Dimensions of the asset economy

Abstract

The papers collected in this Special Issue are part of an ongoing series of conversations and workshops that take as their starting point the observation that the current conjuncture has been, and continues to be, deeply shaped by the logic of assets (some of these conversations were held, in person, at the University of Sydney, but they have continued in various online fora throughout the pandemic). From a certain angle, the claim that asset logics are a prominent aspect of our time could be seen as almost banal. These days it’s almost impossible to open a newspaper or social media account without being exposed to a list of news items about various new asset economies – bitcoin, NFTs, and a range of other financial inventions. All these are products of complex, somewhat unfamiliar technological design strategies, and they sit in an economic grey zone: nobody seems to be able to say exactly how they should be classified according to traditional economic categories. They are not simple commodities (in Marxist terms, they don’t seem to have any discernible usevalue separate from their exchange-value), nor are they money in any straightforward sense (with some exceptions, you can’t use them as general means of payment). This means that they have, almost by default, been classified as assets. But this re-classification doesn’t really resolve the mystery surrounding these new economies. After all, we normally think of assets as property titles or investments that are held because they are anticipated to generate returns in the future. With many of these tokens or symbolic chains, it is not at all clear why we should expect them to generate returns in the future. If they are assets, they are very unfamiliar kinds of assets. The conceptual puzzle that these strange assets pose is symptomatic of wider social changes. Their advent has entirely upended the notion, intuitively appealing to so many of us and the cornerstone of orthodox economic theory, that money is a simple measure. We are used to thinking (and orthodox economic theory is premised on the formal elaboration of this intuition) that there exists a world of objects, and that money is a more or less arbitrary, neutral convention that allows us to commensurate these heterogeneous objects. The new asset forms that are receiving so much attention these days undermine this distinction: they make it essentially impossible to separate object and measure, commodity and money. If it was at one point in time possible to imagine that we had an economic world that consisted of stable economic objects on