The Bank of Finland is looking at ways of how to maintain the ability to pay in times of extreme crisis, for instance, when there is no electricity or internet. they aren't the only central bank looking to do the same in the area, as there is near total reliance on Mastercard and Visa for payments now, and the geopolitical situation is worsening. The irony is of course, is that while they have consistently reduced the amount people use cash through all kinds of ways, they are telling people to keep cash on hand in case of an emergency.
In many areas of daily life now, it is impossible to operate with cash and often, impossible to operate without an application. For instance, a lot of the carparks in Finland have numberplate readers and require an app to pay in order to get out of the lot. If for some reason the application or the phone isn't working, too bad. There are also a lot of businesses that will not accept cash, because it costs them more to do so now. Back in the day, it cost them to accept cards, but this has been reversed.
Pretty much all of our daily life is reliant on the communication infrastructure that makes it possible, with very little analogue remaining in the system at all. Most people don't fully appreciate how much this has changed in a very short time I think, because when everything works, it is far, far easier and more convenient. But when it doesn't work, society collapses. For instance, my daughter's bus card wasn't working the other day and I have told her to always keep cash on her, just in case this happens. However, the bus driver couldn't take cash - so he let her on for free. Now, extrapolate that out to a million people a day on buses, trains, and trams, and it creates quite the headache.
I remember back in the day working in retail in Australia, occasionally the EFTPOS system would go down, and we would have to get the card "clacker" out from under the desk and manually process credit cards. We couldn't take debit cards. This happened once during one of the busiest sale periods of the year, and it was absolute chaos, and many people left the store without their goods in frustration. But also understanding that it wasn't our fault either.
Our reliance on technology is pretty extreme these days, isn't it? For many of us (at least in developed and developing nations), our very livelihoods rely on having internet access, not to mention our hobbies and entertainment. If there was a hypothetical EMP that knocked out the internet for a few days, the world would very quickly descend into chaos, as people take advantage of the system being down, and perhaps just out of boredom. We would end up at each other's throats, because we had nothing else to do with our time.
These days, we have to encourage people to "switch off" from technology and have "technology detox" periods in their life to try and bring back some analogue living again, but it is a pretty small amount of people who regularly do this. I know that I am not one of them, because I will at least once a day write an article for Hive like this one, meaning I need digital equipment and internet access. And then, a lot of the other things I do in life like go to the gym, still require internet access and applications.
What is also interesting to note as a risk, is that while the technology brings us all of the information we could possibly need to us immediately, it is also probably the biggest source of risk for the information we receive. The propaganda machines of the 1930s would have killed to have this kind of gradation and access to people in their own homes, pushing whatever they want right into the brains of people who consume it as constant entertainment, not even caring as to the accuracy of what they are absorbing.
We might now have generations of "digital natives", but the thing with being culturally immersed is that it also comes with the blindness of the culture itself. Every culture is largely blind to itself and it is only when people from outside, "foreigners" who meet the differences from their own culture and highlight it. It is only when we step outside of the normal, that we see how strange the normal actually is.
Have you ever thought what your life might look like to a stranger who gets to silently observe your daily life? Would they be impressed, shocked, disappointed, disgusted? Would they want to copy you, be like you, or want to have nothing to do with you? Would you be their role model in the positive or the negative?
If we could all just take a step back from what we normally do, I think we would very quickly discover a lot of opportunities for us to make our lives better. Much of it would be low-hanging fruit, like scrolling mindlessly less, and spending a little more time with people we care about. I also think that we would discover things like being a little more analogue, a little more manual in our actions, makes us feel better about ourselves and the world around us. We would start to build ownership collateral in what we do, rather than be a constant renter reliant on the services of corporations.
It is not like the internet and the apps are going away, but as humans, we also have to work out what helps us be the best version of ourselves right now, and in the future now. We have to think about what actually has value in our lives, and not outsource our competitive advantages out of convenience.
Once a competitive advantage is outsourced, it becomes a liability.
What is yours?
Taraz
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