The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'painting of a dollar on the wall of a museum.'
I'm a shameless proponent of technological advancement. My professional life relies entirely on the web and I think crypto networks can deliver us a degree of financial freedom that we've never experienced in this country. At the same time, I seldom carry a phone and nearly always pay with cash. And I genuinely don't understand why more people don't do the same.
There are powerful forces trying to chain us to their agendas using technology. The vaccine passports being pushed during the pandemic were perhaps the most troubling example of this. But the whole idea of a cashless society is comparably problematic, just on a larger scale. Here's a quote from a recent Guardian article about how going cashless is negatively impacting people in the UK:
The shiny, bright future of full computerisation looks very much like a dystopia to someone who either doesn’t understand it or have the means to access it. And almost by definition, the people who can’t access the digitalised world are seldom visible, because absence is not easy to see. What is apparent is that improved efficiency doesn’t necessarily lead to greater wellbeing.
The obvious alternative to dystopia is appropriate technology, centered around the needs of people rather than driven by corporate profiteering. One great enemy of this alternative is engineered obsolescence. Most of the tech we have access to is disposable junk. It could be built durably, but instead it's built to be disposable. If we want to use it, we have to keep buying it forever.
There are many who believe a transition to a cashless society is inevitable. I believe a cashless society would be a ticking time bomb of systemic risk. Less dramatically, it would represent a tax by financial services companies on absolutely everyone. Right now, that tax is mostly levied on businesses paying per transaction fees to card companies. Part of why I prefer cash is to eliminate these fees for the places I shop at. I also like that cash doesn't leak private data.
One of the most popular scams in Minneapolis involves one or more persons getting a hold of a victim's phone and using Venmo to rob them of thousands of dollars. Sometimes the thief asks to use the victim's phone. Sometimes the device is taken by force or pilfered from a table at a crowded bar. This kind of thing can't happen to people who don't carry their phones.
I feel like the UK will attempt to go cashless before the US. American dollars are simply too common throughout the world for them to be taken out of circulation at all quickly. But there are metro areas here that are already far down that path. Where I live, you have to pay for parking with an app now.
From my perspective, requiring people to carry phones is exactly the same thing as requiring people to carry comprehensive surveillance devices. If we submit to the surveillance, we get a little short-term convenience. That doesn't seem like a reasonable deal to me.
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