Finn P. Brunton (University of California, Davis)

Small Change: Micropayments, Content, Utopia

Micropayments — "low-value electronic financial transactions" — have always been the future of online culture, from hypertext to cryptocurrency. For some, this future was a utopian promise of a new kind of distributed resilient creative economy, the realized promise of the internet as an engine of democratic content; for others, a different kind of utopia, a libertarian prospect of a post-national network purged of the state; for still others, a dystopian threat to foreclose a truly free future of information and culture for all. As I trace the history and technology across several eras of digital infrastructure, I hope to convince you that the idea of the micropayment was itself a kind of mediator: a space for negotiation over what both the internet and culture itself are, and what they could be, carried out through a debate about the properties of a kind of money.