The ecosystem of a ‘wealth-tech’ culture: the birth of networked financial subjects in South Korea

Abstract

Starting with an online financial community in South Korea, this article explores the simultaneous production of a new form of subjectivity and a networked ecosystem of financial cultures. Using a multi-sited ethnography to track the movements of users as they moved across different spaces, this article finds that users gifted financial information to each other, blended laity and expertise, and reappropriated financial communities into a third place defined as an informal, public place hosting sociable conversations. Through the grafting of prosocial activities (e.g. sharing, gifting, and social networking) onto financial self-management, users were shaped as networked financial subjects and exhibited a distinctive mode of selfhood informed by both financial subjectivity and neoliberal networked subjectivity. At the same time, their practices spawned countless social, convivial groups as well as entrepreneurial financial gurus. By demonstrating the complex webs of on- and off-line groups, programs, relationships, and social networks, this article illustrates how the networked ecosystem of financial cultures brought the markets and commons into coalescence.