As the world waits to see the outcome of negotiations between the Greek government and its creditors, our attention has been drawn to the fragility of money by the ATM queues in Greece. The euro project, which has long been under strain, may soon start to irrevocably crack.
This fragility is born of an irredeemable tension at the heart of the modern monetary system, between the apparent mobility of money—most types of money nowadays usually flow fairly easily across boundaries and borders of all sorts—and its potential immobility. In Greece, it is the ATM queues for the now ever more tightly rationed amounts of cash that symbolize this. When the mundane technology that so many of us rely on to smooth our passage through life suddenly becomes unreliable or inaccessible, we confront the very real consequences of what can happen when money stops moving.
