crossposting from the MoneyLab blog at the Institute of Network Cultures website; Interview by Geert Lovink, July 7, 2026
German media theorist Sebastian Gießmann has written an accessible book on the history of the credit card. In INC circles he’s known as one the organizers of MoneyLab6, which took place in Siegen in March 2019. As the book was written in German (info here), we conducted the email interview in English so that more could find out about his research. Back in 2016 I did a similar interview with him on his impressive cultural history of networks, which eventually came out in 2024 in English with MIT Press, entitled The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832.
With great ease, Gießmann takes the reader through the US industrialization of debt, from the 19th century credit reports that would judge clients on character, capacity and capital to the post-war Diners’ Club card and the invention of the magnetic stripe encoding. The story continues with the rollout of ATMs and the market dominance of Visa and Mastercard. A special chapter is dedicated to Eurocard and the failure of Europe to come up with viable alternatives. It’s interesting to read how the introduction of the chip on the credit card coincided with the rise of online and then smart smartphone payments. This all culminates into the current push for a cashless society with ID provision in online payments and the proposals for the digital Euro (which Sebastian Gießmann spoke about at during the INC Exit Fest session on digital sovereignty).
Geert Lovink: You describe 60+ years of development of the credit card as a US tool of banks to create a large group of consumers with credit card debt, paying high interests, to a medium that is part of a digital online payment eco-system. What happened to the ‘buy now, pay later’ aspect? Is massive credit card debt still a US phenomenon? Has the ‘disappearance’ of plastic into the smart phone made any difference there? At first hand, one could say that the smartphone is making paying even more easy. How are customers identified these days that lack the 3Cs, character, capacity and capital?
Sebastian Gießmann: ‘Buy now, pay later’ is today’s ‘appified’ sibling of conventional credit card business models. While Europeans will associate it with Klarna, cultures of quick mobile credit are also a feature, and quite possibly a bug, of usage cultures in Kenya’s Silicon Savannah. Let us not forget that the American credit card with its deep integration in national banking systems has served as a global model for pretty much every other consumerist digital payment system around. Even PayPal has not managed to disrupt it fully. While credit card debt is still a major issue in the US, other aspiring societies like South Korea have seen their own crises based on accelerated circulating credit. Basically, most credit cards appeal to middle class consumerist desires on a worldwide scale, while provoking debt practices within the lower classes. That logic is still very much intact with the disappearance of plastic into digital wallets, and the infrastructural extension of credit scoring into platforms and social media.
GL: Does your title refer to Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book? You opted for a sociological approach, not a philosophical angle. Is there one? Ronell’s interpretation revolves around Heidegger’s hesitant attitude and his saying that one doesn’t call but is being called. For outsiders Germany is known for its cultivation of cash money. I bet that, statistically speaking, Germans are as much into digital payments as other Europeans. Is it still useful to underpin a collective hesitance to use plastic with a techno-hermeneutic?
SG: I had Avital’s book title in mind, sure. But Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo’s Book of Payments is somewhat closer to what I am doing with my credit card book. Theoretically, it makes the case for media histories that are grounded in economical and infrastructural practice. I tend to call it a Braudelian platform study. Because just like the Annales school it takes slower cultural rhythms and series of economic practices into account for histories of computing and computation. The first chapter contains an abbreviation of my forthcoming theory of media practice, too.
For this book I ventured deep into Science and Technology Studies and Social Studies of Finance. While making the final brushes for publication I was surprised how Latourian the narrative had become. To me, the plastic credit card is the last “immutable mobile,” and the first app alike. The smaller the mediators, the more powerful their mediations become. Susan Leigh Star’s and Geoffrey Bowker’s works on infrastructures and boundary objects have been a key inspiration. None of these references are sociological in a conventional way. Social Theory, History and Economic Anthropology meet Media Theory, that’s more like it. And there’s still a lot of techno-hermeneutics in here. I really enjoyed crawling into the 1970s digital data materialities of the magnetic stripe, for example. The “smartness mandate” of 1990s smart cards is another thing if you dig bureaucratic writing technology. And once the credit card becomes payment infrastructure for the Web, payment is getting more stacked, largely intransparent, and black-boxed anew. We still need more techno-hermeneutics of financial technologies.
Let’s not forget about the Germanic, Austrian and Swiss love for cash. It is indeed statistically fading in actual payment practice. Yet, as an imaginary it is very much alive. This is a somewhat contradictory situation: We are yearning for cash while it is fading. My local bakery was a stronghold until the start of 2026. Now, they are now offering cashless payment to keep the customers coming.
GL: Mollie, Adyen, bunq, and Finom are some of the Dutch fintechs. How does their story relate to never ending dominance of MasterCard and Visa, also in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe? What’s the German media theory perspective on this? Throughout your book you emphasized that Europe missed out, for instance with Eurocard, which was sold and integrated into MasterCard in 2003.
SG: Yes, Europe had it all. From 1968 to 2003, Western Europeans were able to use eurocheque, EC cards, and the Eurocard as mobile means of payment. I was the first researcher to look at the Eurocard files at Deutsche Bank’s Historisches Institut in Frankfurt. The Mastercard takeover of this private infrastructure has been a tragedy. It took them 25 years to finally convince the Europeans to sell it. This long-term approach was a platform economical strategy in the making. It is the way Big Tech still works as its own mode of too-late-capitalist political economy. A lot of the payment standard the world still runs on – EMV – came out of Europe: the smart cards, the administrative procedure, the translation between currencies. While the E in EMV stood for Europay, it would now rightfully be called MV only – M for Mastercard and V for Visa.
Looking at current Fintech developments in Europe, this standard making power is almost completely missing in the private sector. Fintech, of course, runs on a lot of technical standards and protocols. Yet only Klarna has a somewhat pan-European leverage. There’s a lot of fragmentation into national systems of digital payment, like Swish in Sweden or Twint in Switzerland. I would really like to know more about Dutch fintech and its Verflechtung with big fintech! Right now, Wero tries to overcome national specifics to compete with PayPal. It is coming mainly out of a joint initiative of Dutch, Belgian and German banks so far. But unlike the Eurocard, Wero rather serves as a conduit for the apps of the cooperating banks. So, there’s no central app and thus a week common identity. Participation depends a lot on whether one’s bank has already agreed to offer Wero.
If you ask me, theorizing Fintech and/or digital money itself has not been a particular strength of German media theory. The best current contributions on this come from Anglophone media studies. Think Lana Swartz, Rachel O’Dwyer, Michael Dieter, Nate Tkacz and Bill Maurer. My approach, however, has some qualities of what some people might still think of as ‘German’ in media theory. However, the historical and anthropological approach in German media theory and research on cultural techniques is quite French, as I have shown in my network history The Connectivity of Things.
You’ll also find that the credit card book pays its dues to Marcel Mauss’ The Gift, which was originally conceived as a theory of contractuality. Media materialities and infrastructures, however, are now a global concern. Plus, theories and philosophies of (financial) media as practical accomplishments take their cues from pragmatism, interactionism, and STS. But even if one decentres the Germanic theory imaginary, my theoretical-empirical program remains quite radical. I prefer to think of media as an ongoing co-operative accomplishment of bodies and practices, objects and infrastructures. This is what makes them into cultural techniques in the first place. To me, there’s no way back after one has made a “practice turn”, which needed media/economy relations as its proving ground and media ecologies as its counterpart.
GL: In 30-40 years the virtualization thesis took command. Saskia Sassen explained how real-time trade between global cities exploded national boundaries, while Jean Baudrillard approached the hypergrowth of global finance from the semiotic angle. The liberation of the capital signifier no longer had any roots in real production or value creation on the ground. You do not mention the credit card system as part of that floating signifier process, often associated with ‘globalisation’, except for the 1971 decoupling of the US dollar from the gold standard. How do you look back at these 1990s theories? You do refer to Fernand Braudel and his longue durée thesis.
SG: I have always been fond of Manuel Castells thesis that diagnosed a “culture of real virtuality” in network societies. And Saskia Sassen modified her diagnosis on globalisation in the 2008, rethinking the paradox of the national with all its obsession for “territory, authority, rights”. With ‘digital sovereignty’ and current geoeconomic struggles we are back in this domain, which we never really left. The credit card book was written with geographies of finance at the back of my mind. It thus moves from the US to Western Europe, from Western to Eastern Europe, to Asia and specifically China –– to return to the US, its big fintech economies and the current authoritarian slide in the final chapter. I gradually realized that this was the geography of finance that an East German media theoretician could track and cover. However, we do need more decolonial Global South accounts on fintech to counter the US and Chinese hegemony!
Your semiotic question is harder to answer because it brings us back in the Western financial hegemony. In his history of debt, David Graeber wrote a final chapter with the enigmatic title “1971 – The Beginning of Something Yet to Be Determined”. In 1971, the American credit card got socio-technically standardized for the first time. The co-incidence with the collapse or rather the giving-up of the Bretton Woods post-war order is striking. Losing the reference to gold and creating datafied references of accounts, bodies, persons, and credit happened in parallel. Yet, payment and debt always have a legal and contractual component. So instead of floating signifiers of debt, we gradually got into a world of databased monetary interaction. Again, there’s hardly anything virtual about this material-semiotic monetary regime if you think of it as legal and contractual. If Bart Simpson gets into debt, he’ll get a phone-call from his bank’s credit department first. Burying one’s card does not help, either. You’ll get the repo men taking away your furniture in the end.
GL: We both collaborated here, as part of the INC MoneyLab network. Even ten years there was still a promise of crypto and blockchain becoming an alternative, sustainable, parallel payment system. The 2008 global financial crisis sparked off many debates, prototypes and innovations, all aimed to overcome the morally bankrupt Wall St. banking system. In my view, the right-wing techno-libertarian wing highjacked the cryptosphere and turned it in a hoarding based ‘digital gold’ environment and steered it away from digital payment. This further strengthened established credit card monopolists. Towards the end of the book, you mention that what’s left of the crypto craze are tokens and tokenization, for instance inside Apple Pay. What’s the legacy of crypto, besides Trumpcoins?
SG: Tokens are a thing now, aren’t they? I was not expecting to live through a period in which digital media become as unspecified as tokens were in Mesopotamia. A token can be a new store of value, and it can become an encryption technology (like in the case of Apple Pay’s tokenisation effort). It is at the techno-linguistic heart of generative AI and its operative accounting, too. New monetary infrastructures and the re-personalisation of money go hand in hand, as Rachel Dwyer has shown so aptly in her book on Tokens. In future hindsight, one legacy of crypto could be the start of this tokenisation wave. Other than that crypto has given us strange new ways of making data immutable, so they can represent value publicly. Besides physical cash, all money is data money now.
The crypto question is thus a question of power. Who gets to shape these infrastructures to premediate their public use? 20th century payment systems had a somewhat conservative and liberal ideological core, which has been superseded by libertarian and right-wing tendencies that started with Peter Thiel’s and Elon Musk’s roles in early PayPal. The cryptosphere has mainly upgraded this to become an extractivist, planet-burning, too-late capitalist disaster. Here, virtualisation really took command at a high collective material price: We’ll all pay for its ecological devastation. Donald Trump’s and his family’s role in all this is as weird and corrupt as it gets. Throughout stablecoins, crypto assets are getting normalised even more. While payment has long been neglected in crypto, compared to its speculative uses, it is now back on the table with stablecoins. My hunch is that this is less glamourous and more dangerous at the same time.
GL: What are the lessons learned regarding alternatives to credit cards? What should be on the agenda of MoneyLab in 2026? Since 2022 there is the ghost again called inflation. Is taxing the rich something we should start building fintech apps for? Where do you see speculative energies and debates that want to overcome the dreadful rechtwing populism that is so dominant in Europe today?
SG: Over sixty per cent of transnational payments in Europe now rely on Visa and Mastercard. Obviously, that consumerist duopoly needs to be challenged. PayPal has a stronghold in European online payment markets, too. Apple and Google rule the mobile wallet game. Europe has become a province of digital payment that consists of several national provinces with specific market setups like in the Netherlands. Cash use is declining further after the Covid-19 pandemic. When I got asked to take part in a Bundesbank workshop on the future of cash in 2022, I first declined politely: “I am an expert on cashlessness, not on cash.” Yet, this was exactly what people were looking for. Everybody at the workshop agreed that the Digital Euro would be the next cornerstone for the future of cash.
Ever since then, I have become a critical friend and advocate of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) that shall provide us with digital cash. Admittedly, the rather abstract CBDCs are a real stretch for the triple-A activist, artistic and academic MoneyLab tradition. The Digital Euro is a legal-technical creature that comes with the massive paper trails and techno-specifications of European politics. Yet, it would be the first democratically justified digitalisation of payment that creates new public infrastructure. MoneyLab must have a say in that as part of the European civil society! Right now, we are in a good position to do so. After being stalled since 2023, the EU lawmaking process is finally back on track. The European Central Bank will start its Digital Euro pilot in 2027. So, we can finally lay our hands on something like a D€ app, and start testing our CBDC imaginaries to make them real in 2029: “Dance the ECB, swing die Staatsfinanzen …”
And you are right, inflation has really increased pressure on everyone, including the affluent middle classes. Credit cards used to remedy that effect, while taking the indebtment of the lower classes into account. While CBDCs could be a new medium of cooperation for societal change, that progressive momentum has been lost with the massive financial industry lobbying against the Digital Euro. Yet, it can really be an instrument of financial inclusion! The right-wing populists and extremists hate it, which is a very good reason to support the D€.