Bill Maurer: Sovereigns, Cooperatives, Publics: Central Bank Digital Currencies as a Debate over Intermediation

Bill Maurer, Ph.D., is dean of the School of Social Sciences and professor of anthropology; criminology, law and society; and law at the University of California, Irvine. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the money’s artifacts and technological systems, from cowrie shells to credit cards. He directs the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion and the Filene Center of Excellence for financial technology. A Filene Fellow, he is currently conducting research on AI in consumer financial services, social relations between human and artificial agents, data cooperatives and data governance, and blockchain technology and law. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and served on the Board of Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Science at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. He has worked with numerous government and industry partners, from the Federal Reserve to Intel, and has contributed to fields as diverse as numismatics and human-centered design. He received his BA from Vassar College and his MA and PhD from Stanford University.

In this seminar, Bill Maurer will question how to assess central bank digital currencies when public trust in central banks is at a nadir, and institutions of all kinds are held in suspicion by large numbers in the formerly politically stable industrial democracies? Where far-right "sovereign citizens" decry a potential panopticon into and repressive force over everyday transactions, central bank researchers, in the main, see CBDCs as fulfilling central banks' commitment to money as a public good. Blockchain experiments form the backdrop of these debates. At issue is a question over intermediation: who does it, whom it serves, whether and why it is cast as necessary, or parasitic, and how discourses about intermediaries shade into longstanding anti-Semitic theories about money and control over its supply. There are other social organizational models for directing resources toward investments, however: the cooperative model institutes intermediation as a collective and democratic process, more transformational than transactional. Based on interviews with credit union professionals, this talk explores the political contours of the debate over CBDCs and blockchain on the heels of a pandemic and a global recession, and the effort to enact alternative social imaginaries in the wake of political polarization.