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).