‘Cards are for showing off’: Aesthetics of cashlessness and intermediation among the urban poor in Delhi

In this chapter, I explore how payment technologies such as mobile phone-enabled payments pertain to the lives of the urban poor in the post-demonetisation India. While becoming increasingly widespread after the demonetisation, these technologies and their uses operate on unequal infrastructural terrain and are refracted through social inequalities and unstable income patterns. I show how in this context, the aesthetic production that underlines the use of payment technologies by the urban poor unsettles demonetisation’s technological promise of immediation, and highlights how intermediation, unexpected uses and differentiation of forms of moneys take place.