Fintech hackathons, corporate hacking, and ‘the everyday’ in critical fintech studies

This article engages the concept of ‘the everyday’ as a critical tool for analysing the intersections of finance and technology and the political economy of the fintech industry. While existing studies often use ‘the everyday’ to refer to those actors, practices, sites, or relations outside the financial sector that are increasingly subject to the sector’s influence, the article advances a more expansive notion that highlights its affordances as a critical concept. On this view, the everyday does not in the first instance denote an empirical domain; rather, it signals an analytical effort to expand the research agenda of critical fintech scholarship in specific ways. To develop this understanding and demonstrate its analytical value, the article provides a concrete example of its application, using the everyday to analyse fintech hackathons. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at four fintech hackathons, it reveals their constitutive role in the formation, consolidation, and expansion of the fintech sector and engages their ephemeral politics, which revolve around the promotion of corporate hacking as a preferred mode of social agency.