The veil of economy: electronic money and the pyramidal structure of societies

Electronic money is a compound of currency and technology which takes its rise around 1970 while benefiting at the same time from the miniaturization in electronics and the democratization of informatics. Electronic money covers the payment cards with magnetic tape, chip cards, the contact-less payments by card, mobile phone, or tablet PC, and the logical moneys (often called ‘virtual moneys’ such as the Bitcoin, the Litecoin, the PPCoin, the Ven, the Linden dollar, the ‘gold’ as in the digital game World of Warcraft). These forms of electronic moneys have three common properties: the cryptography, the network, and the privileges. Cryptography conditions the ways to access the money. The network represents the kind of regulation of electronic moneys. The privileges differentiate the use of electronic moneys. Each form of electronic money does not match these three conditions identically because all are not equipped with the same technologies and the same related services. Nevertheless, the presence of these three properties within all forms of electronic money leads to a better understanding of how such functionalized money deeply changes our view on modern society. Indeed, whereas the economic standard model considers money as a veil hiding economic reality, the case of electronic money lets us think, on the contrary, since the swell period of the early 1970s, of the real economy as veiling socio-economic reality, which has to be considered as a kind of a Ponzi scheme. While this scheme becomes the core of societal reality, the economic laws and their sociological as well as political equivalents, functional differentiation, and democracy are no longer the pillars of modernity. They hide this reality as fetishes enabling its order.