Follow the Money – Of Analogue Values, Digital Currencies and the Quantification of the World

A classic format of performative knowledge sharing: around 100 experts follow the traces of money on a grand scale, on a small scale and in their own lives, showing how cryptocurrencies meddle with banks and states and how the loopholes of marketability are closing. The “market for useful knowledge and non-knowledge” is a place for exchanging knowledge, an archive and a reading room, a stock exchange and a counselling service all at the same time.

Money generates, transforms, destroys ties between people and people, people and things, things and things. This has (almost) always been the case. Acceleration is increasing, the market ticks in real time and trades with the future: nowhere is the digitalisation of the world more striking than in the economic sphere. Cryptocurrencies are replacing bank accounts, alternative payment systems are challenging the power of states, which in turn are trying to counter the competition from global technology and platform corporations.

The total virtualisation of reality promises its equally total commodification. Everything – real and virtual objects, memories, feelings, care – becomes a potential carrier of value, a possible object of speculation, a token. Money is a relational tool. It creates relationships: of debt and guilt, of dependencies, of prosperity and poverty. It rationalises the world in an irrational way. It is used to compare the value of things, activities, relationships, but also of people. Money is the face of capital, fetish, metaphor and machine, threatening and desirable.

In an arena running on the rhythm of administrative time, 90 experts from the fields of art, activism, theory and myriad of everyday careers will present their expertise: What actually is this strange medium of money that has been argued about for at least two and a half thousand years? The market for useful knowledge and non-knowledge traces the developments of money, looks at what it makes possible and what it does by adopting the leitmotif of investigative journalists and marriage swindlers: Follow the money!