Targeting crop pests with RNA, the legacy of temporary streams, and the future of money

This episode discusses innovative approaches to pest control using RNA, the ecological and regulatory impacts of ephemeral streams, and new perspectives on the future of money.

1. RNA-based pesticides represent a promising leap towards sustainable agriculture, targeting specific pests without harming other organisms.
2. Ephemeral streams, often overlooked in environmental regulations, play a crucial role in sustaining water quality and availability in larger perennial rivers.
3. The concept of money is rapidly evolving, with digital and alternative currencies gaining prominence, influencing both economic policies and personal finance.
4. Temporary streams are under-researched but critical in ecological and hydrological studies, highlighting a need for more comprehensive environmental policies.
5. The future of money may increasingly intertwine with digital identities, shifting how we perceive and use financial resources.

1: RNA Pesticides

Eric Stockstead discusses the development and benefits of RNA pesticides for combating pests like the Colorado potato beetle. These pesticides are designed to be environmentally safer and target-specific. Eric Stockstead: "RNA-based approaches could revolutionize how we manage pest resistance."

2: Ephemeral Streams

Craig Brinkerhoff sheds light on the vital yet underappreciated role of ephemeral streams in maintaining river ecosystems and influencing water policies. Craig Brinkerhoff: "These streams are pivotal in managing water quality and resource sustainability."

3: The Future of Money

Rachel O'Dwyer explores the impact of digital and token-based currencies on the traditional economic systems and individual financial autonomy. Rachel O'Dwyer: "Tokens and digital currencies are reshaping the financial landscape, filling gaps left by conventional money systems."

1. Explore the use of RNA-based pesticides in gardening or farming to reduce environmental impact.
2. Support policies and research focused on protecting all types of waterways, including ephemeral streams.
3. Educate yourself on digital currencies and consider their implications for your financial practices.
4. Engage in community discussions about sustainable pest control methods.
5. Consider the environmental impact of agricultural practices and advocate for innovative solutions like RNA pesticides.

Guest host Meagan Cantwell talks to Staff Writer Erik Stokstad about a new weapon against crop-destroying beetles. By making pesticides using RNA, farmers can target pests and their close relatives, leaving other creatures unharmed.

Next, freelance producer Katherine Irving talks to hydrologist Craig Brinkerhoff about a recent analysis of ephemeral streams—which are only around temporarily—throughout the United States. Despite their fleeting presence, Brinkerhoff and his colleagues found these streams play a major role in keeping rivers flowing and clean. Brinkerhoff is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, and completed this work as a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Finally, the next segment in our books series on a future to look forward to. Books host Angela Saini talks with author Rachel O’Dwyer about her recent book Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform. They’ll discuss new and old ideas of currency, and what it means to have our identities tied to our money as we move toward a more cashless society.

People

Eric Stockstead, Craig Brinkerhoff, Rachel O'Dwyer

Companies

None

Books

"The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform" by Rachel O'Dwyer

Guest Name(s):

Eric Stockstead, Craig Brinkerhoff, Rachel O'Dwyer

Content Warnings:

None

Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
This podcast is supported by the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, one of America's leading research medical schools. Icon Mount Sinai is the academic arm of the eight hospital Mount Sinai health System in New York City. It's consistently among the top recipients of NIH funding. Researchers at Icon Mount Sinai have made breakthrough discoveries in many fields vital to advancing the health of patients, including cancer, Covid and long Covid, cardiology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai we find a way.

Megan Cantwell
This is a science podcast for June 28, 2024. I'm Megan Cantwell, filling in for Sarah Crespi. First up this week, staff writer Eric Stockstead joins me to talk about a new weapon against crop destroying beetles. By making pesticides using rna, farmers can target pests and their close relatives, leaving other creatures unharmed. Next, freelance producer Katherine Irving talks to Craig Brinkerhoff about a recent analysis of ephemeral streams, streams that are only around temporarily throughout the US.

Despite their fleeting presence, Brinkerhoff and his colleagues found that these streams play a major role in keeping rivers flowing and clean. Finally, the next in our book series on a future to look forward to, books host Angela Saini talks with authorization Rachel O'Dwyer about her recent book, the Future of money in the age of the platform. They discuss new and old ideas of currency and what it means to have our identities tied to our money as we move toward a more cashless society.

Synthetic chemical pesticides are a crucial part of agriculture, preventing pests and weeds from ravaging crops. But their use does come at a cost. These pesticides can kill unintended insects and plants, as well as runoff into surrounding waterways and soil, which expands its toxic reach. Scientists have been eager to find alternatives, and a new approach has arrived. Staff writer Eric Stockstead wrote about how rna based pesticides could be safer and maybe even more durable against these pesky pests. Thank you so much for joining me, Eriche.

Eric Stockstead
Hi, Megan. Great to be here.

Megan Cantwell
So pretty soon we're going to see an rna pesticide come to the market that can fight against the Colorado potato beetle. What is the extent of damage that this particular insect has done to crops?

Eric Stockstead
Well, I think it's been a problem ever since potatoes arrived in Colorado in the 19th century.

The potato beetle is a native insect in Colorado, and when potatoes started being farmed in Colorado, it decided it liked potato leaves better than its normal plant it would feed on, and it can cause significant damage to the crop if it's not controlled. That's certainly a problem in Europe. It's now arriving in China, which is one of the largest potato growing countries in the world. So it's now of concern in that country as well.

Megan Cantwell
So there have been more than 50 synthetic chemical pesticides that have been used to try to tame the potato beetle. And inevitably, it has developed resistance to every single one of these. Is this particular insect an outlier? Is this pretty common, that pests can develop resistance to pesticides that quickly?

Eric Stockstead
It's not uncommon, and it depends on how you use the pesticide.

So depending on how, how it's sprayed, how often it's sprayed, whether it's mixed up, and whether it's alternated with other pesticides or other ways of controlling the pest, it can take less time or more time. A crop is a great resource that insects would hate to hate to see wasted by going to feed humans. So they're going to evolve ways to get around our protection of the crop.

Not all of those pesticides were specifically developed just for the potato beetle. Some of them, like lindane or pyrethroids, those are classes that have been used widely. But pita beetle seems to be one of the first species that will evolve resistance.

Megan Cantwell
How long does it usually take for a synthetic chemical pesticide to be developed to target a pest and then rolled out in a well?

Eric Stockstead
It's getting harder. One researcher said the easy pickings have already been developed as pesticides by the chemical industry. In the forties, the fifties, the sixties, lots of new pesticides were coming out, and the pace has slowed. And the other factor is that more dangerous pesticides, even if they still work, are being removed from the market for safety reasons. So the number of chemical tools that are available is shrinking.

Megan Cantwell
That makes it even more dire to figure out an alternative to these synthetic chemicals, which is what your entire story is about, a different approach. These are rna pesticides. It was so interesting, I thought, that the basis for this technology didn't start with thinking it would be used for pesticides. How did this sort of technology even begin with, to start?

Eric Stockstead
So this approach of using rna as a pesticide, it came out of some basic scientific discoveries. The first thought was that this approach of using rna would be good for human medicine, and it's been slow, but that does seem to be the case, that you can get new and helpful human medicines by using rna or specifically something called rna interference. And then as this basic research was progressing, it became clear that it might also be really helpful for fighting pests. The reason I did this story now is that the first spray has been approved for an rna pesticide. This year, and maybe two years ago, the first genetically engineered crop reached the market, using rna interference as one of its ways of controlling pests.

Megan Cantwell
In the case of the spray, which has been developed for the potato beetle, what exactly is the mechanism of action for it to kill the beetle?

Eric Stockstead
So here's how it works. When a farmer spots colorado potato beetle larvae on the plants, that's the time that you'd spray this rna on the leaves. What happens next is as the larvae are crawling around the leaves, munching on it, they'll also eat this rna. Once the rna molecules are inside the gut, what the cellular machinery in the beetle cell does is it spots these double stranded rna segments which have come from the spray. It recognizes them as foreign. It does that by having one protein complex that's in the cell, chops up this double stranded rna. Meanwhile, back inside the nucleus, the insect is trying to make a protein that it can't live without. And inside the cell, the DNA creates a single strand of rna called messenger RNA, specifically for that protein.

After these single stranded messenger RNA's leave the nucleus, normally parts of the cellular machinery would use those mRNA to create a protein. But once the interference is happening, another molecule opens up the double strand and looks around for other strands that's inside the cell and the cytoplasm to destroy those.

Any normal messenger rna is swept up in this flurry of defensive destruction. So there's no blueprint from the nucleus anymore from which the cell could make these proteins that it vitally needs. And without those proteins, that's when the pest starts to languish and die.

Megan Cantwell
I the actual double stranded rna, is it an exact copy of the gene that you're trying to silence?

Eric Stockstead
That's one of the real advantages of using this approach over synthetic chemistries, Megan, is that designing this pesticide, you can target it to a gene or to a version of a gene that is specific to a pest or to a pest and a couple of its close relatives. And so when you block it, any other kind of organism that has a different gene or a slightly different version of the gene, the rna interference isn't going to happen, so it won't be harmful to those other organisms.

Megan Cantwell
You mentioned that this is ideally sprayed on when you see larvae on the leaf. If you spray it on later when the beetle is older, does it matter?

Eric Stockstead
It works a lot better with the larvae, and the reason is that they are actively growing. So this gene, right, if theyre absorbing things through their gut and theyre actively eating a lot, their growth will be hindered and theyll slowly starve and die right over the course of days. Its less effective with the adults. This is also sort of part of the environmental safety, is that the pesticide, the rna will break down and itll be gone.

Megan Cantwell
Is this approach actually more effective than the pesticide, the synthetic chemical pesticides that are on the market right now, would it kill more potato beetles than the other approach?

Eric Stockstead
Its comparable. So those other pesticides, theyre very fast acting. Theyre not harming the growth of the insect. Theyre messing with the nervous system. They are toxic and they kill very quickly. So in that sense, this is a slower process. The main thing is not that its more effective than the existing chemistries, but its new. So its going to be broadly effective at these beetle populations because they haven't experienced it before.

And if you add it into the toolbox, if you alternate the pesticides from year to year, it reduces the risk that the potato beetle or any other pest is going to evolve resistance quickly.

Megan Cantwell
Have there been any studies in the lab to test exactly how long it would take a potato beetle to actually evolve resistance to this rna based approach?

Eric Stockstead
Thats a question of really deep interest or urgent interest.

Its been shown in the lab that they will do it, and thats not really a surprise because any other kind of organism can also evolve resistance if you pressure it enough.

What seems to happen in this case was a bit of a surprise. The first thought was that maybe the gene will mutate, that vital gene will mutate. If it's got a couple of differences to it that allow the gene to still work but are different enough from the rna blueprint, then it might skirt around the interference.

That's not what happened. Potato beetles in the lab started absorbing less of the rna from their diet. So that may just be a stress response, but it does show that they can come up with a way to avoid the rna. And it does suggest that it's going to be trickier to come up with variations of the rna approach.

Megan Cantwell
That's interesting that they came up with this way to evade it, not changing their gene, but absorbing less of it. And this approach also does not work for all insects and pests. Right, because some of them have enzymes that actually break down this rna.

Eric Stockstead
Beetles seem to be particularly susceptible.

Large groups of insect pests like aphids or moths, they vary in how susceptible they are to rna pesticides. There's a lot of interest and research happening to try and figure out how to modify rna pesticides or encapsulate them in some sort of shield that might help them get through the lepidopter and gut and into the cells to kill them.

Megan Cantwell
Are there any other specific pests that this technique is being developed for right now besides the Colorado potato beetle, the.

Eric Stockstead
Major pest of corn plants called the western corn rootworm? It's a beetle, but again, it's the larval form, not the flying form. There are existing approaches to controlling them. And in genetically modified corn, it's not a synthetic pesticide. Thats the main approach. Its a naturally occurring toxin from a bacterium that has been added into the corn plant genome. So what Bayer did was to add a gene that would produce this rna, targeting a vital gene in the root worm. So the concept is exactly the same as in the Colorado potato beetle spray. Its just expressed in the roots. And so when the beetle eats it, when the larvae eat it, they are killed by that. That's the first one that came out.

Megan Cantwell
Did you speak to any farmers, people who are plagued with this problem? Is there any hesitation from people to adopt this?

Eric Stockstead
I think there is pretty broad enthusiasm. I think there are some segments of the environmental community that are looking at this more skeptically. There really is sort of broad interest in making sure that a pesticide is as, that its harm is targeted as specifically as possible to the pest. And so EPA will require companies that are developing a pesticide to see if it harms a handful of pest insects or earthworms. Many people have critiqued EPA, saying thats just not a broad enough look with rna. Its an interesting counterpoint that the companies have, because they say they can look at the genomes of a lot of different insects and check if they have a gene. Right. This innocent insect has a gene that matches the target rna or not.

Megan Cantwell
And it's a lot faster to do that.

Eric Stockstead
It is faster to look it up in the database. But I think real tests have value.

Megan Cantwell
Because, I mean, like you said, we have a lot of the genome sequence for many of these insects in terms of future development for these rna based pests, pesticides. Can we expect that? Itll be kind of pretty quick?

Eric Stockstead
Theres a lot happening in the lab. There are a lot of other kinds of pests for which rna pesticides are in field trials. Theres one thats at EPA now for regulatory approval, which its for a pest that plagues honeybees, commercial honeybee hives. Its a really urgent situation because these mites are also masters of evolving resistance, and theyve pretty much escaped almost all controls. So a new type of action there would really be valuable. People are trying really hard for a pest called the fall army worm, its a big problem in Africa right now. And the fall army worm, it just hits a lot of different crops. So a spray, an rna spray that could handle the fall army worm would be a big, a big boon. Now, its not a beetle, right. It's, it's one of these lepidopterans. So it's a tougher task. But even mosquitoes are of interest, right. And that's not as a crop pest, that's for human health protection.

Megan Cantwell
Yeah. So these could be, I mean, expanded not just to agriculture, but to potentially other pests as well.

Eric Stockstead
Right. You know, ticks or other insects that affect livestock. That's an area of interest.

Megan Cantwell
Great. Well, thank you so much, Eric. I appreciate you walking me through it.

Eric Stockstead
Really nice talking with you, Megan. Thanks for having me.

Megan Cantwell
Eric Stockstedt is a staff writer for science. You can find a link to his story@science.org. podcast stay tuned for producer Katherine Irving's conversation about how ephemeral streams across the US feed our major rivers.

Katherine Irving
Rivers like the Mississippi are vital water sources for millions of people, and they provide habitat for hundreds of animal and plant species.

Given how important they are, its pretty essential that we understand where the water in those rivers is coming from and how those sources contribute to its water quality.

As it turns out, these big rivers that cross the United States get their water from an innocuous source. As their name suggests, ephemeral streams are only around for a short time, but new research from Craig Brinkerhoff and his colleagues has found that they have a big impact on our rivers. So this week in science, Craig helps explain the impacts of these small but mighty streams. Hi Craig. Welcome to the podcast.

Craig Brinkerhoff
Hey, thanks for having me.

Katherine Irving
So I didn't know that there were multiple types of streams before I read your paper. So what are these different types and what makes them different from one another?

Craig Brinkerhoff
We can think of rivers as having these two types, perennial and non perennial. Perennial would be the Mississippi rivers that flow all the time, and non perennial streams, as the name would imply, are rivers that don't always flow. They are dry. At some point in the year. There's a handful of types of non perennial streams and ephemeral, or one type of non perennial. These are rivers that have no real long term connection to groundwater. And so they only flow in direct response to rain. So when you get a big rainstorm, that water gets into that ephemeral stream channel and it starts to flow.

Katherine Irving
And so those channels are just kind of carved over time based on where the sort of path of waste resistance for that rainwater is. Or how do they form?

Craig Brinkerhoff
Yep, pretty much they're formed depending on the place. It's either gulley, as you might see up in the mountains if you're on a hike, or if you go out to like, say, a desert. Out in the western us, it's these dry creek beds that are shaped by very large floods that only happen every once in a while. If you think of having a sort of continuum from the Mississippi river all the way up to your smallest little headwater creek, these are the headwater creeks. And so theyre all, yeah, really tiny, often quite steep. Two of them will flow together and form a bigger river, in which then two more will flow together and form a bigger river, etc. Until you arrive at the Ohio and then the Mississippi.

Katherine Irving
So going by that name, ephemeral, it kind of seems like these streams would be coming and going and maybe not making much of an impact. But your research indicates that these literalr streams might have a bigger impact than we think. And why is it sort of important to know what effect theyre having?

Craig Brinkerhoff
Its important because these temporary streams are a place where a lot of stuff gets into fresh water. So nutrients, sometimes pollutants, oftentimes sediments, because they are only flowing sometimes, and sometimes theyre dry. Theyre the way that a lot of these nutrients importance can get into streams and then eventually flow downstream into your perennial rivers. And so if you want to manage water quality and you want to have streams that are safe to drink or are safe to swim in, its important to kind of piece together where a bunch of these nutrients and pollutants are coming from.

Katherine Irving
And you kind of mentioned also in the paper that there's this controversy over what's known as the United States Clean Water act. So can you kind of explain a little bit what the argument is there and how ephemeral streams fit into that discussion?

Craig Brinkerhoff
The Clean Water act is the legislation that regulates where and how much pollution we can discharge into rivers, lakes and wetlands and basically these types of freshwater systems. The Clean Water act only applies to what are called the waters of the United States. And so somehow that has to be defined right where we're allowed to regulate what pollution ends up in these streams. Defining what the waters of the United States are is a complicated and relatively contentious topic. It's gone to the US Supreme Court three different times, most recently this last summer, where ephemeral wetlands and by proxy ephemeral streams are now no longer considered part of the waters of the United States, meaning they're no longer regulated under the Clean Water act. And so what that means is, in theory, you could go and introduce some sort of waste or pollution or what have you into these ephemeral water bodies.

Katherine Irving
Why wouldn't they just include everything just to be safe?

Craig Brinkerhoff
Some of the argument is that we can't necessarily regulate everything. You could take this all the way to saying you're regulating a riffle in the sand, which we're obviously not going to do. So there has to be a cutoff at some point. But I think that the debate is around how far does that cutoff go, or how conservative does it go, but.

Katherine Irving
Kind of seems like in terms of all the different streams and rivers that are out there, that ephemeral streams are one of the ones that we have less information about. So why is that?

Craig Brinkerhoff
In the past decade or so, there's been a really strong community effort by a lot of hydrologists and ecologists and all sorts of freshwater scientists to look at non perennial streams as a whole. But the trickier part is separating ephemeral from non ephemeral strains. And a lot of the reason for that is just that there isn't that much field data on ephemeral strains. And when we do have it, it's often done in desert watersheds, where these things are absolutely everywhere, and they're easier to go out and measure, even in a humid place. Like, I'm in New England and I, we usually dont think of these ephemeral streams as existing in Vermont, but they do.

Katherine Irving
It seems like theyre quite small, theyre not always around, and theyre all over the place. So I can imagine it would be a task to try and start that.

Craig Brinkerhoff
Exactly, which is why we turned to using a model instead, a model driven by field data, because we cant feasibly have data for all of these streams.

Katherine Irving
So why focus on the US in this study?

Craig Brinkerhoff
Well, we focused on the continental Us. So basically every river that drains or flows into the United States outside of Alaska and Hawaii. And we focus on that really for two reasons. One, the Clean Water act is a uniquely american piece of legislation, and in that context, it really only applies to the US. And we wanted to focus on that. But also, the US is really the only place in the world where we have high enough resolution maps of rivers to do this type of work. If we were to look at maps of rivers in other places, ephemeral streams are likely not going to be included in those types of maps and data. And so this type of modeling would be actually very, very difficult to do in other places.

Katherine Irving
So it seems like your paper was able to put a percentage number on the amount of discharge, which is basically the volume of water in the river channel that comes from these ephemeral streams. So how did you build that model? What was the process of coming up with the numbers that you did?

Craig Brinkerhoff
There's two steps. Basically, the first step is to map every ephemeral stream in the continuous uS. We start from this map of rivers that the US geological Survey has painstakingly built over the past two decades or something like that. And we start with a long term average model of groundwater. So we know how deep underground the water table is. And so we can isolate the streams that must only be fed then by precipitation, because they don't have this groundwater connection. And these are likely ephemeral. So then once we get those ephemeral streams, we can ask you the question that we're actually after, which is this kind of percent of water. And the way we do that is we take what's basically a numerical transport model and we just push a pulse of water through the entire United States criteria system. And as it moves downstream, we keep track of the fraction of that water that got into your rivers in these ephemeral watersheds. And we just keep track of that fraction as it moves through the entire river system, all the way basically to the mouth of the Mississippi. And by the time you do that, you get these percent estimates of what fraction of that water came from ephemeral watersheds.

Katherine Irving
You come up with this number that ephemeral streams contribute around 55% of that discharge coming out of big rivers. So that's a pretty big number. Thats more than half.

Craig Brinkerhoff
Yeah. Its a little surprising.

Katherine Irving
So what implications does that have for what you were looking for, like this water quality potential pollutants coming in?

Craig Brinkerhoff
We cant necessarily say that the 55% tracks to pollution because basically the way that these pollutants and solute loads get delivered is very context dependent on your specific river and the specific pollutant. And these types of things.

In general, nutrients and pollutants will get mobilized with flow and move downstream. What we can say is that if the majority of water in a river system is coming from ephemeral streams and watersheds, then there is a really significant potential for pollution to get into the rivers and potentially degrade water quality.

Katherine Irving
So just the fact that theres so much water coming from these ephemeral streams means that it's possible that pollutants are also coming in a pretty significant amount.

Craig Brinkerhoff
Exactly. And it also implies in the Clean Water act context. Right. It implies that even in your bigger rivers that are still nominally regulated under the Clean Water act, say the Connecticut river, which is ten minutes from where I'm sitting right now, that river is still nominally regulated under Clean Water act. But if 55% of that river water is coming from these ephemeral watersheds, those are no longer regulated. Which means even if one place is regulated, it can still be significantly influenced by places that are not regulated.

Katherine Irving
So how does that percentage number change when you move along the river? It's the amount of ephemeral stream water in the Connecticut river, the same where you are as it is in Canada, for example.

Craig Brinkerhoff
That ephemeral influence decreases as you move downstream into bigger and bigger rivers, and you get a more and more water from perennial rivers, that effect gets diluted. Its never going to drop to 0% though, because small streams are always going to feed into big rivers. Even in a big river, you still can have small little creeks that might be ephemeral and feed into it. What we end up seeing is a really high influence from ephemeral streams in your headwaters, and then that influence decreases to a point, and then it sort of asymptotes and it just sits at, depending on the watershed, lets say 40%. It just sits at that 40% all the way to the mouth of the river system.

Katherine Irving
Going back to that clean water act that we talked about earlier, how do you think that these findings in your research speak to that debate?

Craig Brinkerhoff
Provides some modeling confirmation of something that a lot of folks have been saying with field data for a long time, which is kind of this idea that, well, I guess it's two ideas. One, that regulating individual rivers or lakes ad hoc might not necessarily be the best solution when all of these things are connected and small streams are going to influence what's happening in big lakes and rivers, kind of regardless of their classification. And so basically this work provides a sort of confirmation of that idea. But we're also showing just how far downstream these impacts can be felt. And that can set up a kind of unique scenario when youre talking about water quality management, because these rivers go across state borders, for instance, or across kind of jurisdictions. And so this confirms the idea that theres this unique scenario where you might be introducing water with waste in it into other jurisdictions.

Katherine Irving
Where do you kind of hope that your research goes next? Are you going to continue to focus on these ephemeral streams, or are you kind of hoping to continue studies of water elsewhere?

Craig Brinkerhoff
I'm looking to do, I suppose, two things. So one of them has to do with one of the main kind of caveats of this study that's worth mentioning is that we're not looking at specific floods, for example, or specific flow paths, right? So we're not looking at, oh, a flood affects this river and then that water flows downstream. To this point. What we've done is just looked at really broad long term averages over the entire United States, which is a great first step. But im looking to take this work towards looking at individual floods. How might specific floods influence this effect?

How might pollution introduced at specific rivers influence downstream communities in specific places? And then were also looking to do similar modeling for other water bodies, ephemeral streams. Theres just one component of fresh water. Theres also different types of wetlands, different types of ponds. And we're looking to kind of expand this modeling into those domains as well.

Katherine Irving
Thanks so much for coming on the show, Craig.

Craig Brinkerhoff
Thank you.

Megan Cantwell
That was producer Katherine Irving talking to hydrologist Craig Brinkerhoff. He's currently a postdoctoral fellow at Yale and completed this research as a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For more information on the paper they discussed, you can go to science.org podcast next books host Angela Sainy talks with author Rachel O'Dwyer about her recent book, the Future of money in the age of the platform.

Angela Saini
Hi there. I'm Angela Saini, journalist, author, and the host of this segment of the podcast, in which I interview authors on a particular theme. This year, that theme is a future to look forward to optimistic ideas at a time when it can feel pretty hard to feel optimistic. Last month, I spoke to legal scholar Claire Horne about new reproductive technologies. This time I'm with Rachel O'Dwyer, a lecturer in digital cultures at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland.

Her book, which came out last year, is the future of money in the age of the platform.

O'Dwyer looks at how alternative forms of exchange like food stamps, store coupons, gift cards, and airline miles have become more important to us in an online world.

Rachel, thank you so much for joining me. You write that tokens fill the cracks in the legitimate economy.

What were these cracks then that you think needed to be filled?

Rachel O'Dwyer
Tokens have always sort of ghosted the economy of real money. Their term, I suppose. I use for all of these things that are sort of moneyish, that circulate alongside state backed money. So that could be things like bitcoin, but also book vouchers, Amazon gift cards, food stamps, snap balances, bone credit, even things like in game currencies or nfts. So tokens are less than money in some ways. So often they're things that can only be used by specific people or for specific things in a specific time or place. So think gift balances, for example. So Amazon's mechanical Turk workers are paid entirely in gift balances in most places in the world. So outside of the US and India. So often these tokens, they're kind of a sleight of hand, I suppose. They fill cracks where money can't flow either because people can't be paid easily, I guess, or because, yeah, they're sort of filling these sorts of extra regulatory spaces, these sort of spaces in gray or black economies. They serve, I suppose, a function for the state or the platform, often where those institutions want to maybe turn a blind eye, but also sometimes for users themselves as well. Tokens can also be a way of getting by, so they can be a way of being paid in these informal economies.

Angela Saini
When I was reading your book, it didn't occur to me that actually I use tokens quite regularly. I have airline miles, I use store coupons sometimes. And this is such an everyday part of my life. But as you explain, it's also an expanding one for many people who is using tokens now these days. In what kind of ways?

Rachel O'Dwyer
Yes, to your point out, I suppose we all probably use tokens without realizing it. We're constantly maybe moving from one economy of money like things to another. Maybe I have money on my revolut card, which is a kind of a venmo like system that we have here in Ireland, but I might also have points on a pharmacy card or points on my travel card. And I'm constantly moving between these different sorts of monetary economies. There's different kinds of ecologies of money like things. There might be one kind of money like thing for a middle class person and another kind of money like exchange system for somebody who's undocumented, for example, or somebody who, as I mentioned, is trying to be paid in a sort of an informal economy. So where maybe I can sort of very easily cash in and out my money from these various different kinds of money like economies. Somebody who's being paid exclusively in an Amazon gift card that's tied to their account or somebody whos receiving a remittance thats tied to their refugee status may not be as easily able to cash out their money into readily available cash. These different tokens, I suppose, come with different kinds of strings attached.

Angela Saini
What kind of benefits then do tokens have over conventional cash? Because youre implying then that for certain workers outside the formal economy then its a way of, I guess, bypassing the tax system. Is that the logic here?

Rachel O'Dwyer
I think for most of the time the benefits of tokens lie with the issuer. Historically there was a token that's known as scrip, that was issued by companies to their employers. And scrip is a sort of a special kind of a money that can only be redeemed in the company store. So a lot of companies issued them during the depression. It was a kind of a wage that you could only spend basically in the company store. So you got paid your wages in a kind of a token then that you could only spend back with your employer. So you were kind of being screwed at both ends, basically. You're screwed when you're paid a wage.

Angela Saini
Yeah, it does sound like a racket.

Rachel O'Dwyer
Yeah, it's a complete racket. And as I mentioned, Amazon are actually paying, you know, quite a lot of their mechanical Turk workers. So they're crowdsourced workers on their mechanical Turk platform in an Amazon gift balance. It's tied to their account, so they can only sort of redeem their payment back on the Amazon store.

Angela Saini
And can you just explain what a mechanical Turk worker is?

Rachel O'Dwyer
Amazon has their own crowdsource platform called Mechanical Turk, where if somebody wants menial online tasks done, like, maybe you want an image dataset labeled like, show me how many of these images are of a human face. You can assign this task to a set of nameless workers, usually in a poorer country for a small kind of nominal fee. It's usually a sort of a north to south kind of an arrangement. And the majority of these workers are outside of the US and more recently outside of India. Their pay is through this kind of historical scrip model where you are paid in Amazon gift balances for the work that you do. So you can only redeem it through the Amazon store. And that's actually quite difficult because if you're living somewhere that doesn't actually do Amazon deliveries or things like that, it's actually quite difficult to even spend that money. So you'll see people actually trying to find ways of cashing out their Amazon gift balance, like selling it at a loss for cash or for bitcoin on Reddit channels.

So there's kind of a whole, I suppose, history of exploitation. But we were asking about what are the benefits of these tokens? So for platforms, the benefit is that actually Amazon can act officially as an employer without being seen to employ. Because if you're not dealing with money, which you're not, these are gift balances, then you're not officially an employer and you're not officially a bank because you're not actually processing payments and you're not actually officially employing. So the token sort of acts as this regulatory sleight of hand. By not actually being money, you're not doing either of these things.

So mostly it's in the platform's favor. But sometimes for workers, for example, sex workers often have quite a lot of difficulty being paid. This is not because of sort of morality issue, it's because a lot of payments processors are famously adverse to dealing with sex work because of chargeback issues where patrons sort of turn around and basically issue a chargeback through their credit card for charges from Pornhub or things like that. So it's sort of a historical issue where payments have been difficult. So a lot of legacy payments processors don't like dealing to with online sex workers. Some of these token systems have actually proved to be quite useful for people engaging in things like cam modeling or streaming online.

And so in some instances, actually tokens can be useful for people as well. For workers, they can have this sort of utility, I guess, and they have this sort of flexibility as well, where they can feel a little bit more social, I guess, than money.

Angela Saini
As I was reading your book, I was amazed by the ingenuity of some of the people using tokens in this way. So for example, you give the example very early on in the book of Zimbabwe, where for a while airtime credit on cell phones was used as a way of quickly and easily sending small amounts of money to family and friends because you could just charge their phone with a bit of airtime credit. And it bypassed the hassle and costs associated with money transfer firms, which did feel quite subversive in a way, as though consumers were taking charge of money in their own way.

Rachel O'Dwyer
Yeah, I just find it really fascinating that even when these tokens come with strings attached, that people often find then the ways around. And I think airtime is a really good example of that. Or I loved in the book I wrote about butter vouchers in Ireland. So these were a relief token, like a social welfare token in the 1980s, where people were issued a voucher for butter along with their social welfare payment. And ostensibly that was only redeemable for butter. But actually a lot of people struck up these sort of informal relationships with shops where the shopkeeper would allow them to get all sorts of other things for the butter. So other dairy products, but also sardines and beans and cigarettes and buckfast. And even since writing it, ive heard in other countries people will say, oh yeah, we had a milk voucher. Somebody will have needed the milk voucher and will have bought milk vouchers from their friend who didnt drink milk for money. The thing im finding now, though, is that some of those loopholes or those workarounds that maybe were more possible in the old days of tokens are becoming less possible because so many of our tokens are now kind of hard coded. If you think of the old days of food stamps, for example, in the eighties when these were like bits of paper, now relief tokens, are theyre electronic tokens that are tied to your identity or often tied to your biometric identity. So food stamps in the US, for example, are electronic benefits cards and any of that kind of turning a blind eye, its just impossible.

So you cant buy hot meals, for example, with food stamps in the US, you cant buy hygiene products.

Yeah.

Angela Saini
And this is another thing you explore in your book, is that these tokens, the way theyre different from cash, from hard cash, is that theyre often linked to identity. My airline company knows that my miles can only really belong to me. Only I can really earn them or redeem them. Why does that matter in the world of tokens? This kind of tethering of identity to the tokenization, a lot of these sorts.

Rachel O'Dwyer
Of air miles or shopping kind of basket models are very much tied to the fact that your identity is sort of linked to your purchasing data.

The value of that data is predictive data for advertising, for training data, for AI for particularly, I suppose, for things like insurance and risk, and then also for the future of logistics. We are seeing that sort of more and more that is a big value proposition. Even like Sam Altman, who's best known obviously, for his connection with OpenAI, was involved with Worldcoin, which was this sort of attempt to launch a coin that was linked to your biometric identity. There were sort of pilots in Kenya and in Argentina. I mean, the biggest one was in Kenya. Users were offered like dollar 50 worth of worldcoin if they would scan their biometric details onto the worldcoin system. So the idea is that not only would you be sort of an arbiter of a world digital currency, you'd also be the owner then of this biometric data. So I think it's a system maybe where we're seeing a sort of a collapse, maybe, of money and identity into one thing in some ways.

Angela Saini
Well, that's fascinating in a way. It's bringing money into the information economy and the information is us, that they will know everything about us through. Not just through our transactions, but because our transactions are linked to who we are.

Rachel O'Dwyer
Yeah, but it's just even I think there was a time where, historically, banknotes were sort of tied to a particular individual. So they sort of come from things like the goldsmiths receipt, where you lodged money with somebody like a goldsmith, and it would have said, pay Angela whatever amount of gold you lodged when you returned that receipt, you. You would have been given that. But people started circulating those receipts, and over time, they sort of were decoupled from identity. So it just started to say, pay the bearer. So we got these sort of anonymous bearer instruments, which were just paper notes. I think what we're seeing now, increasing our money, is sort of being repersonalized or recoupled back to our identity, so that I think our identity will be our means of payment.

Angela Saini
And this is another thread in your book, this idea that what we're seeing now is not necessarily something completely novel, because this idea of money, the way that we use it now, is quite a recent invention. Bartering and tokens are actually very ancient. They've been used for such a long time. What do you think the future of money will look like then? Will it be a mix of tokens and cash, or will cash just disappear?

Rachel O'Dwyer
What I did find really fascinating, and I feel like maybe the title of the book is a bit of a misnomer, because the title is the future of money. But what I found, I guess, was that, as you say, the history of money continues to repeat itself, and that many of these ostensibly new tokens have actually sort of been around at different moments in time. But I really feel like we urgently sort of need anonymity in our money. I really hope that we're not moving to a future completely cashless society.

Angela Saini
Well, this series is about a future to look forward to, kind of optimistic future. So how do you see the world of tokens, then? In positive ways, changing how we live our lives, especially as we live our lives more online, virtually. Are you optimistic then?

Rachel O'Dwyer
I was definitely a lot more optimistic, I think, when I first came to money, because I sort of came to money as a digital activist sort of person who was really interested in open source. I sort of viewed money as a technology and a technology that could maybe be designed differently, but ive become a little bit more circumspect about that, I think, over the last ten or 15 years. But I do think there is still a space for different kinds of values within money. And I did come across examples that were quite interesting within the book where people are exploring ways of trying to make money more social, I'm just thinking of one, and I'm probably going to butcher the pronunciation. But there's a japanese currency, for example, called furaikipu, which is like sort of a token of a caring economy where they were looking, I suppose, at the problem of care for the elderly. And one of the issues was that sometimes children were living far apart from their elderly parents. People kind of wanted to care for elderly people in their neighborhoods, but couldn't necessarily care for their parents. So you could sort of accrue these sort of caring tokens by caring for elderly people in your neighborhood. And then that care could be sort of referred. You know, those tokens could be used to provide care for your parents in another part of Japan. What they found was sort of the japanese elderly people, who also had a sort of an objection to charity, prefer to receive care through this kind of fur aikhipu system than they did through aid care or through a sort of a quote unquote kind of charitable system.

So there was something about this kind of token, this sort of almost barter economy that felt more like real care, more like love, than other kinds of systems.

I don't know. I found that example quite interesting. And there are other experiments like this, like time banking, for example, or local exchange trading systems that play with a similar idea. And they're not perfect by any means, but, you know, there are attempts to encode other kinds of values into money beyond.

Yeah, we're all competitive, self interested agents, and I think, you know, that has to be a good thing.

Angela Saini
Yeah, that is pretty optimistic. Rachel O'Dwyer, thank you so much.

Rachel O'Dwyer
Thank you so much, Angela.

Angela Saini
And thank you, wherever you are, for listening. Please do read along with this series if you can. Next month, I'll be speaking to Daniela Russell, and if you want to get her book, it's called the Heart and the our Bright Future with robots. See you then.

Megan Cantwell
And that concludes this edition of the Science Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, write to us@sciencepodcast.org to find us on podcast apps, search for science magazine, or you can listen on our website, science.org podcast. This show was edited by me, Megan Cantwell, Catherine Irving, Sarah Crespi, and Kevin McLean. We also had production help from Megan Tuck at Prodigy. Our music is by Jeffrey Cook and Wen Khoi wen on behalf of science and its publisher, aaas. Thanks for joining us.