Paywalls

The use of credit cards or payment apps has become an everyday activity right around the world – but it is much more than a purely technical affair. In this important book, Barbara Brandl illustrates how the increasing replacement of cash with digital payment methods has significant effects on the dynamics of social inequality. A lack of access to digital payment methods plays as much of a role as the unfair distribution of fees and the extraction of sensitive personal data. Brandl compares five geographic regions – the Euro zone, the USA, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, and South America – looking at the digital payment technologies in use there and their social impacts. A global sociology of digital money and the barriers it creates.