverage these theorists to introduce new ways of thinking about
technological mediation, information, and networks that ought to be central to the field
of philosophy of technology.
Searching beyond the traditional domains of philosophy, Zeilinger explores the
terrain of artistic intervention into financial technologies through an analysis of the
blockchain platform Monegraph. Monegraph is an emerging monetisation platform for
art that attempts to create artificial scarcity for digital objects. To do so, digital art
objects, according to Zeilinger, are financialised and entered into the capital flows that
Btraditional^ (physical) art has long been part of. He addresses the ways that the
traditional tools for managing scarce resources, namely intellectual property law
(copyright), have been both flexible and yet deficient when tackling the emergence
Coeckelbergh M. et al.
of digital art objects. To address these perceived deficiencies in law, the Monegraph
platform positions itself as a kind of better version of Digital Rights Management
(DRM), which, like the DRM systems that inspired it, works to Bstand in^ for copyright
law. This technological inflexibility, however, worries Zeilinger, especially when
manifested in a series of Bsmart contracts^ immutably running on the blockchain.
Zeilinger believes that while Monegraph’s stated intentions are good (to create value
and income for digital artists), the way that the system enters digital art and artists into
existing (and problematic) capital flows curtails the real emancipatory potential for
digital art (as a potential site of resistance). Moreover, the birth of Monegraph curtails
different or future blockchain systems that could (and should) critically intervene into
these financial imperatives, rather than creating more efficient onramps to the further
commercialisation of art.
Focusing on algorithmic trading, Lotti offers a response to the intrusion of computational methods in finance. She philosophically investigates the concept of financial
liquidity, a central concept in contemporary market-making and a term that is often
used by those who defend practices of algorithmic trading. Connecting the ontology of
computation with Simondon’s philosophy of technology, Lotti then proposes a new
definition of financial liquidity. Lotti argues that financial liquidity should be understood as ontogenesis, Bthe manifestation of the coming of the being of algorithmic
markets^. Lotti’s re-conceptualisation of liquidity and markets does not just make a
contribution to ontology and metaphysics, it also has implications for thinking about
the politics of finance. In developing this new philosophical approach, she offers an
interesting synthesis of being and becoming, as applied to both finance and computation. She also suggests that this gesture may support efforts to problematise price as an
adequate measure of financial value, and instead seeks a different measure of worth. By
resisting the neoliberal naturalisation of markets, Lotti proposes a way to see markets as
inherently techno-social ensembles, which implies that markets (and their financial
tools) can be changed, perhaps leading to Bthe invention of new socio-economic
organisations^. As such, Lotti contributes to ongoing thinking about the nature (or
rather, artificiality) of markets, and demonstrates how work in metaphysics is necessary
and politically relevant to this broader topic.
Ossewaarde connects discourses about financial technologies to three distinct histories in the crises of modernity. The first discourse is framed by the works of Comte
and Tocqueville, with the crisis of modernity marked by disruptions and social
revolutions such as the French revolution of 1848 and the Industrial Revolution.
Characteristically, Comte views technology as a liberating force (the triumph of
Newtonian science), while Tocqueville views it as a potentially weakening and
enslaving force. The second discourse is marked by the ruptures of the twentieth
century—the Great Depression of 1929 as remnants of the First World War, and leading
up to the terrors of the Second World War. Liberal scholars such as Titmuss defended
and legitimised the Keynsian welfare state as a response to this crisis, relying on the
positive impact of industrial technological development. Radical scholars such as
Sorokin, however, argued that technology paralysed the creative powers of the mind.
The third discourse points to the financialisation of the world, with the financial crisis
of 2008 as the decisive moment of rupture. Modern liberal scholars see technologies
such as algorithmic trading of derivatives as liberating people from government control,
while radical scholars criticise the crisis of democracy that resulted from this
Towards a Philosophy of Financial Technologies
financialisation as the loss of political alternatives in the wake of the hegemony of
finance. Thus, Ossewaarde presents us with a historical framework that helps makes
sense of the relations between laudatory contemporary accounts of financial technologies and their pessimistic counterparts, and how these can be linked to a discourse of
the crises of modernity.
By connecting the ideas of the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser to the study of
financial technologies, Viana introduces a novel approach to understand highfrequency trading and blockchain technologies. Central to Viana’s inquiry is Flusser’s
concept of the technical image. The technical image has three central properties: (1) it is
generated by random particles that depend on underlying code, (2) it results from the
activity of technical objects and systems, and (3) it implies the presence of human
operators (Benvisioners^) who determine the meaningfulness of the image. The technical image, therefore, differs from the traditional two-dimensional character of the
image, and the one-dimensional, linear character of text, by being non-dimensional and
synchronous. Viana links this conceptual development of the technical image to
theories of money. In existing literature, the ontological status of money has long been
debated, sometimes thought to be due to the circularity of commodities (e.g. gold), or
the linearity of text (e.g. ledgers) (for a full description of these debates, see Dodd
2014). Instead, by reading new forms of money and financialisation as Btechnical
images^, Viana argues that the digitalisation of finance is a non-dimensional form of
money, which instead results from the calculation of present-value counterintuitively
based on virtual, expected value. He uses this conceptual framework to analyse highfrequency trading, showing how it is based on algorithmic processes that create
technical images of prices. He also uses the framework to analyse blockchain technologies, showing that the algorithmic processes underlying the blockchain network create
a technical image of Bsedimented^ time, made present in the form of virtual coins in a
digital wallet. Through these two examples, Viana produces a framework for understanding the enigmatic character of important contemporary financial technologies.
Reijers and Coeckelbergh 1 develop a framework of Bnarrative technologies^ to
discuss the social and political dynamics of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. This framework also suggests an ethics of financial technology by
problematising the ways financial technologies mediate relationships between people.
Re-reading Ricoer’s social theory in Time and Narrative, the authors argue that
blockchain technologies are fundamentally ‘narrative’, in the sense that they rely on
the social reality of a collectively held, socio-technical imaginary. In drawing this
comparison, Reijers and Coeckelbergh tease out the symbolic mediations of value (as
a feature of money, and a driver of social meaning). Using the example of
cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies, Reijers and Coeckelbergh also develop
an ethics for financial technology. Deploying the framework reflexively, a series of
hermeneutical possibilities emerge as a way to read latent social inscriptions. To do so,
Reijers and Coeckelbergh operationalise the middle part of Ricoeur’s theoretical
triad—the Bconfigured^ time that runs through the (narrative) Bplot^. With their
distinctive and characteristic narrative plots, cryptocurrencies and blockchain
1
The article of Reijers and Coeckelbergh has been subjected to the regular editorial processes of Philosophy of
Technology and excluded from the editorial process of this special issue. Also, the relevant parts of this
introduction have been written by DuPont, after a personal review of the paper.
Coeckelbergh M. et al.
technologies alter our capacity to ethically use them and intervene into their design.
Rather than being faced with the possibility of working through somewhat more
authentic Bfirst-order^ narrative plots, these financial technologies Babstract^ away
the Bactual^ characters and events, leaving Bremote^ second-order activities that are
mere representations. In doing so, the complex interplay of actual entities is potentially
forgotten and uncritically replaced with another second-order narrative instead.
As these articles show, this special issue marks the start of a discussion rather than its
critical and conceptual conclusion. Financial technologies will continue to play a large
part of our lives, and will continue to pose new ethical, epistemological, and ontological challenges daily. The contributors to this special issue had a daunting task in front
of them, and rose to the occasion by revising and responding to the reviewers’ helpful
feedback, and accommodating our editorial interventions. In being so willing to
entertain our initial exploration of the thematic, Philosophy and Technology, its Editor-in-Chief, Luciano Floridi, and Springer show that editors and publishers are open to
critical new approaches. The special issue editors, Coeckelbergh, DuPont, and Reijers,
would like to extend our gratitude and thanks to the authors, reviewers, and journal
editors that made this work possible.
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