We examine the implications of tokenization for the transformation of things into financial assets. Framed as the ‘democratization’ of financial investment by its advocates, tokenization is a process whereby asset ownership is fractionalized and represented by a digital token to be sold to potential investors on blockchain-based platforms. Tokenization can be seen as an extension of securitization to illiquid real-world assets or digital assets; as such, tokenization is often framed as a technique to isolate risks, reduce financing costs, and generate returns without selling the underlying assets. For example, real estate security tokens offer fractionalized ownership to smaller investors through digital means lowering entry barriers, though such investors still typically lack exposure to diversified real estate token portfolios. Through an analytical and empirical investigation, we argue the governance claims made about tokenization obscure a key contradiction: tokenization is touted as a way to democratize financial markets, but the necessary adaptation of tokenization to prevailing financial market infrastructures undermines this democratization promise. Engaging with this contradiction, we unpack the governance of financial markets and assets through the techno-financial transformation of things into digital tokens, focusing on the promise of tokenization to democratize finance.

Does music sound all the same nowadays? This article revives the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry by recontextualizing it within contemporary financialized platform capitalism. We argue that Digital Streaming Platforms (DSPs) like Spotify showcase the proliferation of the future-oriented asset logic inherent to both financialization and platformization. This process intensifies the standardization of music that was first recognized by Theodor Adorno. The playlist is the central device of this assetization of music, contributing to a noticeable decrease in sonic and stylistic diversity in music. We illustrate this novel development through a diachronic content analysis of hip-hop music, comparing Apple Music’s Hip-Hop/R&B Hits: 2002 playlist based on hip-hop charts from the pre-DSP era and Spotify’s largest in-house curated playlist RapCaviar (from 2022). Rather than democratizing the music market, as Spotify is often hailed to do, the twenty-first-century culture industry facilitates further homogenization of artistic expression. Our findings contribute to ongoing political economy debates about the effects of financialization, platformization, and assetization on music, culture, and the everyday.

Finance and financialization have dominated scholarship on capitalism and society for the past decade. Although scholars noted early on that the expansion of finance relies on the creation (and trade) of new financial assets, assets and assetization have been a blind spot as scholarship continued to focus on financial markets (Langley, 2020). This, however, is currently about to change as a number of landmark publications have been published in the past months that point toward growing momentum in the field of asset and assetization research. In this short essay, I review Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa's edited collection, Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism, which is of central importance to said momentum, and put it into dialogue with some of the other recent publications on this topic.

Having emerged from World War II as a permanent feature of American political and economic life, the “glamour” of research and development (R&D) would soon take hold of Wall Street. By the 1960s, shares of high-tech electronics and aerospace firms became irresistible to the flood of young men entering the securities business with the hopes of getting rich quick off capital gains. For this generation, R&D spending today came to mean earnings growth tomorrow, and in periods of financial hardship, executives under pressure to meet earnings expectations changed R&D accounting policies to boost their bottom lines. With this change, firms experiencing significant losses could maintain the appearance of profitability while reinforcing public perceptions of R&D as a magic bullet for growth. Contrary to the mythology of the “space age,” however, those intimately involved in R&D and tracking its costs insisted that expenditures so incurred failed in practice to qualify as assets. Drawing from arguments made by industrial researchers and cost accountants, this article problematizes the “R&D underinvestment” consensus that emerged in the wake of the space age and suggests dropping the R&D asset view wherever it circulates, including in academic scholarship.