Digitale Zahlungssysteme und die Vision einer Cashless Society. Zur Veränderung von Infrastrukturen, Praktiken und Lebensstilen mit digitalem Geld.

Like almost no other medium, money significantly structures everyday social life and acts as a regulatory valve for access to consumption, security, and health. In light of the rise of contactless, mobile, and digital payment systems toward a “cashless society,” this work examines money from a media and social science perspective using qualitative literature analysis to understand the nature of digital financial tools, their functional logic, and their potential social impact. By embedding digital payment methods in the software conditions of an increasingly privatized platform and attention economy of social media, where their use goes hand in hand with the personalized data collection of consumers and the manipulation of their behavior, they function as socioeconomic interfaces.
The thesis argues that a momentum generated by money is thus infrastructured on the basis of ubiquitous data monetization. A comparative analysis of the three payment methods Apple Pay with the Apple Card, PayPal, and WeChat Pay makes it clear that large technology companies use subtle lock-in measures to create customer loyalty moments that emotionalize consumers' perception of money. The key finding is the intensifying correspondence in the financial sector between gamified, platformized operating logics and data monitoring practices and the monetization of individual behavior: Modern financial services stage the exchange of monetary value online and offline with playful instruments of sensory and emotional marketing to create a smooth experience, incorporating the act of payment into the consumption activity and decoupling it from the perceived pain of financial loss.
Contrary to the visionary rhetoric of their providers, the mostly centralized and concentric application structures also act as barriers by regulating social and economic access and potentially reinforcing inequalities and power asymmetries. As a result, digital payment methods not only defy democratizing forms of disintermediation in financial market situations, but also evoke a dangerous complacency that leads to a loss of seriousness in financial activities. Data is equivalent to a currency whose value results from the fusion of personal and financial identity and which, through its feedback to individuals, severely restricts lifestyles.
Such a development allows for the conceptual introduction of the personalized sociality of (digital) money, which attests to the medium's ability to rebalance the relationship between special-purpose and general-purpose money, frame social relationships, and pluralize types of money. Digital payment systems thus catalyze the state of a cashless society in the 21st century, which negotiates the relationship between established and new monetary practices between attention control and experiential experiences. This makes it all the more urgent to take far-reaching measures to increase the transparency of digital mechanisms and to better protect individual anonymity in the public sphere under data protection law.