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Date: 1998-11-10

Digicash: Ein Nachruf


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q/depesche 98.11.10/3
updating 98.11.5/3

Digicash: Ein Nachruf

Fort, schnödes Mammon/denken - her mit dem Trost der
Philosophie. Nun, da sich Digicash in Agonien windet & unter
dem Konkurs-Paragraphen Elf gleichsam eine geschützte
Werkstätte geworden ist
Der unten angeführte Nachruf stammt von einem bekannten
Skribenten der voreilig schon totgesagten Nettime-List.

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Failure is interesting.
Felix Stalder
Much more than in success stories it is in sad failures where
the gory mechanics of development break through, scattered
pieces lying around open, available for inspection to anyone.
No gloss of "evolution," "market success," "superior
technology" obscures the view on the vectors of forces, the
pulls and strings that shape the events.

The most important point to be learnt from DigiCash's
troubles is the utter contradiction of any techno-determinist
view, or its milder, more fashionable version according to
which technology is developing according to some inherent,
independent trajectory.

What DigiCash's problems bring to the fore is that technology
is much more than just technology, a mere set of tangible
and intangible artifacts. If that was the case, DigiCash would
fly miles high, because it is a beautiful, elegant, socially
desirable technology. But it's flat on the ground because it
has been particularly weak at associating with its
technological proposal all the other elements that are
necessary for transforming a technology from an idea into
something that actually works.

In the case of DigiCash, this would have been, most of all,
banks and users. But neither banks nor users are Alices and
Bobs, as envisioned in Chaum's blueprints. In the real world,
they have their own interest, their own inertia, their own
idiosyncrasies which need to be reflected in the technology
they are to be attracted to it.

It might very well be the case that DigiCash was too good a
technology, too precisely thought out and over-developed.
When it encountered real human beings, real institutions,
real on-line behaviour this made it impossible to change the
technology to reflect those different interests, not because it
wasn't good enough, but because it was so well constructed
that nobody dared to fiddle with it.

In this sense, a strong but inflexible technology can be a
major impediment in technological development, because
technological development is to a large degree about the
mutual and simultaneous constitution of multiple elements:
the technology under development; institutions supporting the
technology; society incorporating the technology into its
routines; and culture making sense out of what is happening
and integrating it into a larger context of who we are as we
relate to the technology. None of these elements can simply
determine others, nor is any simply determined by others.
They are all in a process of constant adjustment. Many of
the major new technologies have undergone series of deep
changes under the influence of multiple non-technical factors
shaping its history, just think of the history of radio.

A motley crew of different forces, ideas and interest needs to
be incorporated into technology in order to make it
acceptable, that is, make it work. The true innovators are,
more often than not, not the brilliant inventors, fully immersed
in the technology and only the technology, but
"heterogeneous engineers" people who manage several areas
at the same time, able to translate from one into the other.
This takes time, because not all elements change at the
same pace. Artifacts are usually rapidly replaced, but that
doesn't mean that much, since they are only one, arguably
small, aspects of what technology is all about. Which is one
of the reasons why change is never discontinuous, despite all
the millennarian rethoric surrounding the Internet.

The other important myth that can be easily debunked
looking at the story of DigiCash is the 'invisible hand' of the
market and the supposedly pitoval role of 'consumer choice'.
These concepts might be adequate if introducing a new
technology was about putting new artifacts out and then see
who picks them up. But the mutual adjustment of factors that
have sometimes a very slow pace of change requires deep
pockets and sustained efforts. In the case of electronic
money, it requires extremely deep pockets since the product
is technologically, economically, legally, politically, socially
and culturally so complex.

Looking at the current field of electronic money, only heavy
hitters are left over. There are the smart card behemoth
alliances -- Mondex and VisaCash -- which are backed by a
significant share of the financial industry. Pockets don't come
any deeper than this. And still, even they have massive
troubles coordinating all the different aspects that, together,
make a technology work. Mondex has just rescaled
significantly its implementation in Canada. Not even the most
wealthiest institutions can simply control technology (as
political economy tends to suggest).

On the other end, micro-payments are being promoted by
IBM and Digital/Compaq, companies that can also mobilize
very significant resources. By the time when these
technologies appear on the 'market' most of the major
decisions will already been made.


relayed by
Felix Stalder <stalder@fis.utoronto.ca>

via
nettime-l@Desk.nl

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published on: 1998-11-10
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