CHAPTER 12

Money Talks, Plastic Money Tattles

THE NEW SOCIABILITY OF MONEY

Alya Guseva & Akos Rona-Tas

THE NATURE OF MONEY has become a center of lively interdisciplinary debate. Economists view money as a central element that fulfills three main functions of a modern capitalist society: universal payment instrument, source of stored value, and means of accounting. Classical sociologists from Marx to Polanyi pointed to the corrosive effect that uniform, fungible, impersonal, and universally equivalent money had on society. Simmel and Weber described money as the ultimate representation of economic rationality and the means related to detaching economic transactions from personal relationships. Both believed that the impersonality and anonymity of money and its quantitative, mathematical form are closely linked: modern money removed transactions from the messy world of concrete personal relationships into the realm of abstraction and engendered rational calculation. But while Weber warned that impersonality and infinite fungibility of money (one unit is completely replaceable by another of the same value) turned qualities into quantities, producing fully fungible, replaceable actors, and stripping human interactions of much of what was human about them ([1921]1968: 635–37), Simmel viewed the anonymity of money as essential for individual freedom, as it liberated people from the judgmental and constraining bonds of one’s family, clan, community, and society ([1900]1978).

Contemporary anthropologists and sociologists subjected these classical accounts to a multi-pronged critique (Zelizer 1994, 2000; Fine and Lapavitsas 2000; Ingham 2001; Maurer 2006; Hart 2007; Dodd 2014). Keith Hart challenges the classical arguments of money’s supposed universal impersonality by giving examples of non-Western money and by broadening the conception of money to include not only commodity exchange, but also money as personal credit (Hart 2007). Thus he draws attention to a variety of money issuers: not only nation-states, but also credit-granting banks. Furthermore, Bill Maurer (in chapter 13 of this volume) and Nigel Dodd (in chapter 14 of this volume) underscore the challenge that recently appeared alternative currencies, such as Bitcoin, pose to the monopoly of states and banks on issuing money and controlling its circulation. Viviana Zelizer (1994) takes a different approach. She directs our attention away from money issuers and toward money users, exploring how active, user-initiated meaning-making around money (earmarking and the like) breaks down the concept of fungible, dollar-is-a-dollar money, giving rise to multiple monies. Her work originally focused on “special monies”: nonmarket or non-mainstream money (domestic money, local currencies), though the argument applies also to the meaningful differentiation of market money. Any form of budgeting, including that used by businesses, depends on similar sense-making classifications and restrictions on the money flows in violation of the fungibility principle.

In addition, Zelizer argues that rather than destroying sociability, money is tightly connected to social relations. Money talks (in keeping with the “special monies” idea, the motto should really be “monies talk”): for instance, money can reveal a lot about the nature of a sexual liaison: Is this a romantic relationship? A paid service? Something in between, like compensated dating or a sugar daddy arrangement (Swader et al. 2013; Rossman 2014)? Is this a committed relationship or a hookup? A quid pro quo? The meaning of money and of social relations are co-constituted as part of a relational package, the nature of the relationship having an effect on the meaning of the payment—a gift, a fee, an advance, a bribe, or an award—and vice versa.

While earmarking and relational packages could account for the creation of new, sometimes even nonmonetary, currencies, the overwhelming emphasis in most of these arguments is on cash. (Indeed, the importance of Zelizer’s argument is precisely that even cash is not as impersonal and fungible as classical theorists lead us to believe.) The emergence of new forms of borrowing and paying—cashless, digital, or plastic money necessitates a conversation about the ways in which these monies are different from or similar to cash and personal credit. While 85 percent of retail payment transactions in the world are still cash-based, cashless payment have already taken over in much of Europe, North America, and Australia (80 percent of retail payments in the United States, 85 percent in the Netherlands, 86 percent in Australia, 89 percent in the United Kingdom and Sweden, 90 percent in Canada, 92 percent in France, and 93 percent in Belgium in 2011).¹

In this chapter, we argue that money in its recent digital, immaterial incarnation has acquired what we call a new sociability. In contrast to cash, any transaction involving plastic money always leaves a permanent trace, entangling its issuer and users in a relationship, no matter how small or one-off the transaction. If money talks, plastic money tattles, and this has far-reaching implications for actors at both macro and micro (household) levels. On the one hand, it opens enormous possibilities for surveillance and social control; on the other, it raises the stakes for those plastic money users who value anonymity to attempt obscuring and disrupting this new sociability. In the next section, we discuss the theoretical implications of immateriality and re-embedding delivered by plastic money. Then we turn to a set of empirical examples to illustrate how plastic money enhances the ability of nation-states to govern and control their citizen-cardholders, focusing on the cases of Russia and China. We complement this analysis with the discussion of plastic cards’ potential effects on domestic economies, suggesting that the new sociability of plastic money could be informative (or revealing) not only to states and card lenders, but also to spouses and parents.

New Sociability of Money: Immateriality and Re-embedding

Parting ways with the classical conception of impersonal and fungible money, economic anthropologist Keith Hart views all money as “a source of economic memory for the community,” arguing that “one of money’s chief functions is remembering” (2007:15, italics in the original). With cash, this requires the separate act of account keeping. With plastic money, this remembering is digital and inseparable from money itself. Plastic money, as Nigel Dodd emphasizes, possesses an enhanced ability to convey information “about its users that is not present with traditional forms of money, such as cash,” which he links to the increased traceability of digital transactions. This trail does not only pertain to “the amount changing hands and the flow of funds involved, but also [to] the preferences and routines of transactors themselves” (Dodd 2014:

294).

Plastic money is simultaneously immaterial and more personalized than cash. Immateriality of payment cards stems from the fact that the card itself is not the money, but only a tool to access it, more akin to the wallet than to the banknote. Behind each card is a row of numbers making digital money invisible, untouchable, without weight or smell. The dollar bill is printed on paper made of cotton and linen, weighs one gram, and can carry germs and residues of cocaine. It can be rolled, folded into origami, stashed in a safe, or slipped in a handshake. Digital money is digitized information and cannot spread staphylococcus. It can be manipulated, moved, recategorized, analyzed and subjected to any mathematical function imaginable with superhuman speed and a scintilla of human energy. Parting with digital money is easier than with palpable greenbacks: people spend more when paying with cards than cash, an additional reason for merchants to be interested in accepting cashless payments.2

Yet, despite the immateriality, cards link the payer to the transaction in a very personal way, recording the date and the place of the purchase, including the name of the merchant, city, state, the amount and a transaction reference number. In the United States, every transaction processed by the two largest card networks, Visa and MasterCard, receive a merchant category code (MCC), a four-digit number describing the type of business receiving the payment, often in uncomfortable detail. For instance, the MCC for gambling establishments is 7995, for wig and toupee stores, 5698; for dating and escort services, 7273; and for bail and bond payments, 9223.³ All that is transmitted digitally, obliterates the materiality of money, and re-personalizes transactions in ways that would have astonished classical theorists. In a complete break with any other form of money used in the past, digital money now has a unique photographic memory of unlimited capacity, registering the history of its movement, every transaction, and every single actor involved.⁴ Digital money is truly “a ‘memory bank,’ a store allowing individuals to keep track of those exchanges they wish to calculate (Hart 2007: 15). It is this ability of digital money to preserve the details of economic transactions, to capture our geographic movements, and to infer our tastes and routines—in other words, the social context of our economic lives—that we call the new sociability of money.

This new sociability is the feature of all cashless payments, including mobile and Internet payments that may feel very impersonal (Singh 2004), or new currencies like Bitcoin, which is hailed precisely for preserving anonymity of its owners and users. A digital transaction can never be as anonymous as cash, even if some aspects of payment can be obscured so that the payer is very difficult to identify. In the case of Bitcoin, although exchange partners’ identities are cryptoprotected, Bitcoin’s distributed ledger—the blockchain—“provides a verifiable, time-stamped record of transactions” (Maurer, in chapter 13 of this volume) that is constantly updated, publicly available, and cannot be unilaterally manipulated, thus making it tamper-proof. Even prepaid chip cards that can offer anonymity to payers cannot do the same to payees; and the time and place of the transaction are also recorded.

Traceability, of course, is the other side of personalization. If impersonal money is anonymous and liberating, re-personalization delivered by plastic money improves transparency, increases traceability, and, therefore, has a potential of enslaving its users. Dodd clearly sees the implications of re-personalization that digital money brings about: as “a device for remembering [it] cannot be divorced from the criticism that it is also a vehicle for political and commercial surveillance, above all, as long as the technology involved is controlled by corporations and states” (Dodd 2014: 296, italics in the original).

Plastic Money, Traceability, and Enhanced Governability of Consumers and Citizens

The two key institutional actors involved in building and operating markets for plastic money are private card companies and nation-states (Rona-Tas and Guseva 2014). Both are interested in exploiting the enhanced sociability of digital transactions, albeit in different ways. Private actors—Visa and Master-Card—are mainly interested in fraud detection and the marketing of their respective card brands. They also offer loyalty and various redemption programs in cooperation with merchants. Visa and MasterCard do not dispense cards directly but instead authorize banks to issue them and also to acquire merchants who accept the cards for payment. The credit card companies receive the data necessary for the authorization, processing, and the clearing of the transactions, but they have relatively little personal information on cardholders apart from the transactions. Issuing banks, on the other hand, accumulate all kinds of personal information, such as the Social Security number, address, age, and gender of their cardholders. Issuing banks often maintain additional accounts opened by the cardholder, and they can use card transaction data for risk management and marketing of other financial services, such as mortgages, auto loans, additional (co-branded or loyalty) cards, insurance policies, and so forth. They can also sell the information in aggregate form to other vendors.

The primary interest of nation-states in accessing digital payment data is enhanced law enforcement: combatting economic crimes like money laundering, tax evasion, and the breaking of economic sanctions, or tracking the financing of terrorist organizations (Goede 2012). In a handful of countries, like China and India, the state has been a key player in building national payment card systems (UnionPay and RuPay, respectively), and it has a deeper reach into the digital payment data than in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many European countries, where the card market was created and has been operated by large private corporations, such as Visa and MasterCard. But even if the state is not directly involved in the card business, it still keeps an overriding interest in tracking the use of electronic money. For instance, states can enlist digital traces of plastic money transactions in solving crimes or settling civil disputes and can subpoena payment records as evidence, similar to the manner in which telephone records are used. Private companies that own the data must comply with law enforcement requests. Coercive states can also draw on payment data in tracking down oppositional political activities. What corporations can do with payment information is regulated in different countries in different ways.5

Russia has been toying with an idea of creating a national payment system based on a domestic brand since at least the mid-1990s. At the time, Visa and MasterCard still had a limited presence in the Russian market, which was dominated by several competing and often incompatible domestic brands. The main motivation behind a state-led initiative was to offer a less expensive financial product, but even at that point some lone voices, like the populist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, favored digital money as an instrument of state surveillance and control (Zhirinovsky and Jurovitsky 1998). Anonymous cash, he argued, was the root of all evil—corruption, prostitution, and the drug trade. Wholesale elimination of cash and mandatory transfer of all transactions onto traceable plastic money would be akin to suffocating the black market. At that time, the national payment card initiative did not come to pass, largely because of the lack of political will and resources on the part of the state. The project was revived more recently and gained full steam in 2014, following Western sanctions against Russia for annexing Crimea. As a result of the first wave of sanctions, Visa and MasterCard blocked cards issued by several Russian banks, affecting about two million cardholders. The Russian state retaliated by passing a law that required Visa and MasterCard to place security deposits equal to 25 percent of their daily turnover (by different estimates, between $1 billion and $3 billion for the two companies) with the Central Bank to prevent any future service interruptions. The next step is to start issuing cards of a national brand named Mir (the “World”) card featuring a blue-colored image of the Eastern hemisphere on a red background.

The Russian state has been undoubtedly inspired by China, which in 2002 introduced its own national payment card, UnionPay, currently the largest card brand in the world with more than four billion cards issued, soon to surpass MasterCard and Visa combined. The Chinese state has been very clear from the very beginning that payment cards are not a consumer product, but a key component of the country’s national financial system, as well as a tool to control and improve citizen’s behavior (Rona-Tas and Guseva 2014). Despite overall market liberalization and China’s recent membership in the World Trade Organization, the financial system remains under tight state control. The state has built its own consumer database, which is used both to assess creditworthiness and to fight crime and corruption, by, among other things, identifying tax evasion through linking tax and spending records. The state is currently overseeing the construction of the national “social credit system,” which takes an expansive view of individual creditworthiness, defining it as personal credibility, honesty, or character. Payment information is complemented by data on legal compliance and violations, and by social and moral history. The goal is to promote a virtuous, “sincere” citizenry. While many of the details are still unclear, the social credit system is supposed to be a tool to increase “sincerity” in government, by keeping tabs on the behavior of civil servants; in commercial relations, by improving honesty in commercial credit; and in social relations, by making people more virtuous in a wide variety of areas from health care, birth control, and hygiene to energy saving and online behavior. Last but not least, the system is intended to record judicial probity to advance integrity in legal and criminal matters.6 Here, the new sociability of money is mightily and uncomfortably enhanced by linking payment data to other kinds of information about individuals. This system promises to strengthen the state’s capacity to monitor financial flows, and more generally, control and correct the behavior of citizens by detecting and punishing violations.

India has also developed its own national card system, RuPay, a portmanteau of the name of the Indian currency, the rupee, and the word “payment.” RuPay cards were launched in 2012, originally with the purpose of offering a cheaper alternative to the multinational cards and bringing the majority of Indians into the banking system. But RuPay soon merged with Aadhaar, the unique twelve-digit-number-based national identification system that started just three years earlier and was designed primarily to deliver government services. Aadhaar was to deliver a single, universal, and unique means of identification for all Indians, using biometric data (fingerprints, iris recognition, and written signature) as opposed to a card. Aadhaar is expected to create the possibility of linking data on individuals, who up until then had a wide variety of local identification documents, and it was planned to allow eligible Indians to receive various government benefits by simply supplying their fingerprint or iris scan. In principle, Aadhaar would have made it possible for people, especially the poor and illiterate, to pay with their biometric scans. The Aadhaar program proved to be unsuccessful for logistical reasons, as the biometric technology was too prone to failure. As a result, the government decided to roll it into the RuPay system, where instead of biometric scans, the RuPay-Aadhaar card would be used to identify customers. The typical card includes the name, picture, and RuPay and Aadhaar numbers of its holder, plus an expiration date and the name of the issuing bank. The fusion of RuPay with Aadhaar makes the debit card India’s universal ID. While the Indian state is not as clearly coercive as the Chinese or Russian states, the possibilities for surveillance and control are considerable.

Meaning-Making at the Statistical versus Individual Level

Digital transaction data are generated at an astonishing speed that vastly outpaces any human actor’s ability to process them. Both the state and private corporations are busy making sense out of this vast and ever-growing amount of data. Meaning-making can focus on individual transactions or on aggregates. Law enforcement is interested in particular persons or social networks of related individuals. This clinical approach requires the building of a narrative by documenting sequences of transactions and paying attention to precise amounts, times, places, and recipients of the money—all the information that is attached to electronic payments but generally unavailable for cash transactions. This clinical approach is causal: it attempts to establish reasons and motifs. Meaning-making as an idiographic pursuit also depends on the context, and can link other information about the individual in question. Countries’ privacy regulation differs in the extent to which payment information can be linked to other data.

Corporations are mostly taking a statistical approach to meaning-making. Marketing experts comb through enormous quantities of transaction data looking for statistical patterns. These can then be used to target consumers in a more customized manner. This marketing work is heavily dependent on interpreting correlations and complex statistical models and seeks to capture well-defined groups or segments. The statistical approach is predictive. It needs no story or explanation as to why consumers behave the way they do.

But the statistical approach is not limited to private companies. Public agencies, too, are increasingly using data-mining techniques, primarily to screen vast numbers of cases and find those that deserve individual scrutiny. At the same time, corporations also use the clinical approach to attack fraudulent card use as they police their own operation. Fraud detection is interested not in the tendency, the typical, the “normal,” but in the unusual, the exceptional, the outliers (Bolton and Hand 2002). Public agencies that analyze payment information to catch tax cheats operate under a well-defined method (catching big spenders whose tax records then can be contrasted to their spending) and can take their time. Fraud hunters, on the other hand, who must work in real time, have to rely on highly inaccurate statistical predictions to be followed up by contacting the legitimate cardholder to determine if fraud actually happened.

Fraud hunting is mired in a paradox. To keep marginal costs low, corporations strive for volume, and this requires standardization of products and processes. Standardization produces the enormous data heap, which helps them in monitoring transactions and fraud prevention, but it also offers economies of scale to fraudsters. As payment systems can process hundreds of thousands of cards in seconds, thieves can steal data on hundreds of thousands of cards with a single break-in. In the arms race between hackers and the security measures by the card systems, the latter must constantly stay vigilant.

Privacy advocates bemoan both corporate and government intrusion. Simmel was right: the impersonal nature of cash engenders liberty, at least liberty conceived as the absence of restrictions (Berlin 1961). Plastic money and the new sociability it brings enables large institutions to monitor, control, manipulate, and attempt to predict behavior of citizens and consumers.

Plastic Money as Domestic Money

Immateriality of plastic money and the ability of payment cards to leave electronic traces may be changing things at the household level, too. For example, immateriality makes cookie jar–type earmarking impossible. Unlike cash, digital money is just a number, and while it can be divided—budgeted—into different categories of spending, unless these categories are represented by different bank accounts, the boundaries of different categories, unlike the cookie jars, are completely fictitious. Still, modern consumer banking offers ample opportunities for digital earmarking. Spouses can have separate accounts that can keep “their” money as separate as they like. Or they can set up a joint account, which can be replenished regularly based on a particular formula that designates the portions and the sources that feed the account. They can also set up separate accounts for savings, retirement, college tuition and adult children’s living expenses, household expenses, or vacations. All of these accounts can be connected to particular earners or to specific sources of income.

Contemporary Russian households present an interesting case for studying the effect of immateriality and new sociability of plastic money on household budgets. Starting in the late-1990s, there was a gradual countrywide push to transfer salaries, which in Soviet times were paid exclusively in cash, to direct deposit schemes and plastic (debit) cards (Guseva 2008). This change typically involved bilateral employer-bank agreements to transfer salaries of all employees of a particular company to the same bank. As a result, working spouses in Russia today typically have their salaries directly deposited to separate accounts, often in different banks. This includes students and retirees, whose benefits were also transferred from cash to plastic. In a recent set of face-to-face interviews,7 Russian husbands and wives, the vast majority of whom have separate bank accounts, reported a variety of household money management arrangements: from claiming that all the money is commonly shared (in some cases, this was indeed so; in others, husbands had sole access to family savings and investments, and the wives had no choice but to trust them as family benefactors) to stating that they maintain separate budgets, to reporting that they shared some money but kept the rest separate. We did not find a single couple that immediately pooled all the money into a joint account.⁸ In fact, where joint accounts were set up, they were intended for household allowances for nonworking spouses or spouses who earn very little compared with their husbands and whose earnings were trivialized—earmarked largely for the wife’s personal expenses rather than common household needs. The move from cash to plastic money had a lasting effect on the couples’ perception of their finances. In some families, separate bank accounts enabled a more complex set of distinctions between mine, his/hers, and ours, allowing spouses to conceal their earnings or spending from each other. Even in those households where spouses generally professed egalitarian views about marriage, including the equal sharing of household resources, they had to actively make sense of the structural separateness of their finances, imagining and making claims of the money as shared and coming from the same pool.

When cash is stored at home, as it used to be during the Soviet times, both spouses are usually free to see and touch it (and earmark, and use, when needed). Banking strictly regulates access to money: accounts are locked and can be made accessible to some, but not other family members. This is because financial instruments, including plastic money, are personalized, issued to a particular individual and protected from being used by anyone other than the authorized users. Moreover, cards do not only provide access to money, but they also, in the case of multiple cards attached to one account, capture the spender, the amount, and, if it was an electronic payment, also the vendor. Any movement of money to or from the bank account, unlike the jar, the wallet, or one’s trouser pocket, leaves a trace, which is visible to the bank and to the account owner. And this is where plastic money use in households gets really consequential. The literature on household money management has framed plastic money as an “individualised medium for managing and spending money” (Pahl 2008: 582). On the one hand, this allows spouses with separate payment cards to “conceal spending from each other, or to maintain a higher standard of living than their partners” (Pahl 2008: 578). This exemplifies the inherent paradox of plastic money: cards are issued to and used by individuals, yet households are collectives that would bear the costs of overspending or overborrowing incurred by individual card-carrying members. If, on the other hand, a couple (and even their children) have their cards linked to the same account, “there will always be a main card holder, who is responsible for paying the bill, and a second holder. The purchases of the second holder will be known to the main card holder” (Pahl 2008: 582)—and transparency raises the possibility of control.

Thus, just as in the case of nation-states, plastic money could be an instrument of surveillance in the household. A household allowance to a nonworking spouse and an allowance for living expenses to a child attending college, when extended on a card, are a tribute to the power of the primary cardholder (breadwinner) or parent: purchasing behavior becomes transparent, subject to scrutiny and post hoc analysis and accounting. The early credit cards—like Diners Club cards, were marketed precisely for their ability to monitor spending and simplify accounting for expenses of traveling businessmen by their bosses (Simmons 1995). Modern card issuers, too, offer accounting analysis as part of their customer service: cross-time and cross-category comparisons can aid in financial (self-)control. Made transparent, one’s purchases can evoke blame if money comes short, or shame when buying is perceived as frivolous, and, more generally, traceability allows for broad surveillance, particularly in cases of card charges in unlikely places or unexpected geographic locations. Bill padding or pocket picking, to which the nineteenth-century housewives resorted in order to obtain some cash for themselves (Zelizer 1994) are no longer possible because cash is not involved; accounting is precise and numbers flowing through the card system are inaccessible to household members for manipulation. Anonymity and liberation pace Simmel are no more. The only way to evade control is to first head to the ATM and withdraw cash.

Thus, while plastic money always tattles to card issuers, card processors, and merchants (and some of those can be agents of omnipotent nation-states), whether or not it conceals or reveals in the household depends on many factors and on the intentions of its users. Because of its ability to form social memories, plastic money can be used by husbands and parents to control purchasing behavior of wives, children, or other dependents who receive allowances through secondary cards attached to accounts that husbands and parents control. In some cases control can be evaded: if allowances are extended on debit cards, dependents can easily withdraw cash and, wittingly or not, conceal their future purchases. And in other cases, control simply will not be activated despite the structural possibilities because of the values on which the relationship is built, or the concerns about destroying trust and causing adversity.

This brings us to our last point. Plastic money is a tool—of payment, saving, sometimes of status, sometimes of dependence and control, and other times, of independence and opportunities. In the household, it can tattle, but it can also help disguise (card issuers and processors, however, know it all). Whether or not it does the former, the latter, neither, or both (a philandering husband can conceal his gifts to his mistress paid by a personal card, but at the same time monitor his wife’s spending of the allowance extended through a secondary card attached to a joint account he controls) depends on the many aspects of the relationship. The word that was evoked by several Russian spouses we interviewed was “trust.” A fifty-year-old woman, married for more than thirty years, explained, “A person can tell his PIN number to other family members, and everyone will have access to his account. Or he can keep the PIN a secret. But as a rule, in families where the relationships are good and trusting, people do not conceal their PINs.” Thus, sharing one’s PIN may even be viewed as symbolic of a particular kind of—trusting, honest—relationship.

As household money ceases to be anonymous, individuals may strategically use this new sociability to their advantage to conceal or control. Plastic money can foster individualization of finances for those spouses who value independence, or it can enable control over dependent family members in cases when individuals do not fully trust others to make good consumer choices. Even if individuals do not seize on these opportunities, they are still faced with the necessity to make sense of and adjust to this new reality. That is why egalitarian-minded couples strive to imagine all their money as shared and contained in a common pool despite the separate bank accounts, or suggest that sharing one’s PIN with others is symbolically important for maintaining good family relations.

Conclusion

The anonymous, impersonal cash that classical theories of sociology considered to be the dominant means of economic transactions and a defining feature of modernity may turn out to be a relatively short historical affair. The arrival of plastic or digital money with its new sociability requires new ways of making sense of money. If money talks, as Viviana Zelizer (1994) insightfully demonstrated, plastic money definitely tattles. Its personalized nature and the infrastructure that is required for it to circulate produce a constant flow of data that offers new and enhanced opportunities for the monitoring and control of others. States and private actors claim ownership over digital financial flows and strive to use them to their advantage, but they are also expected to protect them from breach and unauthorized use, raising concerns over privacy and individual rights. There is an ongoing debate about how much control we are willing to cede to the state and other institutions in return for guarantees of safety of the data that plastic money transactions generate. On the level of households, individuals have an opportunity to be quite strategic in whether they want to take advantage of this new sociability to ensure their privacy from other family members or enact surveillance and control over them. Thus, states, businesses, and households must take up the challenges brought about by the arrival of plastic money and its new sociability in multiple ways. Studying this variation promises a fertile and productive line of sociological research.

Notes

1.  MasterCard, “Cashless Journey,” white paper, September 2013, http://newsroom.mastercard.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Cashless-Journey_WhitePaper_FINAL.pdf.

2.  American Psychological Association, “How You Spend Affects How Much You Spend: Credit, Scrip and Gift Certificate Purchases Found to Be Higher Than Cash Buys,” September 7, 2008, http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2008/09/credit-cash.aspx.

3.  See Visa, “Visa Merchant Data Standards Manual,” 2015, https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-merchant-data-standards-manual-2015.pdf. American Express has more information about cardholders than Visa and MasterCard.

4.  The American payment card with its antediluvian magnetic strip technology can store only a very limited amount of data and can only give but not receive information. Chip cards, currently a standard in Europe and Canada, can hold more information, and mobile payment technology, where one uses a cell phone and not a card to pay, can use the memory of the smart phone along with its GPS, and not only send, but also receive data.

5.  Other countries that also developed their own payment cards like Denmark (Dankort), Norway (BankAxept), Germany (GiroCard), or Belarus (BelCard) represent a wide variety of ways that states can be engaged with plastic money.

6.  “State Council Notice concerning Issuance of the Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014–2020).” The original and the translation by Rogier Creemers can be found at https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/planning-outline-for-the-construction-of-a-social-credit-system-2014-2020.

7.  Data collected as part of the education-research initiative led by Dr. Dilyara Ibragimova of National University–Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Semi-structured interviews conducted in 2011 with 156 heterosexual couples, married or cohabiting, interviewed separately (non-random sample). Interviews were recorded and transcribed. For more information, see Alya Guseva and Dilyara Ibragimova, “Economic Resources and Power in Contemporary Russian Households” (unpublished).

8.  There is plenty of evidence that suggests there is no direct correlation between having a joint account and fully sharing money in the family (Burgoyne and Morison 1997). Likewise, having separate bank accounts may result in a variety of arrangements of money management in the family—from truly separate and independent accounting to largely shared (Ashby and Burgoyne 2008).

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