Koray Caliskan – författare

The cryptocurrency world has transformed in a few short years from a niche subculture to a parallel economic universe, reaching a market capitalization of more than $2.5 trillion in 2021 before plummeting in 2022. For their advocates, cryptocurrencies represent a revolution of world-historical significance. To critics, crypto is more of a speculative tool than a true currency. How do tens of thousands of financial actors make these new monies? What forces give cryptocurrencies their value—or take it away? And what does crypto’s spectacular ascent reveal about the nature of money? In this groundbreaking ethnographic analysis of crypto economies and their global markets and communities, Koray Caliskan offers an inside view of how cryptocurrencies are made and traded. He argues that cryptocurrency should be understood as “data money,” a historically novel money type, created as the right to send data privately over an accounting infrastructure called blockchain. Drawing on two years of fieldwork among global cryptocurrency communities and in crypto markets, Caliskan makes visible the production principles of cryptocurrencies and explores how crypto exchanges work from within. He explains why and how we have been misunderstanding, underregulating, and improperly taxing crypto exchanges and actors. He also proposes a radically new way to make sense of new finance and its actors. An invaluable book for all readers seeking to understand cryptocurrency, Data Money sheds new light on a profound transformation of finance and its possible future trajectories.

The cryptocurrency world has transformed in a few short years from a niche subculture to a parallel economic universe, reaching a market capitalization of more than $2.5 trillion in 2021 before plummeting in 2022. For their advocates, cryptocurrencies represent a revolution of world-historical significance. To critics, crypto is more of a speculative tool than a true currency. How do tens of thousands of financial actors make these new monies? What forces give cryptocurrencies their value—or take it away? And what does crypto’s spectacular ascent reveal about the nature of money? In this groundbreaking ethnographic analysis of crypto economies and their global markets and communities, Koray Caliskan offers an inside view of how cryptocurrencies are made and traded. He argues that cryptocurrency should be understood as “data money,” a historically novel money type, created as the right to send data privately over an accounting infrastructure called blockchain. Drawing on two years of fieldwork among global cryptocurrency communities and in crypto markets, Caliskan makes visible the production principles of cryptocurrencies and explores how crypto exchanges work from within. He explains why and how we have been misunderstanding, underregulating, and improperly taxing crypto exchanges and actors. He also proposes a radically new way to make sense of new finance and its actors. An invaluable book for all readers seeking to understand cryptocurrency, Data Money sheds new light on a profound transformation of finance and its possible future trajectories.

What is a global market? How does it work? At a time when new crises in world markets cannot be satisfactorily resolved through old ideas, "Market Threads" presents a detailed analysis of the international cotton trade and argues for a novel and groundbreaking understanding of global markets. The book examines the arrangements, institutions, and power relations on which cotton trading and production depend, and provides an alternative approach to the analysis of pricing mechanisms. Drawing upon research from such diverse places as the New York Board of Trade and the Turkish and Egyptian countrysides, the book explores how market agents from peasants to global merchants negotiate, accept, reject, resist, reproduce, understand, and misunderstand a global market. The book demonstrates that policymakers and researchers must focus on the specific practices of market maintenance in order to know how they operate. Markets do not simply emerge as a relationship among self-interested buyers and sellers, governed by appropriate economic institutions. Nor are they just social networks embedded in wider economic social structures.Rather, global markets are maintained through daily interventions, the production of prosthetic prices, and the waging of struggles among those who produce and exchange commodities. The book illustrates the crucial consequences that these ideas have on economic reform projects and market studies. Spanning a variety of disciplines, "Market Threads" offers an original look at the world commodity trade and revises prevailing explanations for how markets work.

Dozens of times daily, access to your screen is auctioned to advertisers, sometimes by your own phone or laptop without your knowledge. In the background are huge, electricity-hungry, carbon-emitting systems that conduct roughly two trillion near-instantaneous, automated auctions every day.This book takes you into the heart of this mysterious world. It describes how Google built its astonishing global system of warehouse-scale computing and turned that system into an unprecedented, multibillion-dollar, money-earning machine, and how Facebook – almost by accident – also became an advertising leviathan. It examines the tensions between those giants and the smaller firms that populate digital advertising’s open marketplace. Those tensions, as well as conflicts over user privacy, give rise to a new kind of politics that plays out in material systems in the form of crucial clashes between different ways of designing those systems. Building on work in the emerging interdisciplinary field of market studies, MacKenzie and Caliskan examine digital advertising’s material politics, its giant megamachines, and the foundations of platform power.Inside Digital Advertising lays bare the processes that underpin today’s global advertising industry. It will be a key book for students and academics in the social sciences, humanities, and business studies, and it will appeal to anyone interested in the forces that are shaping our everyday digital world.