Assetization has become a useful term because it stresses the need to think about how different things can be configured or reconfigured as assets through active attempts to make new investable objects.

Assets mean different things to different people. While we might think of housing or shares as the definition of an asset, almost anything nowadays can be transformed into an asset with the right configuration of legal rights, technological devices, and economic rules. Assetization is a concept that helps us to understand this process of making assets, avoiding the assumption that some things are inherently assets while other are not. Today, we can define a YouTuber’s personality, or artwork we own, or the digital personal data that large tech multinationals collect as assets; all these things and more can generate future revenue streams.

Assetization has its intellectual origins in the academic discipline of science and technology studies, which is a field that looks at the social, political, and economic drivers of science, technology, and innovation, as well as the implications of the latter for the former. The rapid expansion of assetization as a real-world phenomenon, however, is traceable to two recent issues. The first driver of assetization is financial, reflecting the public policy response to the 2008 global financial crisis with the pursuit of a zero-interest-rate-policy through quantitative easing: the decline in government bond returns alongside growth in capital available led to a search for yields from new asset classes. The second driver is technological, especially the growth of blockchain technologies and tokenization, as these technologies created new mechanisms for turning things into assets; the classic example is the rise of non-fungible tokens.

New markets are arising as the result of assetization. Companies, especially fintech innovators, are identifying ways to create new investment opportunities across a range of previously non-bankable resources. Some estimates put the value of these untapped markets in the trillions of US dollars. The objective for these companies is to find ways to generate liquidity and tradeability for these non-bankable assets, while opening up finance to more and more people. For example, it is possible to create new markets for environmental services to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through environmental, sustainability, and governance (ESG) standards and metrics, although only

if these standards are rigorously enforced.

The growth in new asset classes and increasing importance of the asset-based economy is not without its potentially problematic side effects. While assetization has led to the emergence of new markets, it is also creating a range of public and political governance issues. To put it simply, there is a dark side to assetization – as with everything. Assetization has led to the explosion of new asset classes, but several have led to financial bubbles – these include cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, while potential bubbles include artificial intelligence. Aside from the financial losses and wasted investment, assetization also changes the way we organize and govern societal resources, having the potential to lock us into a specific future we can not get out of. For example, inter­national investment law can limit the capacity of governments and policymakers in the future to change the direction of policy. We can end up binding future generations to our mistakes today.

Kean Birch is Ontario Research Chair in Science Policy and Professor in the Department of Science, Technology & Society and Graduate Program in Science & Technology Studies at York University, Canada. He is co-editor of the book “Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism” published by MIT Press.