Libra
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 4 July 2019
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What does it mean when Facebook says it wants its own currency? We explore the power, the potential and the pitfalls of Libra. How does Facebook plan to make money out of making money? Can anyone stop it? And does this represent a fundamental shift in the model of surveillance capitalism? Plus we consider some of the rivals it faces: Bitcoin, WeChat and the good old dollar. Finally, this week we pay tribute to our dear friend and regular Talking Politics contributor Aaron Rapport (1980-2019) with some memories of his many appearances on the podcast.
Talking Points:
What is Libra?
- A digital currency that Facebook unveiled in a White Paper last month
- It aims to be a global currency that will bring the unbanked into banking and make certain transactions, such as remittances, easier.
- Libra itself would be managed by an association of members, including big finance companies, big tech companies, and NGOs. But Facebook would control Calibra, the wallet that would allow people to actually use the currency.
How is Libra different from Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?
- Unlike Bitcoin, Libra would be pegged to a basket of currencies. This would make it less volatile, but more centralized.
What would it mean if Facebook started issuing money?
- If Facebook were a state, it would have more subjects than any country on earth.
- Regulation remains a huge question.
- What will happen if Facebook has leverage over both social and economic capital?
If Libra isn’t stopped before it launches, it could quickly become indispensable.
- There are huge potential benefits, especially in terms of facilitating remittances and increasing the efficiency of payments.
- But there are also risks: this could allow Facebook to go even further in accumulating new kinds of data and monetizing human behaviour.
Mentioned in this Episode:
Further Learning:
And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. One of the most difficult |
| 0:08.8 | political questions of all is trying to understand money, what it is, what it means, where it |
| 0:14.7 | gets its extraordinary power. But here's another question. What does money mean when it's |
| 0:19.5 | issued by Facebook? |
| 0:25.8 | Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books. As politics |
| 0:30.7 | speeds up, slow down with a subscription to the LRB where Brexit and Trump are only part |
| 0:37.4 | of a picture that includes, well, everything else. Read relevant pieces and subscribe |
| 0:43.3 | at a special rate at lrb.co.uk forward slash talking. |
| 0:53.4 | We've got some people here who are going to help us help me. Try and understand this. |
| 0:57.4 | This is hard. I think we all find it hard because there's so much going on here. Helen |
| 1:02.2 | Thompson's here who understands about money. I don't understand about money. |
| 1:06.6 | Great. Alan McPherson is here who's co-director of the Centre for Governance and Human Rights, |
| 1:11.4 | which among other things has done a lot of studying a blockchain technology, which is |
| 1:15.5 | what lies behind this. Are you happy with that? We haven't done a lot of studying |
| 1:19.0 | a blockchain technology now. John Norton does not write for the |
| 1:22.6 | observer newspaper. John writes for the observer newspaper and you have definitely written |
| 1:27.6 | a lot about Facebook and Facebook's currency, including last week unless something's changed. |
| 1:34.1 | Yes, and the other thing is I have no money. So here we are, your crack team to tackle |
| 1:40.1 | this. The way we're going to do this is we're going to start and I should warn you before |
| 1:43.6 | we start, by the way, that there's building work going on. We live in Cambridge, Boomtown. |
| 1:46.9 | There's always a building going up somewhere there. You just heard something dropping in |
| 1:50.0 | the background maybe. We're going to start by just discussing what Facebook says it's |
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