Duckbucks: Many people working in financial technologies believe that technology is politically neutral, simply a set of tools — or even a positive force for liberty or equality. Your work pushes back on that. How so?
Barbara Brandl: In sociology, as in every branch of the humanities dealing with technology, it’s an old piece of wisdom: You can’t really separate the technology from the intentions that built it. To give you an example, if you look at credit cards — most of your readers won’t see them as digital finance, but in my view, the first wave of financial digitalization was credit cards. And most of the revenues are now coming from interest or overdrafts. This changed in the 2000s: before, the main revenue source was interchange fees; now, it’s overdrafts.
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