Western Union is a financial service and communication company from the US which is mostly known for transferring money. In the 19th Century Western Union dominated the telegraph industry in the United States. Nowadays it is the biggest player in transferring the remittances of migrant workers all over the world.

Consequently, Western Union is an interesting and significant player in the border-money-complex. By focusing on this company and its role in today’s global capitalism we hope to show how money and border are connected to social and moral forces. We combine this analysis with stories of being stopped, pushed back and exploited at the border in an allegedly „free“ world, and one where money transfers become a deciding economic and social factor.

Why focusing on Western Union?

• This company is one example of how money crosses borders and how borders cross money.
• The Western Union’s business model fundamentally depends on the existence of legal restrictions of borders and the practical problems of distance. There is a close relation to precarity, immobility, anonymity and participation.
• Also, by understanding how Western Union operates we hope to show how money functions today: The very fact that Western Union is primarily a communications company points to the role of money as a form of information and the movement of money as data flows. Money might be said to be an abstraction machine, turning action (workforce) into data.
• Western Union is interesting form a historical and postcolonial standpoint as well: In the 19th Century, Western Union was part of the colonization of North America, enabling the communication between the first settlers and their famillies and later helping to finance their settlement on Indigenous lands. Nowadays, Western Union does a similar job on a more globalize scale. Yet the directions money travels are revered (and thereby create an even more powerful system of (neo-)colonial power).

Facts&Effects

• Western Union pitches itself as reaching into 200 countries worldwide and moving $150-billion USD per year. They counted 31 transactions per second in 2015. And all that has an impact: According to the NGO Tigra, countries as Haiti and El Salvador highly depend on the remittances sent via Western Union, which represent up to 25% of their GDP.
• One typical transaction-story:
  • A family or a village has to collect money in order to pay a human trafficker to usher one of their young people over the border.
  • The journey begins, it is full of dangers (deserts, mountains, oceans, borders and border patrols). It is likely that the voyager might be injured, imprisoned, deported or even killed at one of these borders, natural, political or financial.
  • Arriving in the destined country or city, the voyager will have to contend with questions of residence, legal status and accommodation.
  • After finding a job (perhaps in the informal sector, often highly exploitative) and covering his or her own expenses, the voyager will send money back to their family or community, and they will likely have to depend on Western Union to do so.
  • But due to the dangers of the voyage, only a few of those who started the journey will reach its end and remit money.
  • This has the potential to increase inequality in the community or a divide between those who have and does who do not. Those who receive money from their family members will be able to build or renovate their houses, start a business, cover health expenses, etc.
• Another effect might be that the local economy can stagnate due to the dependency on the remittances coming from other countries.

Click on an area in this interactive graphic to see a more detailed view:

[drawattention]

• Western Union is also often used to pay traffickers.
• Many people question whether Western Union should be imagined as a governmental or public institution of the United States. They certainly enjoy widespread trust as an American corporation.
• The practices of Western Union are ambivalent: On one hand, they exploit the precarious situations and social bonds of migrant workers; on the other, they enable people to send money to their relatives in a safe, fast and unbureaucratic way. By the way: Western Union relies on this benevolent dimension, using it to promote their business and demonstrate the security of their financial management.
• Can the remittances system also be described as a wealth redistribution machine. The role of Western Union in this sense is interesting: Since they profit from the redistribution to the poorer segments of global society.

A possible tacit future

Some tech evangelists claim that in terms of money, money transfer and even creating a currency of its own, the blockchain technology might be the next big thing. Or already is. There are already some powerful institutions delivering a chain core testnet – backed up by corporates like Microsoft. The main inititative for cryptocurrency and contracts (IC3) is run by mainly American Universities such as Cornell, UC Berkeley, University of Illinois.

But beside this very American centrered development of the core technologies, protocols and software it is interesting to see how the blockchain technology is used for business reasons. Beside many others in the context of the internet of things / Industry 4.0 it is the banking business using this technology for money transfers, clearings etc. One of the biggest player in this field is Ripple. This might guide to a future, where banks will also step into the business of Western Union. Maybe. If the costs are reduced and it seems like a new business opportunity for the struggling banks.

Another application of blockchain is the direction in which crowdfunding and microcredits guide: the people themselves become the creditors and/or trust system. Therefore stands the example of cashaa which claims itself the Uber of cash transfer. Well. Which means: everyone can become his or her own Western Union. With all the effects we described above. Happening faster, even more distributed. A tacit future that is maybe closer than we expect…

Morals&Affect

A quick look on the Facebook page and website reveal one of the main business methods of Western Union: emotional engineering. It’s not just the Western Union Foundation and its charity projects – from the way Western Union writes about its customers and adresses them in social media we can also learn about the connection of affect, morals and money.
Western Union describes itself as „providing critical financial services“ and by this helping „to transform lives, create jobs & drive economic growth worldwide.“ In fact, what they do, is basically profiting out of the world’s growing remittances which today adds upto 75% of the global GDP.

So, there is „Dan“,the Vice President of Product Management, stating:

“It’s very easy for me to be passionate about our customers. They sacrifice and work hard to support their families and make their lives better. We honor them daily with the products and services that we offer.”

This honoring of course is not for free. Western Union charges fees and and gets profits from interest rates when transfering money from one currency to another.

Western Union has 6.5 Mio Likes on Facebook. We find there, next to dog pictures and requests on sharing „best moments“, slogans like:
„Nothing shines brighter than a good heart“.

During the days of setting up this project, Western Union was also extensively posting on the Indian Lights Festival Diwali. Their message:
„Help us light up a village by sending money to your loved ones“.

Western Union is using the social bonds and responsibilities for its PR, and thus producing certain affects and emotions based on these social bonds and responsibilities via social media. By this, one could say, they also reproduce the company’s reputation and find moral legitimation for their business model.

There is no generally accepted definition of what a tax haven is, but activities that are commonly associated with such places range far beyond tax.
Some definitions do focus purely on tax: for example, a widely cited academic paper describes a tax haven as a jurisdiction where particular taxes, such as an inheritance tax or income tax, are levied at a low rate or not at all.^[1] Other definitions refer to a state, country, or territory which maintains a system of financial secrecy, which enables foreign individuals to hide assets or income to avoid or reduce taxes in the home jurisdiction. Some refer to „secrecy jurisdictions“ as an alternative to „tax havens,“ to emphasise the secrecy element, and a Financial Secrecy Index ranks jurisdictions according to their size and secrecy. ^[2]
Earnings from income generated from real estate (i.e. by renting property owned in an offshore jurisdiction) can also be eliminated in this way. If taxes (if any) are paid in the tax haven jurisdiction, companies can avoid taxes in their home jurisdiction because the tax had already been paid in the lower tax rate jurisdiction. Some taxes (such as inheritance tax on the real estate, VAT on the initial purchase price of the real estate, or transfer tax, annual immovable property taxes, and municipal real estate taxes) cannot be avoided or reduced, as these are levied by the country the real estate where the property is located, and hence need to be paid just the same as any other resident of that country. The only thing that can be done is picking a country that has the smallest rates on these taxes (or even no such taxes at all) before buying any real estate.^[3]

If you type ‘money’ into Google image search, you get the following:

For some, this imagery is unproblematic. Who cares if we use cash as the basis to represent all money? It is, however, deeply problematic. Firstly, it is inaccurate, which we might argue is a good enough reason to change it. And not only is it currently inaccurate, but it’s always been inaccurate. Physical cash forms of money have always existed alongside non-physical forms of ‘ledger’ money. More important than pedantic intellectual accuracy, though, is the fact that this imagery helps to maintain a false paradigm about what the financial sector is and what it does, and this false paradigm is one of the ways that banks can avoid political scrutiny for their actions.

We live with an economic folktale that goes as follows: Money is a ‘thing-like’ commodity and banks are intermediaries that move it around. You ‘put it into’ your bank account, and then you can ‘transfer’ it to others, or the banks can ‘lend it to others’. This idea that money is stored and passed around like a normal object is one of the great myths of finance, and an extraordinary number of people take it for granted, including business school professors, economic journalists, and parents and schoolteachers around the world who continue to pass the myth on to generations of children. And everyday this myth gets perpetuated via the images we see in the press.

So what is the alternative story? Money is not a commodity, and never really has been. Furthermore, in its current form it cannot exist without banks. Most of the money we use is not state money, but privately issued commercial bank money. Banks are not mere intermediaries in the background. They are a crucial pillar of the entire exchange system upon which we rely. This system grants them extraordinary creative and destructive power, and it is power that needs to be monitored. Unless we can see the underlying basis of the monetary system clearly, we will struggle to do this.

The fact that ‘money’ is a noun suggests that it is an ‘object’. But what is that ‘object’? The first thing we know is that the object is defined by numbers. $200 is numbers, but numbers of what? Numbers are supposed to convey units of something. Zero represents nothingness, and one represents the base unit of somethingness, and then the multiples of one show how many units of somethingness I have. But what is this somethingness? What is £300? If you ask people to visualise $20 they tend to immediately imagine a cash note with $20 on it, but they are just ‘kicking the can down the road’. What do the numbers actually mean?

Many people have often wished to imagine that the numbers literally are value. This is 20 units of actual value that can be passed around like a commodity. That ‘intrinsic’ value can either be imagined in the form of utility – the money is useful in itself, like a chocolate dollar you can eat – or in the form of labour, like Adam Smith and Karl Marx did, where they imagined it as somehow being an embodiment of embedded previous labour, captured or ‘stored’ in the units of money.

The idea that somehow the money is units of value is extremely dubious though. Thinking that money ‘stores’ value is a bit like imagining that a Starbucks voucher stores coffee. This is why many have chosen to think that perhaps money is not actual value, but a kind of representation of value, a symbol of it, or an avatar for it. Many representations in the world, though, have no active power – holding a picture of Donald Trump does not mean you get to meet him. It is merely a representation. Money might represent value, but more importantly, it allows you to gain access to value. It seems to be a kind of portal to human labour, or an access key that unlocks it.

In its most basic sense, money appears to be a claim upon human labour that we can use to mobilise human labour. I walk into a cafe and use it to mobilise the barista to make me a coffee. This is a monetary exchange. Essentially I get a specific good or service, created through the specific labour of specific people, by presenting a token that grants access to general goods and services created through the labour of people in general. The person who holds a money claim, in other words, has a claim upon the labour of people in general. This claim has a certain magnitude. The more you have, the more ability you have to control labour.

There is debate about what gives this claim its power. One angle of thinking is that we all collectively trust in it. I accept money because I believe others will accept it from me. We thus construct its legitimacy through some kind of social agreement. Another line of thinking is that we are forced by an external authority like The State to view it as legitimate. Thus, we only use it because we are forced to pay taxes in it, for example.

There is a more subtle line of thinking though. Note that the labour being mobilised in the example above is specifically the barista, but for this situation to exist there were thousands of previous acts of labour to grow, process, pack and transport the coffee beans and to create the machines used to make the final coffee. Money systems thrive in these situations where labour is highly specialised. This is a key element of what locks money systems into human labour. In a situation where one cannot survive without the production of other people, you crucially need a generic representation of the link between your specialised labour and the general pool of labour of other people. Money tokens come to form that link – on the one hand they represent ‘what I earned for what I did’, but that only makes sense when paired with ‘what I can get from other people’, because what you ‘earned’ is the ability to command goods and services from others.

Perhaps the power of modern money is established through a combination of state power, societal agreement and the coercive network effects of being utterly dependent on the labour of others. Thus it comes to function as an access key to the labour of a huge body of strangers who are all reciprocally locked into dependence on each other. We are forced to accept it because we cannot survive without accepting it.

For much of monetary history, ‘ledger’ money has been as important as cash forms of money. Ledger money essentially takes the form of data entries in a ledger, attributed to accounts representing particular people. An authority controls the ledger, and edits it, and has power to alter the monetary balances in response to either commands or requests from the account holders, or through political powers granted to the ledger-keeper (such as the credit creation power that banks have in which they can write new money into existence in accounts)

Note the components here

• Ledger: An ordered database with allotted spaces – accounts – in which you can record account balances and changes to account balances (‘transactions’)
• Account: A space on a database attached (or attributed to) a particular person, either a natural person (real human being), or a corporate person (a collective legal entity)
• Account holder: A person who the account represents, and who ‘owns’ the account, and who has rights to request changes to it
• Account balance: A number attached to an account, representing the number of monetary tokens attributable to the holder of the account
• ‘Keeper of the ledger’, or the recording authority: The entity that holds and controls the ledger, is authorised to make changes to it, and is responsible for maintaining its integrity

Here is an example of an old banking ledger, used by the keeper of the ledger to ‘keep score’ of money tokens in the accounts of account-holders

The ledger keeper is supposed to abide by information-recording protocols that maintain the validity or the reliability of the recordings. This means the ledger keeper is not supposed to make arbitrary changes to the data on the ledger, and must have some reason to do it, or be abiding by a set of rules. For example, if an account holder requests to ‘transfer $356’ and the ledger keeper instead decides to edit their account to reflect a negative change of $678, this is a breach of the information protocols that keep the data valid. The account holder will shout at them until they re-edit the system.

It is these information rules that help to establish the idea of the data being subject to restrictions that prevent it arbitrarily expanding, altering or morphing. It is these restrictions that help create the sense that the data is an ‘object’, rather than mere information. Rather than being arbitrarily changeable, there must be both rules for the 1) creation of data, or its initial recording and 2) altering of previously created recordings of data.

We often imagine our digital money in our bank account as a ‘data object’ that can be ‘moved around’. The term ‘movement’ in these systems, though, is essentially a metaphor, because there is no actual physical movement of monetary tokens. In a ledger system there is only simultaneous editing of two account entries that creates a positive and negative change to the respective balances. This mimics the physical process of ‘taking money from one person and giving it to another’, and thus creates a residual impression of the money having ‘moved’. To date all visual imagery around digital money continually replicates the movement analogy, for example by showing cash notes flying through a fibre optic cable. In reality, though, the only thing that really ‘moves’ in the system are packets of information between the holders of accounts and the keepers of databases, notifying the keepers to edit account balances.

Components of ledger money

Ledger money is composed of four basic components

1. A ledger, which is a database of account balances and transactions
2. A recording technology: A means to write things into that ledger
3. A recording agent: The agent that writes things into the ledger, or edits them
4. A communications system that connects with it, enabling the holder of the account to request edits to the ledger, or make queries about the current state of the ledger

Note the two following examples: A person walks into an old bank and talks (communication system) to a clerk (recording agent) with an old ledger book (database ledger) and quill pen (recording technology). This is conceptually the same as a person sending a message via their mobile phone (communication system) to a bank database system (database ledger) that utilises automated hardware (recording agent) to imprint atoms representing binary code (recording technology) on a hard-drive.

Ledger	Recording tech	Recording agent	Comms system
Ledger book	Pen	Clerk	Speech
Computer database	Magnetised atoms	Automated rule system and hardware	Mobile phone

Components of digital ledger money

Digital money is a particular implementation of ledger money in which the recording takes the form of atomic structures imprinted on hard drive materials that are interpreted as binary code. The data is arranged into categories like ‘accounts’ and ‘balances’ – i.e. Account number 25672 has a balance of £4687, and these balances are supposed to reflect the net result of ‘transactions’ – i.e. Account 25672 had £4000, but then received £687 and the net result is that the new balance is £4687. These transactions are delivered into the system via multiple communications infrastructures, including

1. A person walking into a branch and asking the clerk to communicate it to the system
2. Internet banking portals
3. Mobile phone banking
4. Credit card networks for point-of-sale interactions
5. The ATM network
6. The cheque clearing infrastructure

Imagery of Money as Data

In terms of imagery, this opens up a number of areas we can explore. How does one ‘see’ a database? In the old days it was simple – it was literally a book. Nowadays it is harder.

Binary code?

Entries in databases – or data objects – used to be created with strokes of a quill pen. Nowadays though, we use binary code… or do we? Actually we use atomic structures imprinted on hard drives, which is then interpreted as binary code. Can you show money with binary code, or is that like zooming in on the drying ink on an old ledger book?

The datacentres

Perhaps rather than the atomic microstructure of account entries, we look at the whole ‘ledger book’, which in modern times takes the form of datacentres. How do these look? Does a bank datacentre look anything different from any other datacentre? And if not, how would showing a datacentre convey anything about money in particular? Are datacentre images essentially about conveying a visual representation of data more generally, or can they somehow be used to convey the idea of ‘money as data’?

The controller of the datacentre

It makes a difference who controls the arrays of databases. They are run by large banks. Here is an image – at least in theory – of a datacentre run by Barclays Bank in the UK:

The network of bank and central bank databases

Money systems, though, are larger than just single banks running datacentres. They operate as networks of different bank datacentres communicating with both their customers and each other via various protocols. They are all connected into the central bank datacentres too. This is where we get into the deep essence of money systems. The money system has layers of accounts – the commercial banks have reserve accounts at the central bank, and it is against the backdrop of these that they set up accounts for ordinary people.

Accounting tables

The bank datacentres are essentially tools for accounting. We might experience the data in our bank account as ‘something we have’, but to they bank it is something they’ve promised. It is essentially a liability for them, set against their assets at the central bank. We might simplify this by drawing accounting tables. In the image below we merge datacentre imagery with accounting tables and Bank Logos:

The international network

We can then start to internationalise this. The UK pound data ecosystem interacts with all the other currencies around the world via international financial data exchange protocols and the correspondent bank network. This starts to get very complex to represent.

Returning to the problem of the ‘movement’ metaphor

When we start to see the international monetary system as essentially an accounting system hosted by banks controlling data recording and communications infrastructures, it becomes apparent that money ‘movement’ is essentially the act of banks coordinating the editing of multiple databases. The ‘clearing and settlement’ system is essentially the mechanism that tries to reconcile the various changes that need to be made to all the various databases.

The term ‘movement’ implies the idea of a coherent object that moves from one place to another. And yet it is not the same ‘object’ that moves. The unit of money that is deleted from one person’s account is not the unit of money that is recorded into another’s. The unit that is deleted represents the retraction of an old promise by the bank. The unit that is recorded represents the giving of a new promise by another bank. The promises of those two banks are not ‘fungible’. They are not the same thing. Nothing has ‘moved’. All the moved was light beams in fibre optic cables or electrons in wires conveying messages to reconfigure the balance of obligations promised by various parties to each other.

The physical communications infrastructure

We might choose to look rather at the communication channels. Below is Femke Herregraven’s Cable Landings, showing the landing points of fibre optic cables used for financial communications:

If a bank records money into existence, we view it as ‘real’, whereas if a local anarchist collective does it, we may see what they have recorded is ‘meaningless data’, like the scribblings of a child in a old book, pretending that they’re a banker. The realness of data objects – or perhaps the ability to view data as a ‘real object’ – comes when the creator of the data has the power to ‘make it real’, such that what they write down has real world impacts, can mobilise people, and has legal backing. Let’s take an everyday situation of monetary exchange at a health spa: we can characterise it as ‘if you change a data entry I will give you a back massage’. The data itself cannot ‘act on someone’, or make them do something, so for an act of data recording to have an activating power upon the masseuse, and to thereby make them ‘do something for me’, it must be set within a political system, a particular social situation that makes people act of the data, or a cultural belief system that gives it power.

Before we come to hawala – lets test your knowledge on another item for cross reference:
When you hear Western Union – what do you think? And if you know it,  where did WU start?

 
Most humans associate it with cash transfer across borders, as in humans sending money to another country for various purposes. Another association is with fraud, since the transfer is final – which for example can be used to take money from unsuspecting victims in the so called forward fraud – someone pays for goods in advance but never receives them. Fewer people know the origin of WU –  the 1856 born telegram company monopoly helped to create services and businesses around the fast transfer of information (by the stadards of the late 19th/ early 20th century.
Now take the word „hawala“. Asked on a typical western european street, most westerns  don’t know what it means – and if asked to guess, answers range from „some oriental dish“ to „a town somewhere in the middle east“. Few know its true meaning, fewer have used it: It means transfer, and it has an association with trust and most humans use it to send remittance back to their home country as it is a cheap and relatively frictionless informal money transfer system (short ITMS).
„So how can I use hawala?“ you might ask. Easy. You need to know two connected hawaladars, thats the name for the humans that are the endpoints in the transaction. You give money to your hawala broker and provide an identifier for the receiver at the other endpoint – most likely a password or pharse. You will not be involved in the transaction between the brokers, but you will provide the password/phrase to the receiver, which then approaches the other endpoint and gets the money minus a small commission – usually around 1 to 1,5 per cent. There is usually little trail of the transaction. And beween the two brokers the real exchange can take a number of forms apart form money transfer – ranging from natural goods and virtual goods, services through a third party to human resources provided.
Because of its heterogenous exchange system, it gives any regulating body a nightmare – and this makes it very hard to find an „official“ hawalar broker in Germany for example. The exchange of financial services across countries is heavily regulated and with 9/11 it has been tightened even more –  so hawala is in conflict with rules like proof of origin of money for specific sums, keeping transactional records and identity checks for recipients and senders.
Comparing hawala with Western Union as a reference, It it shares the endpoint to endpoint transfer, but with the differences that WU owns both endpoints, while in hawala they might be related (like belonging to an ethnic group, clan, family, etc …) but they don’t have to be. Instead of an accounting connection between two branches in WU it is a trust based link. Conflicts and abuse are rare because the relation and trust factor between to hawala brokers will directly impact them and their ability to operate in the future is based on ongoing transactions, while with WU (very rare) abuse can happen because of the involved reliance on digital technology and virtualisation of money. While the fees are lower in hawala so is the maintenance of the system – there is no standard for a specific branding, necessity of an representative office or the like. In terms of scale, hawala finds its individual limits on the agreement of the endpoints what kinds of transactions they can do – both micro payments (think cents and lower) and large transactions (think hundred thousands and more) do not work with hawala.
(I’ll resume later on this, I hope this is useful in context of tacit futures.)
Sources: Report by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (PDF: Link), Informal Money Transfer Systems (PDF: Link)
 

How does money form borders? And how do borders form money?
It has become common to say that, in an age of globalization, the movement of money is freed from the confines of borders, while the movements of human beings is more restrained than ever – especially for those human beings with little access to money. But what might this explanation leave out? What are the nuances and particularities of how money moves and what happens when it encounters a border? How does money transform borders, and how do borders transform money? And with what consequences for human beings in an age of compulsory and voluntary migration and movement?
We assemble together at the moment of two intertwined global crises that all too often are imagined as separate. 
On the one hand, the so-called „migrant crisis“ has tested the limits of the idea of the Western nation-state and the ideals of human rights, forcing us to ask difficult questions about who should be allowed to move and who should control the movement of people. On the other hand, revelations like those contained in the Panama Papers also show us that there is a crisis in traditional techniques for managing or controlling the flows of money. How can we think of these two crises together at the same time? Do they have common roots? Do they have common solutions? How are they related to technological and political changes? And, most importantly for us, how can we tell better, clearer and more compelling stories about them?
In this workshop, we have gathered a range of experts and activists, journalists and coders, to take a closer look at the relationships between money, movement and borders. We are aiming, over two days, to develop an Atlas of Encounters: a catalogue of examples, stories and methodologies that enable us to better understand these relationships in the present moment. We do not yet know what the final atlas will look like; that is for us to discover together in our two days in Berlin.
Such an collective investigation is important for a number of reasons. 
Today, not only are borders being fortified to contain and to exclude certain populations, they are also multiplying and spreading into a wide range of social spaces and institutions. The border as a „technology“ is expanding and intensifying throughout the social fabric, with grave consequences for humans compelled to move because of economic, social, political or cultural violence. Meanwhile, money has become more liquid than ever, overflowing national borders and regulations. From the complex technologies of high finance (derivatives, high frequency trading) to the clandestine activities of organized crime and the global elite (offshore accounts, tax havens, money laundering), money seems to flow uncontrolled.

• Can we say that money’s movement gets easier as people’s movements become harder? 
• Is the increasingly free movement of money in some way at the root of the forms of displacement and violence that causes people to flee to the border or over borders? 
• How are today’s technologically-augemented borders (biometrics, drones, big-data surveillance) enabled or facilitated by the global movement of money? 
• On the other hand, how does the global circulation of money depend on the movement of people (for instance, when migrants become an exploitable labour force)?