Dear readers,

We’re in a new year facing new battles, but also old battles, and one of my old battles is to protect the cash system against the encroachment of digital giants. This issue is now beginning to dovetail with the unstable geopolitics of our time, as Trump seeks to promote digital US dollar stablecoins to spread US dollar hegemony.

If this is something you’d like to learn about, or brush up on, I recently spoke to the Dutch documentary channel VPRO about this (see the video above). In it, I explain - in under 20 minutes - all the issues at stake with cashless society (aka. a bank-dominated society) and also how stablecoins, CBDC and Bitcoin fit into this schema.

Here’s a breakdown of the topics covered

1. 0:00 My metaphor of cash as the bicycle of payments

2. 2:57 The growing digital ‘oligopolization’

3. 3:45 The structure of the money system, using my casino chip metaphor

4. 6:01 Bearer instruments vs ledger instruments

5. 6:42 Payments surveillance and censorship

6. 7:43 Resilience, and cash in times of crisis

7. 9:31 Inclusion, and the use of cash for budgeting in low income communities, and how digital payments increase spending

8. 10:17: Protecting the small-scale peer-to-peer informal economy

9. 11:09 The myth of cash and criminality

10. 11:50 Understanding CBDC

11. 14:44 Understanding stablecoins, and their new role in US geopolitical strategy

12. 16:49 Understanding Bitcoin vs. stablecoins

13. 18:04 The future analog revolution, and rebellion against digital life

The video is published as a collaboration between VPRO and my own YouTube channel. I do cross-post some of my YouTube videos to Substack, but not all of them, so please do subscribe to me on YouTube too!

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Cheers!

Brett

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In a cashless society you’re permanently fused to Big Finance and Big Tech with no way to escape. In this video I give 10 reasons for why that’s a bad way to arrange our economy and our society, and why we need to protect and promote cash to keep a balance of power in the money system.

If you want to go deeper into this issue, check out the Cashback section on ASOMOCO, and see my 2022 book Cloudmoney.

Contents

• 00:00 Intro

• 1:04 Cashless is like bicycle-less

• 2:05 Cashless surveillance

• 3:00 Cashless exclusion

• 4:12 Payments censorship

• 5:19 Cash as resilient

• 7:19 Spending and indebtedness

• 8:44 Economic oligopolization

• 9:45 Political capture

• 10:45 The vibe of cashless society

• 13:02 Financial stability

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I’ve now spent almost a decade defending the physical cash system (see 10 Reasons to Fight Cashless Contagion), and one thing stands out to me. It’s fairly easy to scare people with stories about digital payments surveillance and censorship, but this ‘bad things will happen’ story can seldom overcome the digital progress narratives most people have programmed into their heads.

Typically, when I’ve been on a mainstream show on Sky News or the BBC, the interaction will go like this:

Presenter: so what bad things can happen in a cashless society?

Brett: X, Y, and Z bad things will happen in a cashless society

Presenter: Yes, that is concerning, but isn’t digital just so convenient? Surely we can’t stop progress?

Ok, I’m paraphrasing there, but that’s basically how the interaction goes. Whenever I see those presenters defaulting into that story, I get all existential. Deep down I want to say to them: “A society that seeks short-term convenience will incrementally imprison itself in a long-term corporate cage of comfort, and forget how to live free. And, after a while that cage of comfort will cease to feel comfortable. Not only will you remain discontented, but you’ll now be locked into that state of being”

I mean, I could say that, but it’s not like the BBC - or any mainstream scene for that matter - can process something like that. Trying to deconstruct dominant progress narratives in about 30 seconds on radio or TV is pretty damn hard. It takes years of practice to just see through the progress narratives, and years more to figure out how to deliver the critique fast.

So, here’s one short-cut I’d like to share with you today. If you spend hours showing why tech accelerationist stories are bullshit, it’s a bit like trying to delete a very large file stuck in someone’s brain. It’s actually much quicker to simply overwrite the file by inserting a different one. Rather than fighting within an old frame, you give them a new frame, one that allows them to receive, and buy into, your vision without resistance.

I typically to do this through analogy, because that’s the quickest delivery method for the new frame. So, I’ll leave you with an example of me doing this in Poland a few months back. Here’s how I defend cash in under five minutes.

Want more ammunition to fight against the War on Cash?

I written a lot about cash and how to protect it. If you want to go deeper, check out my book Cloudmoney.

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Paying subscribers can find the audio edition, read by me, here

When I’m defending physical cash I sometimes catch public attention by focusing on scandalous problems that can accompany ‘cashless’ bank payment systems. These include surveillance, authoritarian censorship, cyberwarfare, hacking, exclusion, and domination by corporations (see 10 Reasons to Fight Cashless Contagion). The fintech industry, by contrast, studiously avoids talking about these ‘political’ things, and focuses rather on ‘economic’ considerations like innovation and efficiency. In the fintech worldview, cash is neither innovative nor efficient, which means it must give way to digital payments like a horsecart moving aside for sportcars.

Their progress narrative can be destabilized by simply recasting cash as the bicycle of payments (and digital as the Uber, rather than the sportcar), but their rhetoric remains powerful and disorientating for the public. The language of innovation is the native tongue of entrepreneurs, and for a long time that’s been politically untouchable - who would ever dare to be against innovation? The language of efficiency is borrowed from conventional economists, but it’s equally politically untouchable. In the neoliberal era, governments have been desperate to show that they opt for the cheapest path, and if it’s narrowly more efficient for society to slump into dependence on an oligopoly of centralized firms (and to be under the thumb of tech and finance billionaires) then so be it.

This imagined split between ‘economic’ and ‘political’ considerations is problematic on many levels, but it’s hammered into the minds of undergraduates in many university economics programmes. Wannabe economists don’t begin their analysis by imagining people formed within tangled webs of culture and politics. Rather, they open their introductory textbooks and are faced with an image of ‘units’ - discrete and self-contained agents - who seek to get the most from the least.

Even nuanced economists will have been exposed to this idea of the economy as a collection of independent units who seek out the most efficient and ‘rational’ way to maximize their utility. It’s not that these economists are unable to recognise political, cultural, and even ‘irrational’, weird and creative aspects of society. It’s that economic analysis requires them to strip those away from multi-dimensional issues in order to isolate an imagined economic essence. This is revealed in statements like ‘I can’t explain the politics of this, but I can explain the economics’.

This illusory split gets particularly problematic in the monetary realm. Econ graduates are trained to see money as a purely ‘economic’ phenomenon, rather than a political one. To this end, they’re fed an abstract account of money as an apolitical commodity subject to natural market evolution, as if it were a product on a market, rather than a deeply political structure that underpins markets. Rather than meditating on how this market-underpinning foundation is laid down and maintained, they treat it as if it were just another commodity and try to apply market logic to understand it (which, incidentally, is why economists love creating ‘evolution of money’ stories in which they fantasize a trajectory from barter to shells to metals to cash to credit cards).

This mental glitch, in which money is seen as a product rather than a foundation, wreaks havoc when trying to understand the case of cashless society. I remember the blank look on the face of an award-winning economist when I explained to him that the move towards ‘cashlessness’ is heavily pushed by the banking sector, which fights dirty for the ascendency of its digital casino chips (the so-called ‘deposits’ that we see our bank accounts - see The Deposit Myth). I suggested to him that, ironically, the attack on cash weakens the structural integrity of the monetary foundation that these banks themselves depend on. He didn’t get it. Not only was he unaware of the fact that banks issue their own casino-chip money, but he couldn’t grasp why this might be important. The only relevant fact to him was that the digital payments they facilitated were ‘efficient and convenient’, and were thereby a superior product. In the economics worldview, trying to go against that is like trying to stop water running down a hill.

The force in market forces

Let’s take a detour into that metaphor above. Water is pulled down a hill by gravity, and it’s not like water chooses or desires this. When we move towards things, however, economists tend to assume that it must stem from an internal and independent desire within us, which pushes us towards the thing. This becomes a foundational vibe in their analysis. For example, when our desires hit against constraints, they’re supposed to be resolved by ‘market forces’ that will generate signals that guide society down some optimal path to get the most from the least. This feeds into dominant progress narratives, in which desire-driven economic agents accumulate more and more stuff and carry society to a new ‘high score’ (see Money as Addiction).

But if Economics is synonymous with ‘market forces’, many conventional economists seem reluctant to fully embrace the implications of that word ‘force’. We’re certainly tied up in large-scale markets, but what if those markets subjected us to forceful forms of ‘gravity’ that could override - or condition - our internal desires, and pull us towards paths of least resistance? Rather than being independent units, we’re all caught in interdependent webs, and nowadays those webs have been massively scaled-up to the point where their default settings easily overcome, and mould, our individual desires.

The primary default setting is to expand and accelerate, and going against this path can feel like being a water molecule trying to move uphill. This is why people who find cash totally normal have a growing feeling that the option to use it will be taken away from them. They can sense the systemic tendency pulling everyone towards ever more automation and acceleration, and struggle to imagine how they’d move against it. It’s this uphill path that requires active choice, whereas going with the systemic tendency is a passive act of releasing resistance, allowing yourself to be pulled towards the systemic default.

In a city like London there are millions of people who remember living with debit cards and apps without feeling any strong necessity to use them all the time. Like social smokers, however, they would experiment with them. After a while they started to feel the pull getting stronger, and noticed the alternative options slowly disappearing, after which it felt inexorable. They’re left with a feeling like that society must have ‘chose’ that, but nobody can remember an exact moment when this shift happened, and they’re currently in the process of slowly forgetting what it was like before it happened. Many people are vaguely aware of how their neural pathways have been rearranged into new circuits of addiction, and now find themselves agitated by situations they previously were not agitated by - like the thought of taking out a banknote in a bouji London bar rather than simply tapping their card. At some level they understand that they’re stuck in a vast web that will literally break them if they refuse to ‘choose’ the path of increased acceleration. If they try to go ‘uphill’ through acts of actual choice, they’ll be increasingly blocked. This imminent blocking is why we find so many stories expressing concern about those who’ll be ‘left behind’ by cashless society…

So, asking when Londoners’ chose to transition to bank-dominated digital payments is misleading, because they were slowly sucked into them. All of this is missed by (unnuanced) economists, because the ‘units’ in their textbooks start life in some gravity-free world, sheltered from systemic forces, cultural conditioning, peer pressure, or hegemony (where the interests of a ruling elite seep into our souls as ‘common sense’). So, when they see a man tapping his ApplePay, they see an act of desire and choice. They don’t see a man sliding into a new state of accelerated addiction after his brain has been hacked by endless nudging amidst decades of bank lobbying and shut-downs of the cash infrastructure. They won’t recognise that he’ll increasingly be punished and feel ‘out of sync’ if he doesn’t move in this direction. They’ll imagine he’s stepping forward into the future, rather than slumping into conformity.

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This slumping is now easily visible on plane flights. A few years ago it was common for people to take out cash in an act of choice, but EasyJet executives - and all the other airline execs - decided in boardrooms to take that choice away. Those were political acts imposed from above, and those acts of blocking create shame that transmits like a cultural virus. People have now rearranged their behaviour to avoid it. They literally learn to have their cards at the ready, after which they come to expect it, and - once addicted - want it. This is easy to observe if you have anthropologist eyes, rather than economist goggles. Just visit a place where cash is considered normal. The people don’t perceive any inconvenience, because they’ve not yet learned to feel shame about cash.

This is not unique to cash. This same phenomenon occurs with all automation processes in our economy. A few years ago we barely noticed the absence of AI, but right now all of us are in the process of learning to want, or at least expect it. We’re at the beginning phase of new slumping process, and at some point you’ll be forced to sink into dependence on it. Conventional economists frequently just ignore the econo-political-cultural forces that can create this ‘gravity’, and this approach gets spun by the fintech industry. They dripfeed us a powerful ideology that says automation is pushed by our desire, but is also unstoppable, and thereby completely indifferent in our desire (don’t get left behind!).

Fintech firms like the German digital bank N26 will present themselves as innovators serving this transition, but also as efficiency-mongers reducing cost to society. This takes us back to their story of cash being an inefficient and old-school ‘horsecart’ exerting a costly drag on the economy.

The ‘cost of cash’, and the cost of stairs

In the piece above, N26 propagandists lay down a range of costs that the cash horsecart supposedly exerts on our society. They’re not alone in doing this. It’s common for fintech players to raise concern about the ‘cost of cash’. These costs include the cost of printing it (incurred by money issuers), the cost of banking it, insuring it, moving it around, and the time taken to do reconciliation (incurred by businesses). They harp on about the hassle of using it, the time taken to go to ATMs, and the interest not earned by not using bank accounts. They set that against their digital systems, and invoke the illusory mantra that technology saves you time, rather than simply accelerating your life (see Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster).

One of the reasons why the propaganda works is that it plays into existing weaknesses in economic literacy. An economy is a interdependent web of people who draw from the earth, but nowadays that takes the form of a giant transnational mesh structure underpinned by state legal systems and multi-tiered monetary systems. Modern corporate capitalism is actually a vast network vortex, with sub-vortices.

Rather than experiencing all the underlying connections within this vortex-of-vortexes, a person will experience themselves like a disconnected atom moving from one market to the next. At one point they’re a consumer in the goods market, the next an employee in the job market, and the next an investor in the financial market. In each of these spaces they’re but one tiny node, and rather than recognizing the interlocking nature of the markets they pass through, they experience themselves like a blindfolded person moving around an elephant, imagining each part they touch to be a unique object.

When someone is immersed in a huge system that’s too large to see, it’s easy to get them to fixate on the ‘phenomenological’ elements directly in front of them, rather than the reality beyond their perception. The interlocking markets of corporate capitalism are held together by monetary systems, but many people casually adopt the economics view of money as some kind of mysterious special commodity. We often fixate upon on monetary cost, the amount of monetary credits handed over to get something in an act of exchange, while not noticing that the most primal cost of something is a real resource cost - the amount of human energy and natural resources that go into bringing it to life through an act of production. A monetary cost is one leg of an exchange, and the other is a real good or service which exacted a real resource cost on its producers, and which is the actual thing that (theoretically at least) gives us some benefit. The good or service gets used up, but money doesn’t. Once handed over, the money will continue on an onward path that may fork and make its way back to you somewhere else in the multi-dimensional vortex (or will be pulled out of circulation by its issuers).

Fintech propagandists, though, can mobilize misunderstandings about this structure to their advantage in at least three ways:

1. A modern money system is actually an ecosystem of issuers issuing money in multiple forms in multiple layers, and cash is one component of a balanced monetary foundation. Fintech firms, though, will use the economist idea of money as a series of evolving products, and imagine that ‘money’ will be upgraded if it lapses into one form (somewhat like imagining transport to be ‘upgraded’ if we got rid of bicycles and trains, and relied solely on Uber)

2. They place their audience into the position of the blindfolded person feeling the elephant, and get them to fixate on an imagined cost that cash brings to each section (e.g. the investor loses returns by holding cash, the consumer finds it inconvenient, the manager finds it hard to account for, the shareholder loses profits etc.)

3. They’ll suggest these ‘costs of cash’ are one-way losses without benefits, and then add them up into some total cost to society from this defunct product

Let’s take an example from the N26 article, where they claim that:

Cash needs to be printed, continually inspected and then transported to and secured in safes. That costs the German economy over €10 billion each year.

They’re trying to imply that the €10 billion is like a gas lost to space, but those monetary costs will appear on a bunch of income statements somewhere else as income earned from providing a service, and will turn up in GDP figures. Indeed, everything that turns up in GDP ‘costs’ one party money, and another party real resources, but we tend to assume there’s also a reverse flow of benefit to these costs. Indeed, things often incur a higher monetary cost if they’re valuable. High quality jeans cost more than cheap shirts because they're better. Similarly, a monetary system with cash is a more resilient, balanced and inclusive monetary system, which is better. Of course there's a real resource cost to producing jeans, and to maintaining the cash system, but there's also a real resource cost to maintaining an army, a logistics system, or stairs in a skyscraper. Sometimes we use resources for valid reasons.

The best way to understand our N26 propagandist is to see them like an elevator salesperson spinning stories about the wonderous innovation and efficiency of their automated solution, while casting stairs as a wasteful and costly use of resources. I could imagine an ancient Pharoah ordering the creation of a collossal pyramid of gold-encrusted stairs in a wanton act of wastefulness, but - on average - our use of real resources for stairs is totally valid. While the elevator evangelist harps on about the exertion required to walk up them, fitness instructors would see that as a benefit. Moreover, the costs of stairs can prevent far more serious ‘social costs’, like people getting trapped in a building when it’s burning down.

An elevator salesperson would undoubtedly draw attention to people tripping down stairs and breaking their leg, much like our fintech propagandists who do everything they can to draw attention to social costs of cash. In the N26 piece they highlight ‘all the illegal activity in Germany associated with cash’, and the ‘astronomical sums of cash’ that are lost or stolen. They ignore the fact that digital systems are constantly used for cybercrime, hacking, extortion and tax avoidance (ahem, the entire offshore tax system is facilitated via digital bank accounts), but the ‘cash as crime’ line is a major tool in the anti-cash lobby’s arsenal.

The figurehead for this is none other than Björn from ABBA, who has been spearheading a campaign against cash ever since his son’s apartment got burgled in 2008. Nobody was harmed in this incident, but Björn was evidently outraged, because it led to him becoming Sweden’s foremost proponent of getting rid of cash entirely. He laid out this challenge in ‘cost vs. benefit’ terms:

It’s a classic case of non-holistic and non-systemic thinking, because in focussing on the trauma that could emerge when cash is around, Björn fails to reflect on all the trauma that could emerge when it isn’t. He isn’t particularly interested in the trauma stemming from payments surveillance, or the trauma experienced by those shut out by authoritarian states who can turn off their ability to survive by blocking their digital payments. He’s not particularly fussed by the humiliation and discrimination people face for lacking the means - or desire - to use digital infrastructures. He’s not interested in the deaths that could result from digital systems meltdown, or the life savings lost to hacked digital accounts, or the elderly person in South Africa being flustered by a smooth-talking con-man into giving out digital bank details via a phone call or email scam (or at gunpoint in their home). He’s not interested in the fact that platforms harvest our data - including payments data - to segment, isolate and manipulate us, a factor that is leading to increased political disorientation and polarization. Hell, for all he knows, that disorientation increases our chances of war.

But he is very angry about his son being burgled, so much so that he wants your kids to be securely tethered into Big Finance-Tech for the rest of their lives, and to have to hand over fees to MasterCard and the banking sector to do even the simplest things like selling lemonade on the street. He doesn’t care about the fact that their future will be one in which digital corporates dominate over the political system. He’s indifferent to the fact that the same banks that control the digital payments system also did things like cause the 2008 Financial Crisis, which destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people, and indirectly led to the deaths of who knows how many.

In fact, Björn actively embraces this state of corporate domination as modern. Here he is, quoted in a Wired piece from 2016:

Björn, of course, is so in touch, because he’s a guy with $300 million who cites Bill Gates as the person he admires most, and who believes it’s self-apparent that progress means yoking ourselves into a Big Tech complex designed to extract data and fees. Let’s be blunt. ABBA produced some good tunes, but they were never exactly… political.

Getting real about real costs

There are real costs to cash, but those comes with real benefits, the absence of which can bring real social costs, which are really just real losses to our wellbeing. Monetary costs, real resource costs, and social costs are not the same, albeit there are complex interconnections between them.

The shallow rhetoric of the fintech industry does no justice to these subtle concepts, and shows ignorance of the actual monetary system. The actual monetary system is a politically anchored multi-layered web of IOUs, in different forms, that holds the so-called economic realm together. Analysing the separate elements of that foundation as if they were free-floating commodities subject to monetary cost considerations (that the foundation itself underpins) is delusional on multiple fronts. Not only does the foundation get weakened if you remove cash, but we incur all those social losses: exclusion, centralization of power in too-big-to-fail oligopolies, inequality that stems from centralization, data extraction used to disorientate us, and acceleration that raises our bloodpressure. We can have a debate about the relative severity of these ‘political’ losses, but never let the fintech industry tell you these are side issues. Money is political, and that’s the starting point of the economics of cash.

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I lived in London for 11 years, and hold a deep affection for the city, but when I visit now I feel physically uneasy. As I disembark at Gatwick airport and step into the terminal, I’m hit with the punch of an invisible forcefield. Alarms start ringing in my nervous system, like those birds that cause a racket when danger is approaching.

A friend tells me it’s because I’m an ‘economic empath’. She means it half-jokingly, but it’s true that I sense a creeping darkness looming in the city that I can’t easily put words to, but feel in my body. It must be something subliminal I’m picking up, but what? It starts when I see the HSBC billboards that line the passage to the passport control, with pictures of grandparents and kids alongside slogans like ‘together we thrive’. It builds as I force myself to look into the facial recognition cameras to trigger the e-gates through the border. It spikes further as I try to avoid looking at the MFlow cameras from Human Recognition Systems Ltd, their swirling lights trying to attract my attention so they can log my iris and track me around the airport to optimise crowd control.

Then there’s the feeling of being held hostage in the Gatwick shuttle train where they force me to listen to easyJet deals read by someone pretending to be my friend, selected by an advertising company that used consumer research that told them a working-class voice sounds more trustworthy when trying to sell things. Then comes the moment I dread most. The clipped voice over the loudspeakers at the National Rail station that says, “If you see something suspicious, report it to a member of the British Transport Police…” At that point I violently scrabble for my headphones, because I want to drown out what’s coming next. Shit, I’m too slow. Here it comes…

‘SEE IT, SAY IT, SORTED’, the voice says.

That phrase, which is repeated every five minutes on British transport, send those inner birds of mine into a scream. I think about the kids growing up in this environment, having this repetitive mantra coded into the deepest parts of their neural circuits as ‘normal’. I also think about the economic structure behind it. I picture the brainstorming sessions with the AML Group, the advertising agency that was paid a shed-tonne of money to create that slogan. They’re quite proud of it:

The AML Group execs reckon they’re pretty edgy with their Sin City aesthetics. The website profile photos of their leadership team are set against a backdrop of street art - presumably to show their creativity - while they boast that their campaign has led to a 365% increase in paranoid reports about ‘suspicious behaviour’. In London, you can get paid a lot to make creativity and conformity work hand in hand.

Being held by the handrail

So, within an hour of arriving in the UK, my emotional Geiger-counter is registering high ambient toxicity in the environment, but the triggering goes on. The journey from Gatwick into central London is one long string of directives to be a conscientious good citizen, playing in the background as I’m told to be a conscientious good consumer by the Santander billboards on the Tube platform, the fintech adverts in the carriage, and the Barclays posters on the escalators that pass me while the voice tells me to ‘please hold the handrail’.

London is a city of endless helpful requests coldly delivered to sound like orders, alongside matey propaganda designed by M&C Saatchi to make corporate platforms look warm and cuddly. When I lived here, this mix of dripping corporate inauthenticity and stultifying paternalism was there like a suffocating blanket, but the city had a strong counterculture to balance it out. I was born at the tail-end of the authoritarian apartheid regime in South Africa, so when I arrived London seemed a city of exhilarating experimentation and freedom. I lived in the neighbourhood of Brixton from 2008-2013, where every day the street market was a multicultural carnival with home-made ginger beer, ska music and the smell of weed. London seemed to have a decent balance of power between the formal corporate and state sphere, and the informal street life that teemed around it in the cracks. There was, as it were, a vibrant outside to the suffocating blanket.

Perhaps what my nervous system now registers is a shift in that balance. The vibrancy still exists, but it’s on the retreat as the outside space is eaten up. In the great ongoing war between bureaucratic corporate surveillance capitalism and the human soul, the former is gaining ground.

Entering the production line

Within two hours an emotional motif has emerged. It’s the feeling that London increasingly operates as a series of optimised production (and consumption) lines presided over by authorities, corporations and technology. People cram off the Tube to cram into Pret for coffee to cram into work, before cramming into the self-service checkouts at Tesco for lunch. You'll never see the bosses or shareholders of the production lines, but you will see a series of CCTV cameras, touch-screens, QR codes and employees, with the latter increasingly subordinated to the technology.

As people cram into the bars in the evening, they’ll leave their Pret cups and Sainsbury’s sushi containers crammed into bins. Those will be emptied before dawn by an army of unseen cleaners, many of them immigrants, who will un-cram the city so the process can continue when everyone drains from the catchment area of the suburbs into the trains again. Once on the platform, our minds can get crammed afresh with the cutting edge of automation ideology, which in London means pervasive fintech ads, like this one from the automated investment manager Nutmeg.

Ah, Nutmeg. I remember this crew. I was involved in the London ‘alternative finance’ scene around 2011 when Nutmeg was founded, and the team would turn up at events I attended. Like most fintech players, they claimed to be pioneering a ‘revolution’ against the banks. Here’s their old billboard.

Spot the difference? Glance to the bottom left of their newer ad, and you’ll see that the ‘investing without the bankers’ company has been bought by J.P. Morgan. Their former CEO’s LinkedIn page says he’s ‘taking a break’, which is unsurprising given that he probably no longer needs to work after getting paid to sell out. Then again, selling out was always the plan. Nutmeg was backed from the start by firms like Armada Investment Group, Balderton Capital and Schroders, who would make damn sure the CEO ‘takes a break’ if the likes of J.P. Morgan made an offer. The inauthenticity in Nutmeg’s vision was always there.

At some level everyone here knows that every claim around them is laced with a streak of the fake. False revolutions are marketed constantly. Some are even named after revolutions, like Revolut.

It’s ironic that Revolut chooses this image, because 9 out of the 11 people in their leadership team are white men, and there are no black women, but commercial inauthenticity is so normal that Londoners expect to be lied to. The start-up phase of a company is just like the start-up phase of an unfinished product on a production line. In the early phase, the start-up gets to say scrappy rebellious things, but by the end they’re ready to be sold to J.P. Morgan. Revolut is backed by some of the same venture firms as Nutmeg was, so don’t be surprised if it ends up swallowed. The fintech scene primarily exists for one thing: to help bridge the gap between Big Finance and Big Tech.

The soundtrack of techno-feudalism

By hour three, the latest theme tune of London’s corporate takeover rises into my consciousness. It’s an incessant beeping sound. Beep. Beep. Beep. It’s the sound of people tapping their cards or phones on contactless payments terminals, in Pret, in the Tube, on the bus, in Sainsbury’s, everywhere. It’s the sound of a message being sent by the smart-chip on their card via the merchant’s bank to Visa’s fortress data-centres to their bank’s data-centres and back. It’s also the sound of Visa, Mastercard and the banking sector getting richer. More generally, it’s the sound of us being processed by a system that wants to accelerate its production and consumption lines.

Henry Ford famously quipped that ‘any customer can have a car painted any colour, so long as it is black’. The bosses of London increasingly say ‘use whatever form of payment you want, so long as it’s digital and corporate’. Indeed, the rise of contactless payment in London was kickstarted by the TfL transport system, which not only started blocking people from using cash, but partnered with Barclaycard to promote contactless payments. In true inauthenticity-maximization style, they ran a phoney charity drive to onboard people with the help of former mayor Boris Johnson and the advertising giant M&C Saatchi. The initiative, which was called ‘Penny for London’, claimed you could be a humanitarian by using contactless payment, because the system would automatically donate 1p from your train fare to underprivileged young Londoners if you did so.

The initiative raised little money for charity, but that was never the point. The point was to shift people’s payments behaviour. The directors of the now-dissolved Penny for London Ltd included Boris Johnson’s Mayor’s Fund, former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, and hedge fund mogul and Conservative Party peer, Baron Stanley Fink. Isn’t it strange that a bunch of financial elites were invited to sit on the board. Someone should report that to the See It, Say It, Sorted help-line as suspicious behaviour. I fantasize about calling the operator and saying:

‘I’ve noticed London has been taken over by two colossal American payments firms working in conjunction with Big Finance and Tech, and people don’t seem to notice. Suspicious?’

I can imagine the operator looking for ‘corporate takeover’ and ‘apathy towards ruling class hegemony’ in the list of threats to UK democracy. ‘No, sorry, we only act upon terrorist threats, homeless people, brown people, and people who take photos of our CCTV cameras’.

My French friend Victor takes glee in telling me that the UK has a lingering feudal mindset, because the country never had a true revolution like his. Certainly, parts of UK society seem to welcome in domination by techno-feudalism with minimal resistance. Behind the beeps on the contactless terminals I can see the grinning faces of the execs at Barclaycard, Visa and ApplePay, watching all the ‘cashless’ feedback loops accelerate, entrenching their platforms as the only means of survival in this environment. Their hegemony is amplified by state authorities, museums, universities, theatres and other institutions of cultural clout that add their official blessing to this takeover by ‘going cashless’.

Still, when I first lived in London, cultural immunity to this was higher. Using cash was normal, and it was also the currency of the informal underground that provided a counterpower to the formal sphere. Very few people experienced cash as ‘inconvenient’ in 2008, but even back then payments firms were working to shift that perception. I can hear the Visa UK marketing team popping the champagne cork on the night they released their 2016 ‘cashfree and proud’ campaign. Voiced by the much loved actor Brian Blessed, it had the objective of making cash seem ‘peculiar’ in the city by 2020.

Just like AML Group amplified British paranoia by 365%, these guys amplified the take-over of Big Finance-Tech with remarkable speed. Visa wanted Londoners ‘liberated’ from cash, but so-called ‘cashless payment’ is just transfers of bank-issued digital casino chips. Put differently, they wanted us liberated from our lack of reliance on banks. They wanted the cash economy to get metabolized by a corporate oligopoly.

This mentality of capture was presented as progressive: like our chuffed man in the ad above, we were supposed to feel a ‘sense of achievement’ when welcoming this in. Most notably, this mentality flourished in a particular strata of middle-class professionals. You don’t need to be a social scientist to see that wherever gentrification goes, cashlessness follows. The old ‘cash or card’ question asked by bartenders was silenced, and replaced by them shoving the POS terminal at you. This was the true ‘cashfree’ situation Visa desired, and yes, they are very proud that businesses will promote them by removing your choice to use their physical competitor.

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Sterilisation by gentrification

By hour four in London I must find safe harbour. I retreat to the The Montagu Pyke on Charing Cross Road on the edge of Soho. It’s a Wetherspoons pub, and Wetherspoons is an interesting beast. One the one hand, it’s a stock-market listed company that consolidates pubs into a corporate chain. On the other, it uses its market power to protect stuff that might otherwise be undermined by market forces, like traditional real ale. Wetherspoons is notable for supporting CAMRA - the Campaign for Real Ale - and The Montagu Pyke is bastion for old London geezers who don’t want to be shamed for using cash or talking in a cockney accent.

I actually used to work in an old CAMRA pub called The St. Radegund. The roguish but loveable old boss was called Terry, who in his twenties had travelled for years through Asia in a beat-up van. I walked in, asked for a job, and the next night I was working, no questions asked. His policy was to serve no lagers, allow no smartphones, and accept no card payments. At the end of the evening I’d lock the pub up and take my wages in cash out of the till for myself. He simply trusted I’d take the right amount.

The Radegund felt ‘homely’, but what does this mean? In a corporate office you’re only allowed you to express a limited part of yourself, but in a home all aspects of your being are allowed to reside. Things we call ‘homely’, then, have a certain level of holism. The Radegund was part of the capitalist economy - it sold beers for profit - but that was but one part of its spirit. It was also a community meeting space, a place for lonely widowers to find company, and for Terry to tell long stories to the regulars.

The Radegund’s most notable feature was the banning of phones, which prevented people from accessing a tool they might otherwise use to mine their environment for emotional commodities that could be pushed into an attention marketplace. Even the image I managed to sneak above was a partial infraction on that spirit. Phones are designed to make it technically easy for us to make audio-visual objects out of feelings and experiences that otherwise would resist objectification, and at this time Facebook was trying to lure me in with little dopamine rewards to get me to hand these objects over to them, so it could be displayed back to me from the outside.

At first glance the phone ban seemed restrictive - even draconian - but actually it protected the space from a mentality of commodification that might otherwise take root. Arguably, holding that mentality at bay is what makes things feel ‘underground’. One of the darkest possibilities facing us right now is that our phones may be like trojan horses invited into realms we may want protected from commodification. They slowly erode the sense that the underground resides within us.

Needless to say, the non-commodified holism that made the Radegund feel homely is the same thing that makes entire neighbourhoods feel homely. The old Brixton market, for example, played host to all manner of non-commercial values that co-existed alongside market activities. There was a diversity of spirit, which is what people end up calling ‘vibrant’. The more you push the needle towards non-commercial logics, the more ‘alternative’ a place seems. What we call ‘counterculture’ is a mentality that revels in de-prioritizing commercial logic, rather than foregrounding it.

Brixton’s gentrification really kicked off in 2011, when the Tory government broke the squatting scene and cleared out a big chunk of the informal culture. In the years since, a Wetherspoons pub called the Beehive has operated like a shelter, taking in fugitives pushed out by the rise of cashless wine bars and craft beer breweries. Soho, where the Montagu Pyke stands, was lost to gentrification way before that, but the pub is hosted in the building that once housed the old Marquee Club. Back in the late 60s, the venue was home to nascent stars like Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. The pub has a small exhibit commemorating this:

When I first moved to London, I got a thrill from listening to the Dire Straits song Wild West End, in which Mark Knopfler sings about walking the grimy streets of Soho before the area was turned into a simulacrum of itself to be sold to tourists. I never got to experience Mark’s Soho. One of the classic symptoms of deep urban commodification is that the identity of a place gets ripped away from those who live there and displayed back to them from the outside. You don’t host the spirit of Soho. You consume it. You live inside a product, and the local authorities begin to view themselves as product managers.

Many so-called ‘global cities’ face this problem. Amsterdam and Barcelona, for example, increasingly feel like managed products, which is why neighbourhoods like Gracia in Barcelona have graffiti saying ‘TOURISTS GO HOME, YOU’RE NOT WELCOME’. People who live in a home don’t like sensing they’re living in a production line for experiential commodities to be sold to outsiders, but London authorities have long given up the idea that the city is primarily a home. No, it’s primarily a venue to attract foreign investment, a tourist package, or a canvas of opportunities for property developers.

I saw this first hand when I worked in the financial sector from 2008-2011. I specialised in flogging exotic derivative contracts to property investment funds and developers. I saw how they saw the city as a series of spreadsheets. Buildings were just the intersection of input costs and output revenue, existing only to yield that residual essence called profit. Of course, these values of efficiency and accumulation feel sterile, so the developers would constantly try to cloak their profit-extraction endeavours in non-commercial imagery of friends, family, fun, adventure, weirdness, rebellion and so on. This is a more general feature of capitalism, which always must seek to appropriate non-commercial logics, and this is what ends up making things feel ‘gentrified’.

Gentrification is best understood as a pacification process, in which the marketable elements of some holistic thing are split off from its threatening elements. It’s like skinning a tiger. You’re left with an exotic, novel and aesthetically-pleasing skin, without any of the substance in its original context. Interestingly, if you study the Montagu Pyke exhibit above, it references backlashes to this phenomenon in music:

In reaction to celebrity rock, and to music run by record companies as a branded consumer product, the streets broke through again in the form of Punk Rock

‘The streets’ is an interesting phrase, but the last bastion of punk rock in London was a place called Camden, which no longer exists. Well, it technically exists, but what people call ‘Camden’ right now is actually the skin of the old punk neighbourhood, thrown over a commercial machine that sells the image of punk culture back to both the residents and a sea of tourists.

Trying to be a 1970s punk in a 2023 London is like trying to be a wild ferment in pasteurised milk. What makes a place feel ‘commercial’ is when the values of efficiency, ‘convenience’ and accumulation take over from all others, and the holistic spirit is slowly evicted. Commercial culture sterilises - or pasteurises - the environment of any parts of the human spirit that don’t act to support its aims.

All watched over by benevolent intermediaries

In Wild West End Mark Knopfler sings about ‘getting a pickup for his steel guitar’ in Soho’s music Mecca, Denmark Street. By hour five in London I’ll inevitably end up there. I go to Wunjo Guitars and pretend to be in the market for a National Resonator. A staff member plays along, saying “give it try!” The Wunjo staff are all passionate guitar geeks, and - while they wouldn’t mind making a sale - they’re just as excited to share their love for the topic with anyone who turns up. Denmark Street retains some of the spirit of Mark’s time, but other things are being lost.

One of Mark’s most iconic songs is Walk of Life. It’s about a busker called Johnny who plays "down in the tunnels, trying to make it pay". Busking is a classic informal economy activity. You set up on the street, get moved on by cops, set up someone else, and collect coins as you go. I remember a busker called Flame Proof Moth who’d play down on the banks of the Thames next to a big target for people to chuck coins at.

Let’s map Flame Proof Moth on an economic systems diagram. If you imagine an economy as a giant interdependent mesh of players, ranging from tiny to gigantic, it would look something like the diagram below. The big corporate oligopolies sit in a centre, with smaller SMEs further down the chain, and then the millions of employees, freelancers and precarious workers forming rings around this. The ‘informal economy’ is always in the periphery. As I chuck a coin to Flame Proof Moth, it’s like two tiny nodes interacting on the outskirts.

Imagine now I live in a world where my brain has become convinced that progress means being totally dependent on Visa. Flame Proof Moth has been forced to come up from the River Thames and to set up one of those iZettle payments terminals next to him, so my card can call out via his bank and Visa to my bank and ask them to transfer 50p in digital casino chips to him (minus fees). Now, the tiny nodes no longer interact. Rather, we route our relationship through the central oligopoly.

If we rendered this image in 3D, tapping that card might look like this.

We’re now part of the formal economy. The ‘formal’ sector is the realm where bureaucratic values of hierarchal order preside. Formalization often entails intermediation, with small players routing through large players, a process that requires authentication. The ‘informal sector’, by contrast, operates on more horizontal and peer-to-peer lines. Amazon is formal. Large parts of the old Brixton market were informal. Many other businesses are a hybrid.

People whose minds have become excessively formalised will often demonise the informal sector with names like ‘the black market’. They may insist we ‘bring people in’ to the formal market, because they imagine that those who rely on street-level relations are out in the cold, and that corporate capitalism is like a kindly parental entity waiting to cuddle them. The informal market stands in opposition to corporate capitalism, so is branded as ‘inefficient’, precisely because it holds space for non-commercial values. It’s some grungy guy on the banks of the Thames who wants you to throw coins at him. He obviously has yet to understand that ‘liberation’ follows if he agrees to pay fees to Mastercard for the privilege of survival.

But here comes the dark part. The informal realm is what maintains the very vibe of a city, the sense of aliveness, the sense that its citizens are active creators rather than passive consumers. Some of the world’s most vibing places maintain a healthy balance of power between informal and formal. There’s an almost erotic interplay between those spheres, but the sure-fire way to kill the vibe is to break the balance. That’s when the society gets pasteurised. That’s when punks become consumers.

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Keeping posture in slump culture

It’s hour six, and against my better judgement I enter Tesco to get dried fruit to keep my energy up. The UK’s biggest supermarket is part of a cluster of chain stores that dominate every high street. This phenomenon was dubbed ‘Clone Town Britain’ by the New Economics Foundation, who found that 41% of high streets in Britain were indistinguishable from each other in 2007.

Tesco is a champion for the bureaucratic streamlining of the UK populace. When I lived in London they pioneered self-service checkouts as a way to fire their service staff. As I was leaving they started piloting cashless stores in certain central London locations, aiming to set a new cultural precedent. The Guardian uncritically reported on this as part of the ‘growing cash free revolution’, but we know all about these phoney revolutions. Since I left, Tesco has pioneered the ‘make-it-normal-to-surveil-customers revolution’: each cashless self-service checkout now sports a mini-panopticon camera, to make you feel like you’re being watched.

I look at the people dutifully scanning their goods around me. They seem obedient, or is it that they’re stressed and preoccupied? Their faces seem to say ‘Don’t ask me to think about something political. This is progress’.

We’re told that progress is a bold striding into the future, but much ‘progress’ is actually a type of releasing of resistance. It’s the process whereby we either invite in, or relinquish resistance to, a narrow set of values that will displace a more holistic set. Much like the act of me slumping into a chair is me going along with gravity (rather than resisting it by holding posture), progress is the process by which we slump into acceptance of the default systemic tendencies in a large-scale capitalist system.

Those default tendencies are expansion and acceleration, both of which are elements of the economic god of Growth, and automation is a crucial component of all. Under a capitalist economy, tech just makes our lives faster, rather than easier. It’s not like the people in the Tesco self-checkout area are chilled out. No, they’re being pushed through a bureaucratic apparatus that wants them to move faster. Of course, Tesco will market this with reference to ‘convenience’, showcasing some marginal short-term benefit, but once a person steps in, the alternative will be pulled away from them. Self-checkout used to be optional. Now it’s often mandatory.

This is a type of entrapment, but given that resistance feels futile, it’s psychologically easier to nudge yourself towards believing that a self-service surveillance check-out is ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’. If nothing else, you’ll grudgingly learn that this is the new normal. After all, everyone else is doing it. What’s actually happening here is that the systemic tendencies of capitalism are proliferating through a network of people who have no ability to push pause to stop and ask if this is what they all really want. This is what ‘market forces’ are so good at doing: they prioritise a small subset of human desire - that momentary need to move slightly faster, for example - in order to lock in a new state of acceleration that you won’t be able to back away from.

This is easy to see, because there are many British people who demand physical cash to stay, but their demand will never be acted upon. What will actually happen is that those who slide into digital payment will have their ‘demand’ weaponised to recalibrate the infrastructure. Just look at all the new cash-blocking ticket machines in the National Rail stations. What they’re saying is this: From this point on, we only accept corporate intermediation. We don’t care about your archaic demands for texture. We require frictionlessness. We prioritise hierarchy over horizontality. They’re basically coercing cash users towards the choice that jells with automation.

In the current phase of the global economy, you’re told that you will be ‘left behind’ unless you leap aboard the platforms required to reach the requisite level of automation that everyone’s expected to sync up to. As you slump into acquiescence, the more likely you are to take on the persona of ‘the consumer’. Yes, I’m being served by Tesco. They only put these machines here for my convenience.

Antonio Gramsci would have called this ‘cultural hegemony’. It’s when people internalise the value set of a ruling class as natural, inevitable, and - eventually - their own. This poses a problem for me, because when I critique the captor, the captives might turn on me. I often have London friends shuffling uncomfortably as I insist on paying cash in a restaurant, or asking for a menu rather than scanning the QR code. They feel I’m being unfair on the waiter, who has no power to change the decisions made by the faceless bosses. It’s not like Tesco CEO Ken Murphy is going to turn up when I ask the Tesco assistant why my face is now on a screen. Ken answers only to his institutional shareholders. If I cause a fuss, I’m the trouble-maker.

Holding posture in this environment takes energy, but people are still resistant to the slump. Walking away from Tesco I notice that Nationwide has picked up on the angst felt by those who are being nudged towards digital apps as their bank branches are closed down.

There’s some fine-print at the bottom. If we have a branch in your town, we’ll still be there until at least 2026.

Three years. That’s all they’re prepared to promise. After that, all deals are off. The decision is made, and the key question facing the corporate sector is how to slowly mould the ‘laggards’ into compliance.

Searching for the outside

I want to see my old home. It’s a bittersweet way to spend my seventh hour, but Brixton was always a melting pot for the different clans of the ‘periphery’. This included immigrants but also the countercultures. In the last decade, however, Brixton became a battleground between two different conceptions of ‘independence’. On the one hand, were cash-only informal-vibe diaspora shops selling giant African land snails, jerk chicken and goats hooves. They authentically were pretty independent from the formal corporate economy. On the other, were a new crop of entrepreneurs opening ‘boutique’ shops with names like Champagne+Fromage and Honest Burger.

It was always a class war. The new entrepreneurs called themselves ‘indy’ but firmly plugged themselves into the digital mega-platforms, both in their marketing and operations. Visa was there to present itself as a humble servant, while the businesses slumped into a Faustian alliance to become its ‘cashless’ frontline agents in exchange for shaving a percent off their costs. They always knew their customers would wilt into compliance, after which the adaptable human brain could do the work of editing their memories to forget that there ever was an outside to Visa.

People ask me why I focus so much on cash. It’s because the arrival of so-called cashlessness is an eviction notice served to non-commercial spirits. The formal sector is slowly assassinating the informal economy, like an imperial death squad hunting down rebels. The creep is like a virus, and old Brixton punks must watch as it spreads into the body of the neighbourhood that hosts their identity. It appears to them as a sedation of the spirit, and a great forgetting of a world where solidarity, disdain for authority, and acceptance of imperfection were standard.

Their - perhaps reactionary - fear, of course, is that young Londoners will be born into this situation of capture, with their brain patterns calibrated within the formal system, such that they can’t recognise an outside. For example, many young people no longer have a concept of ‘money outside the bank’. Money is ApplePay. What is friendship without WhatsApp? What is directions without Google? There is no world that precedes the digital corporate overlay, with its filtering, auto-correcting and curating. The very concept of un-intermediated life is an endangered species.

I have no way of knowing what it was like to arrive in London in the 1700s, with no phone to connect to wherever you came from, or what it was like being Mark Knopfler arriving in 1973. I have, though, experienced what it’s like to arrive in 2008 without Silicon Valley laying out an all-encompassing digital red carpet. I’ve experienced getting paid ‘under the counter’ at an old pub, and doing things ‘off the record’. I guess I’m worried that 18 year-olds arriving here now must be preceded by their bank, by Google, by facial recognition, by Whatsapp.

But it would wrong to say that the outside doesn’t exist. Everyone has a holistic spirit with rebellious, creative and romantic elements, even if they increasingly must funnel through platforms that fundamentally contain no rebellion or romanticism. I know that there’s a team of AI engineers right now working on producing simulacra of those mystical feelings, so they can be wrenched from you and sold back. I’m just hoping they don’t succeed.

Do you feel it?

London now manifest in my body as a feeling of constriction, but there’s a hint of something else. Loneliness. I often get told I’m weird for caring about stuff like cash and informal economies, and perhaps my greatest angst in London is to do with voice. I want to name what’s going on, but sense that many others find it uncomfortable, even taboo. I’m not even asking for Tesco to be anything different from what it is. All I want is for them to be authentic for once. I just want to walk in and to hear the bosses admit that those self-service checkouts have got sweet fuck all to do with my interests. I want to hear Ken Murphy say: Brett, the self-service machines are here for us to process you faster, so suck it up and stop standing in the way of our profit. Ah, how refreshing that would be.

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Dear Readers. I published a big long read called ‘Going Cashless’ in Aeon Magazine. It’s a deep dive into how to think about cashless society systemically, rather than falling into conspiracy theories. It delves into how the populist right is becoming active in the pro-cash debate, and how the fintech industry weaponizes that to label anyone who critiques digital payments as a bigoted nutjob. I’m a pro-cash campaigner, so this issue affects me personally every day. The piece features witch trials, the invisible hand, Russell Brand, Christian evangelists and even Kill Bill, and takes you on a journey through the complex political landscape of payments. I can’t reproduce the whole piece here, but below you’ll find a preview of the first 250 words. To read the full piece, please do visit Aeon via the link above.

Four centuries ago a woman named Else Knutsdatter was executed in Vardø, a small coastal town in Norway. She was accused of having used witchcraft to raise an ocean storm that claimed the lives of forty men. She wasn’t the only one to fall victim to 17^th century folk who – in the absence of other explanations – could be convinced that disasters were conjured by malevolent sorcerers. Ninety others were executed for conspiring to produce the same storm.

Today we know that physics and atmospheric pressures produced those storms. So in the realm of weather we’ve moved to systemic thinking, where bad things don’t need to be explained with reference to bad actors. When it comes to descriptions of politics and economics, the progress is not so unequivocal. Do bad things like climate change, conflict and corporate greed happen because powerful politicians and CEOs construct it like that, or do they emerge in the vacuum of human agency, in the fact that nobody’s actually in control? This is a question that confronts me in the campaign to protect the physical cash system against the digital takeover by Big Finance and Tech.

For more than eight years, I’ve advocated for the protection and promotion of physical notes and coins. I published a book called Cloudmoney: Why the War on Cash Endangers Our Freedom. In that book, I point out that the public has swallowed a false just-so story that says we are pining for a cashless society. All over the world, public and private sector leaders claim that ‘our’ desire for speed, convenience, scale and interconnection drives an inevitable digital transition. This is supposed to bring a “frictionless” world of digital payment-fuelled commerce, done at the click of a button or scan of the iris. The message is keep up or else face being left behind…

To continue reading, find the rest of the article for free at Aeon Magazine here

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Imagine referring to whisky as ‘beerless alcohol’, or to Metallica as a ‘folk music-less band’. Those descriptions are deeply uninformative because they draw attention to what’s absent rather than what’s present. The same can be said about the phrase ‘cashless society’. It’s an evasive euphemism that refers to the situation in which every transaction in our economy has to be routed via the banking sector using big tech devices. If this Big Finance-Tech Society is going to be called ‘cashless’, we better call cash payments ‘bankless’.

Cash can co-exist with cards and apps, and when kept in balance, the different forms of payment can complement each other. It’s only when that balance is removed that the dark side of digital payments gets to flourish. Unfortunately, across the world we’re seeing the spread of so-called ‘cashlessness’, a type of contagion in which the option to pay with non-corporate and non-automated money is incrementally taken away from you.

The fight against cashless society, then, is a fight against a state of unbalance. I’ve campaigned on this for eight years now, and in this piece I’ll lay out 10 talking points that you can use to make even the most ardent card-tapper have second thoughts about a totally bank-dominated society.

1) Cashless is like bicycle-less

Fintech firms have tried for decades to make you think that cash is like an outdated, inefficient and dangerous ‘horse cart of payments’. People who buy into this belief imagine that the digital payment takeover is just a natural upgrade, like getting horse-carts to make way for sports cars on roads that don’t have space to host both. In reality it’s like removing bicycle lanes in a world dominated by Uber. It’s an enclosure that narrows our choices. The core way to defend cash is to show that it maintains a balance of power in the monetary system, much like bicycles maintain a balance of power in the transport system. If you’d like a deeper understanding of this, check out my Luddite’s Guide to Defending Cash.

2) Data surveillance and manipulation

Some commentators have recently been characterizing the move towards cashless society as a kind of digital nationalization of money by big government, but in reality it's a privatization by big finance-tech. The vast majority of our digital payments rely on a collaborating oligopoly of banks, card companies (e.g. Visa and Mastercard), fintech platforms, tech companies (e.g. Apple and Google), and global financial alliances like SWIFT. When you interact with this complex, you leave detailed data trails about when, where, with who and on what you spend.

It’s true that governments can do surveillance of that data, but corporates can too. If governments are Big Brother, many firms position themselves as 'Big Bouncer' - spying on your payments data to decide if you get access to things or not - and 'Big Butler', using your data to creepily manipulate you but disguising that manipulation in the form of helpful suggestions.

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3) Exclusion

To survive in a market economy your have to buy stuff, which means if you cannot access the payments infrastructure you’ll be severely at risk. While many of the world’s poorest people have historically struggled to earn high incomes, they do not struggle to spend their small incomes in the form of cash. As the cash system gets shut down though, they are forced towards digital systems run by private sector banks that often don’t want them as customers (and who often exploit them). There are also many people who struggle to access (reliable) digital infrastructures, and when the option to use cash is removed, they essentially start getting firewalled out of the economy.

This issue doesn’t just affect people who can’t use these systems. It affects everyone who doesn’t want to use them. This could include people - like me - who are politically opposed to being totally dependent on the platforms, as well as free spirits who don’t want to be constantly tethered to a phone, and people with disabilities who find the tactile nature of cash easier to work with. In places like London, where policy-makers are allowing the cash infrastructure to implode, half the city is now essentially inaccessible to those people unless they are willing and able to turn their lives over to Visa and Mastercard.

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4) Economic censorship

Anyone who has ever been financially precarious will know that having no income in a market economy feels like being a fish slowly suffocating on dry land. Having money is what enables you to ‘breathe’ in our system, but in a cashless economy those institutions that control the payments infrastructure have the power to strangle people by blocking their payments. Once you're dependent on the digital payments infrastructure, the oligopoly of big finance-tech firms (and governments) that control it can choose to exclude you, freeze your account and prevent you paying for certain things.

Libertarians recently rallied around the case of the anti-vax Canadian truckers who had their bank accounts frozen by government order, but partial payments censorship has long been tested on marginalized welfare recipients, such as indigenous people in Australia who have had their spending controlled via systems like the ‘Cashless Welfare Card’. The possibilities here are dark: in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, a patriarchal theocracy uses the abolition of cash as a means to force women onto a digital payments platform to remove their freedom, but we don’t need sci-fi novels to realise that cash creates a buffer against all sorts of economic censorship. It gives breathing room.

5) Resilience

Being totally dependent on large-scale digital systems is a stupid strategy in a world beset by natural disasters, power outages, cyberattacks, systems failures, bugs and hacks. Those things can bring entire economies to a standstill when there's no cash backup. As the saying goes, 'cash doesn't crash'.

I constantly have to face short-sighted economists who moan about the ‘cost of cash’ - the fact that there’s a cost to running the public cash infrastructure - but that’s like a property developer moaning about the cost of providing stairs in a skyscraper. Picture them saying “Why not leave the stairs out, and only have elevators. Much more efficient! Nobody uses stairs anymore! They’re so expensive to build and maintain, and the youth don’t like them!” We all know how that ends.

If there’s an emergency in a skyscraper without emergency stairs, it’s only the people in the building who are affected, but in the case of the monetary system it’s our entire society that goes down if we have no payments backup. Money is part of the deep operating system of capitalism, a foundation upon which all other industries are built. Any breakdown in the monetary system causes everything else to break, so it’s the one system you have to promote resilience in above all else. Optimising for short-term efficiency rather than long-term resilience is downright dangerous in this space.

Even from a narrow business perspective the cashless equation doesn’t add up. Last year I found myself at a UK music festival where the official beer tent refused cash and had to turn thousands of beer-seeking customers away as the mobile networks their payments terminals relied on repeatedly crashed. More generally, digital hype is built on the probably unrealistic belief that we’ll face no resource constraints in future. Not only do we already have major supply chain problems in microchips, but half the world’s rare earth metal comes from a single mining district in China, meaning the resource constraints could easily be amplified by geopolitical tensions.

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6) Spending and indebtedness

Not only are we physical beings that understand things through touch, but we are also social beings that like face-to-face interaction. Through the eyes of digital accelerationists though, positive texture like this is seen as a negative form of ‘friction’ slowing everything down. In a growth-obsessed world, this leads to a fixation with promoting ‘frictionless’ technologies that accelerate consumption and production (see Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It just makes them faster). This is one major reason why governments and corporates promote digital payments. In it’s ‘Benefits of Going Cashless’ website, Visa gloats that people spend 25-40% more with cards, a finding that is backed by other academic studies (see this thread here for a list of 10 studies). Accelerating spending via digital payments might be narrowly good for big business, but not good for ordinary humans: millions of people are driven into unsustainable credit card debt to serve this unsustainable growth model.

7) Economic oligopolization

What’s the main difference between walking into a corner store in your local neighborhood to buy Heinz baked beans with cash, and getting the same thing via Amazon with your card? The former only involves one distant mega-corporation - the Kraft Heinz company - whereas the latter might rely on me using a Visa card from Barclays, hosted on an Apple iPhone or Google wallet, docking into Amazon to initiate a payment via Visa’s datacentres to Santander. Nowadays we’re told that becoming permanently plugged into digital corporate oligopolies like this is great progress, and that small local businesses should also become totally dependent on these behemoths. In the resultant cashless economy there really is no such thing as ‘local’. You’re going to have to pay fees to a series of distant corporations thousands of kilometres away to interact with someone standing a metre from you in your local farmer’s market.

8) Political capture

Every beep you hear on a contactless card terminal is the sound of the card companies and banking sector getting richer. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis everyone was aware of just how powerful large financial institutions are, and how their 'too big to fail' status held our political systems hostage. Since then they have tried to present themselves as good corporate citizens, sliding into the background while quietly entrenching themselves into our lives via digital finance. A cashless society is one in which we are dependent upon bank accounts for almost everything, but this time the finance sector has characterised this takeover as something driven by the ordinary person.

Gone are the days when the banking sector was made up of family-owned firms. Nowadays they are globe-spanning corporations owned by mega institutional shareholders like BlackRock, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Berkshire Hathaway and hedge funds. The financial sector as a whole has a stake in the cashless bonanza, and the fact that their infrastructures are increasingly the only way we can survive means they can extract enormous political power. This means, rather than fighting to protect and promote the cash system as a strong public alternative, governments try onboard everyone into the banks via financial inclusion initiatives. A cashless society is one in which big finance ceases to be an optional service provider, and becomes a mandatory part of your life at all times.

9) Vibe

As Big Finance-Tech entrenches itself as a mandatory backdrop to all our interactions, the vibe of our economy changes. Older economies have a much greater balance of power between formal and informal spheres of action: in the 1950s you might have gone to work for a big company, but your daughter could still sell lemonade on the side of the road without paying a Mastercard executive. You might have ended up being a yuppie lawyer in the 1980s, but you could still flip a coin to a busker without it depending on your bank. A modern ‘cashless’ economy, by contrast, is an economy where everything routes via formal instutions, and this means it feels different.

The attack on cash is one element of a broader process of corporate-underpinned gentrification, in which more down-to-earth informal economies are systematically replaced with a shallow layer of choice built on a deep layer of corporate domination. Think about the new breed of cashless ‘independent’ stores that are popping up in big cities - the craft beer place, the high-end cupcake bakery, the hipster coffee grinders. They look small and independent, but in reality they are plugged into a complex of tech and finance firms, and their independence is superficial when compared to the cash-only Jamaican record store in London or the Turkish barber shop in Berlin. This gentrification seems ‘modern’, but deep down it’s driven by a profit impulse that prioritises automation, efficiency and scale, values that eventually make everything feel sterile. Anyone who has lived in London for more than a decade will remember a time when you could go to small underground parties with cash-only bars. Now the values of that world are being hunted down and assassinated by corporate capitalism.

10) Financial stability

Sometimes hard-nosed economist types look at me strangely when I pull out my vibe arguments, saying that I’m being ‘romantic’. In that case, I’ll end with a very unromantic point. Even if you do like the endless automation and efficiency drive in our society, and feel at home in the sterile corporate gentrification that it creates, it’s really bad for financial stability. The only reason people trust in cashless digital payments is that they believe those units that they see in their bank account can eventually be redeemed for cash. This becomes especially apparent once you realise that those units are essentially ‘digital casino chips’ issued out to you by banks, and a casino chip means jack-shit if it can’t be redeemed.

During crises people always run to the ATM to turn their digital chips back into government cash, like people running for the exit of an unstable casino. When banks shut down ATMs and branches it’s like them shutting down those exits, but while that makes sense to them individually, when they do it collectively they risk undermining the basis of public confidence in their private systems. After all, if I can’t get out of a bank, do I really want to go in in the first place? In the end, the so-called cashless systems are in fact both legally and psychologically tethered to the cash system.

If you want a deeper dive into all of this, check out my 2022 book Cloudmoney: Why the War of Cash Endangers of Freedom. Please do leave a thumbs up if you found this useful, and let me know in the comments any experiences you’ve had with the cashless contagion in your local town or neighborhood. Thanks for reading.

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Note: For more progressive arguments for cash, see my Cashback series

Are you someone who is concerned about cashless society, but who finds yourself treated like a Neanderthal when you tell this to your friends? Are you worried that you’ll be labelled as a conspiracy theorist if you raise the alarm about all the data and power being transferred to the ‘cashless’ digital payments industry? Do you shy away from expressing your misgivings about the full digitization of money, out of fear of appearing like an anti-progress ‘luddite’?

If you answer Yes to any of these questions, this piece is for you. You have a right to be concerned about cashless society, and you don’t have to come across like a crackpot when making the argument for cash. In fact, you can come across as very reasonable. I know this, because I spend a significant part of my life defending cash in very mainstream circles, and I often leave people who were totally OK about cashless society feeling a lot less sure. For example, I recently debated the issue at the Brussels Economic Forum. Before the debate, the audience (which consisted of hundreds of policy wonks, economists and EU officials) was polled, with 42% being keen on a totally cashless society. By the end, that number had fallen to 27%.

Not only can you come across as reasonable when arguing for cash, but you can also come across as a lot more innovative and imaginative than the average mainstream pundit. We’re often led to believe that digital tech is ‘cutting edge’, but digital hype has been with us for over 30 years now, and is getting ever more boring and conventional. It’s far more interesting to be ahead of the curve, which means widening your imagination beyond digital fetishism.

I’d like more people to feel confident when arguing for cash, so in this piece I’m going to lay out my basic approach for you to adapt and build upon. I’ve structured this into steps, and within each I have overviews of the basic argument. I’m not going into depth on any particular sub-section (and each could be expanded out into an entire article of its own), so treat this piece as an introductory summary.

Step 1: Understand the Global Meta-Narrative

No matter where I go in the world, public and private sector officials basically say the same thing about digitization, regardless of their respective country’s situation. They will say that digital automation - and the speed, scale and interconnection it brings - is not only good, but unstoppable. This ideology is nested in another, deeper, ideology, which says that the global economy must always expand and accelerate.

With this vision as a backdrop, we’re encouraged to then engage in a series of digitization ‘races’ (like a ‘race to cashlessness’ or a ‘race to AI’). Ideally you’re supposed to lead the way in these races by actively developing, pushing and embracing the technology, but if you have other priorities you’re told to prepare for the transition, and adapt. This vision of a race towards a pre-set destination is then complemented by three sub-narratives.

1. The Left Behind narrative: anyone who doesn’t want to go in the digital direction, or can’t go in that direction, is warned that they will be left behind. To stay competitive you’ll have to adapt

2. The Inclusion narrative: to prevent people being ‘left behind’, we find a story about digital inclusion that says that anyone who is a bit behind-the-curve needs to be thrown a lifeline, so that they can get onboard with digitization

3. The Delay narrative: we also find calls to give people who ‘still’ use older systems more time to adapt. The idea is to stave off the inevitable transition for a little while longer until everyone can be absorbed into the new system

We can debate where this transnational ideology comes from, but I’d argue that it stems - in the final analysis - from the corporate sector, which benefits the most from the data, scale, speed and globe-spanning capabilities that digital automation brings. The meta-narrative, and its sub-narratives, gets applied across the board to many different areas of life, but when it comes to payments it gets applied to cash.

Step 2: Understand the Payments version of the Meta-Narrative

Our monetary system is a composite system, with multiple layers of money issued out by multiple issuers in multiple forms, but through the lens of the transnational digitization narrative this nuance gets reduced to a binary between ‘physical money vs. digital money’. We then get told that there will be an inevitable transition from the former to the latter. As we’d expect from the meta-narrative, getting rid of cash is cast as a kind of unstoppable global competition, with some leading and some lagging.

This naturally then creates the imagined risk of some people (and countries) being ‘left behind’. For example, here is a UK labour party politician saying that while it is obvious that a cashless society is coming, “it is really important that we make sure we do this in a managed, careful way, making sure that nobody is left behind”, because some people ‘still’ use cash. The language reinforces the idea that cashless society is like an unstoppable weather event that’s approaching, and that some people will need temporary shelter from it. This message gets endlessly replicated in media.

This is turn creates the inclusion narrative, in which various parties say that we must rescue those who may be left behind. I remember being on a show with a Citigroup executive who was asked what the greatest risk of a cashless society was. His answer was ‘ensuring full inclusivity’. In short, he thought the greatest risk was that not everyone would be absorbed into his bank’s (and other banks’) systems. After all, a ‘cashless’ society is a society where you have to use cards and apps provided by the banking sector. To remedy this risk, he suggested that banks and governments must work together to onboard people into the system. It’s a bit like a McDonald’s executive saying that the greatest risk of McDonald’s is that not everyone has a McDonald’s close by, and that the state should help McDonald’s extend its services.

2.1) The ‘Upgrade’ mentality

Many people don’t realise that when they present cashless society as inevitable, they simultaneously are presenting banking sector domination as inevitable. But not only is this bank dominated society supposedly unstoppable, but we are told that it’s better. It’s presented as an upgrade to our existing system.

Upgrades generally are seen to only improve our lives without detracting from them. Email is an upgrade to the fax machine because it achieves the same function but more efficiently and adds new capacities in the process. The car is an upgrade to the horse-cart, because it replaces the horse and cart with an engine and a metal cabin, and adds far more control and speed.

In the monetary system, this ‘upgrade’ narrative is applied to cash. Cash is cast as the payments equivalent of a horse-cart, and once placed in this position there are three categories of insults that get thrown at it:

1. Oldness: it is outdated, archaic, stuck in the past

2. Inefficiency: it is inconvenient, hard to move, slow, and costly in various ways

3. Dangerous: it supports social evils like tax evasion, crime and disease

This demonised version of cash is then set against a romanticised version of the digital money that you control with cards and apps, which is said to be:

• New: current, modern, up-to-date, cutting-edge

• Efficient: convenient, fast, cheap and globe-spanning

• Safe: free from muggers and thieves, clean, transparent

This framing is so prevalent that even apparently critical thinkers struggle to see through it. I’ve done a huge number of interviews on this topic, and I’ve lost count of the times when the interviewer has framed their questions as if I’m on a well-meaning but futile crusade to save horse-carts from cars. This is because they have the meta-narrative ideology installed in their minds. Fortunately, there are four effective ways to jam that ideology. In this piece I’ll cover the first two, and in the next piece I’ll cover the remaining two.

Step 3: Understand the Casino-Chip Society

One of the crucial rhetorical tools used by anti-cash proponents is to make out that there is but one type of money in society, but that it comes in better and worse forms. Think about a traditional piano versus an electric piano: they are both pianos, but one is much easier to fold up and carry around. In our minds, we have ‘piano’ as a single category, and then we imagine different versions of it.

People often think of money like this too: cash and the units in our bank accounts are presented as being - at a deep level - the same thing, and both get filed under the single category of ‘money’ in our minds. We then imagine that the same thing has a physical and digital form, with the latter - according to the upgrade mentality - being supposedly easier, safer, and more advanced.

This framing is wrong, and shows a lack of knowledge about the actual structure of modern monetary systems. I’ll explain this below, but the summary is as follows: Even if you do believe cash is old, inefficient, and dangerous, it structurally underpins the digital systems that you think are so new, efficient and safe.

You don’t need a degree in finance to understand this. All you need is a good metaphor, and here it is: the units in your bank account - which you use when you are paying digitally via app or card - are not government money. They are digital casino chips issued out by banks. I wrote an entire piece about this a few months ago, which you can find here:

I encourage you to read that piece, because it will tell you everything you need to know about the layers of money in our society, and their different issuers, but the crucial points are these:

1. If I hand government-issued cash to a casino, they take ownership of it and issue me their own chips in return, which can be passed around in the premises. Those casino chips only have power because I believe I can take them back to the cashier to redeem them for cash

2. Similarly, when I hand government-issued cash to a bank, they take ownership of it and issue me their own ‘digital casino chips’ in return (which are the digital units I see in my bank account). These can be passed around the bank payments system via card and app, but these digital units only have power because we believe that they can be redeemed for state cash. Going to an ATM is much like going to the cashier at a casino, and asking to ‘cash your chips’ so you can exit

This leads to two immediate issues, both of which are seldom appreciated in cashless society debates:

1. Legal: If a casino refused to redeem my chips for cash, I’d sue them, but what if my bank closes down its branches and ATMs to stop me cashing out my digital chips? They are basically saying ‘you cannot exit our systems’, or alternatively ‘you have no right to exit our systems’

2. Financial stability: An unredeemable casino chip is a dodgy casino chip. An unredeemable bank-issued ‘digital casino chip’, similarly, is an unstable and dodgy form of money, even if it gets moved around via a flashy and secure app. Ironically, as the public cash system is undermined, our confidence in the private digital systems risks being undermined too (incidentally, this stability concern is a major reason why governments are experimenting with ‘digital cash’ or CBDCs)

This may seem a little technical, so let me repeat the takeaway point: Even if you do believe cash is old, inefficient, and dangerous, it structurally underpins the digital systems that you think are so new, efficient and safe. Digital money is not an ‘upgrade’ to cash, because it derives its own power from cash. If you don’t believe that, watch what happens every time the banking sector looks shaky, or a crisis looms: cash withdrawals spike.

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Step 4: Understand the consequences of Uberfication

If Step 3 points out that cashless systems depend on cash, Step 4 goes further by challenging the idea that they are safe, efficient and positive. As mentioned earlier, we often find a demonised version of cash pitted against a romanticised version of digital. Cash is presented as the ‘horsecart of payments’ trying to compete against the futuristic ‘sportscar’ of digital payments.

To rebalance the debate we need to highlight the negatives of digital and positives of cash, and to do this we need to reframe the metaphor. Here is how you do it. Cash is not the horsecart, and digital is not the car. Rather, cash is the bicycle of payments (or mountainbike), while the bank-issued casino chips we use for digital payments are the Uber of payments.

The first thing that this new metaphor helps us understand is that convenience is not an absolute: If I ask someone ‘is a bicycle or Uber more convenient’, it’s an abstract question, because they are both convenient in different situations, because they optimise for different things. Let’s isolate two classes of difference between them, which give rise to their unique characteristics:

1. Autonomy vs. Dependence: With a bicycle, I directly control it. With Uber, I’m relying on a third party. Similarly, with cash, I directly control it. With digital payments, I’m relying on a whole series of third parties.

2. Public vs. Private: Bicycles only require public infrastructure, whereas Uber relies on a private corporate infrastructure that runs on top of public infrastructure. Similarly, cash is a public utility, whereas paying for things with digital casino chips involves becoming dependent on private corporate infrastructures (which, as we saw in the previous section, are built on top of the public money system)

4.1) The healthy balance of power

If you like using Uber, do you have to stop using bicycles? Obviously not. If someone tried to force you to choose between only having one or the other, you’d resist, because they should co-exist. The mere fact that we have newer digital things doesn’t mean we request to have no analog things. This is very easy to confirm by asking anyone these two questions:

• Do you want the ability to use Uber? (Many people answer ‘Yes’)

• Do you want public bicycles lanes to be shut down if a critical mass of people download the Uber app? (Almost everyone answers ‘No’)

In fact, the only people likely to answer Yes to the last question would be certain parts of industry (such as Uber or the auto industry) that would benefit from the shut-down of bicycle lanes. Now ask someone the same set of questions about payments:

• Do you want the ability to use digital payment? (Many people answer ‘Yes’)

• Do you want the right to use cash to be taken away from you? (Most people answer ‘No’)

The reason people answer like this is that they wish for choice. The digital payments industry, by contrast, would prefer a lack of choice. They’d benefit if we became completely dependent on their systems, but if that actually happens, the balance of power between between autonomy and dependence, and public and private, would be radically shifted.

Balance of power is a very important concept in systems analysis. Not only are there serious political consequences if one industry, party or technology dominates a system, but there are also serious implications for the resilience of that system. For example, we may find lifts in a skyscraper useful, but it would be extremely short-sighted to get rid of the stairs. Nobody conceives of stairs as being ‘out of date’, simply because they’re an older and slower form of vertical movement. They are perennial and classic (or, to use modern slang, OG). In fact, despite all the rhetoric about cutting-edge technology, our society is full of perennial classic stuff, and many people love it. Our society is much better off when we maintain balances of power between newer and older.

4.2) The unhealthy balance of power

Let’s extend this transport metaphor. The marketing spiel of apps like Uber promise you a slick experience and convenience, but come at the expense of you relying on the corporation. Most people don’t mind having moderate dependence on institutions like this, but total dependence is a recipe for extreme centralisation of power and erosion of autonomy. As a thought experiment, imagine if all forms of transport except Uber were removed from our society, resulting in total ‘Uberfication’. What would happen in this ‘convenient’ society?

For a start, you’d notice that your entire ability to move depended on an institution. While the first few weeks of trips might not bug you, over time it would begin to feel deeply stifling, even oppressive. The mass dependence on a intermediary would not only transfer mass power to Uber, but would in turn unlock a host of other problems:

1. Privacy: your every single movement would be recorded in Uber’s datacentre, along with a host of other data, in effect creating mass surveillance of all movement in society

2. Censorship: Uber would have the ability to stop your movements, or place limits and conditions on them (e.g. ‘you are allowed to go here at this time, but not here at this time’), if it decided to do that, or was ordered to do that

3. Exclusion: anyone who struggled to use the system, or who objected to using the system, would not be able to move

4. Resilience: even if the company tried to serve our best interests, any failure in its systems - via hacking, bugs, power outages, cyber-attacks etc - would cause the entire society to grind to a halt, literally

5. Centralisation tendencies: in a totally Uberfied society, there really would be no such thing as a ‘local economy’, because the smallest local movement would only be possible if it were first routed through a distant central player. The driver could be your old friend from next door, but you’d have to go via Uber, which will take rent from your relationship

6. Cultural vibe: that intermediation process changes the entire feeling of your society. For example, teenagers of old could skirt around authorities by racing around on bikes and skateboards, but the new crop would have to try live out their rebellion while being constrained in cars monitored via GPS

This thought experiment is deliberately extreme, in order to help us quickly identify the main classes of problems that emerge from any societal dependence on digital infrastructures. Let’s now use this Uberfication metaphor to see the negative sides of digital payments - which are controlled by an oligopoly of Big Finance and Big Tech players - and the positive sides of cash.

4.2.1) Resilience vs. lack of resilience

Cash doesn’t crash. Digital payments, by contrast, run through centralised systems that can fail. If everyone is dependent on them, this creates an incredibly serious point of weakness that can cause sudden disruptions to our lives. Digital infrastructures are vulnerable to:

1. Cyber-attacks

2. Hacking

3. Outages through error, negligence or bugs

4. Outages through disasters and extreme weather events

The latter is of special concern in a era of global warming. Also, despite all the digital hype (and perhaps because of it), digital infrastructures face resource shortages (e.g. rare earth metals), and hardware shortages (e.g. semi-conductors). Also, much digital fetishism is built on the assumption that we’ll have no future constraints on energy to power mass computation, but it’s more prudent to prepare for a future in which you can withstand energy shortages.

4.2.2) Inclusion vs. exclusion

As mentioned earlier, the threat of people being ‘left behind’ during the supposedly ‘inevitable’ takeover of digital systems is one of the things used - perversely - to try accelerate the spread of those systems via ‘inclusion’ initiatives. Rather than accepting that narrative, we should be fighting for a balance of power, but if the balance of power was totally shifted then it would indeed be true that there would be huge issues of exclusion for all those:

1. Who lack the ability to use digital payments systems

2. Who don’t want to use the systems

3. Who are deliberately prevented from using the systems

The only means of survival in a capitalist economy is via exchange, and money is what we use for exchange, so if all payments have to go through a set of centralised institutions, they can wield enormous power to decide who gets to exchange on what terms. This is why digital payments are a vector via which to exert control, censorship and discipline. Cash, by contrast, is inherently inclusive, because it is a ‘bearer instrument’ that requires no account and no specialised knowledge to use, and once people have it, you cannot block them from using it.

4.2.3) The Four Sub-Balances of Power

Cashless society disrupts the balance of power between autonomy and dependence, and public and private, but this leads to four more imbalances of power.

1) Privacy vs. Surveillance

There is nothing wrong with moderate degrees of transparency in a society, but total surveillance violates our rights to privacy. The data derived from payments is huge, and empowers three entities:

1. Big Brother: governments that want to watch you

2. Big Bouncer: corporate institutions that use your data to decide whether you get access to things or not

3. Big Butler: corporate institutions that use your data to steer you, curate your world and manipulate you

2) Localisation vs. Centralisation

In a cashless society, even the smallest local economic interaction benefits Big Finance and Big Tech. So, even if you are under the belief that small local businesses can cut some costs by ‘going cashless’, this comes at the expense of a massive net power transfer to centralised corporations, which negatively impacts the structure of our economy as a whole. If you’re interested in maintaining a degree of diversity and localisation in your economy, then cash - which is inherently local in its circulation, and which yields no fees to an oligopoly of distant central players - is crucial.

3) Textured vs. Frictionless Interaction

We are always told - in accordance with the transnational acceleration ideology - that making everything frictionless is good. In reality, human beings like a balance. We are tactile, and we enjoy engagement with our surroundings, and many things cast as ‘friction’ in a capitalist system are actually things many people enjoy, such as talking to someone at a shop. ‘Frictionless’ digital payments literally accelerate our spending by up to 40%, precisely because they are designed to not be noticed or felt (here are ten studies that show that), but friction can actually be very useful in payments. One major reason why cash is historically favoured by low-income communities is that its tactile nature is much better for intuitively budgeting and avoiding indebtedness. You can see how much you have, and feel the loss of it when you let it go. Incidentally, from an accessibility perspective, the literal friction - or texture - of the raised markings on banknotes are vital for blind people to feel what they’re using.

4) Informality vs. Formality

What’s the cultural difference between a cashless hipster cafe and a cash-only canteen? The former has a far higher level of ‘formalization’. Formalization refers to the process by which large institutions begin to intermediate between small players. In the case of the cafe, Apple, Visa, MasterCard, and the banking sector all now mediate between you and the owner, whereas in the canteen, the interaction is just between you and the owner.

In mainstream circles, down-to-earth ‘informal economies’ are often demonised, and seen to be dirty zones of poverty and crime. There is a major class element to this, because a lot of poorer communities have low trust in formal institutions and often prefer to work through networks of informal relationships, but even in middle-class society most people like a balance between informal and formal. A society with too little formalization can be chaotic and frustrating, but a society with too much can feel paternalistic, sterile, commercialised, oppressive and even inhuman.

This leads to one of the hardest points to convey about cashless society. It is a formalization process by which large institutions get between our economic interactions, which means it’s accompanied by a change in the feel or vibe of our society. As Visa and MasterCard insert themselves between every act of exchange, everything starts to feel more gentrified. Zones of informality that we actually treasure - such as giving your kid pocket money, or playing a simple game of poker at home with your friends, doing a garage sale, or competing in a pub quiz with a small monetary prize - now all have to be incorporated into a formal economy that’s presided over by large institutions. Cash, by contrast, protects us from total formalization.

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Coming up in Part 2

Step 4 is designed to show us that cash has a crucial role in keeping the dark side of digital money in check, and that in the absence of cash that dark side would really get to express itself. This goes a long way towards rebalancing the debate, but it’s wishful thinking to imagine that anti-cash proponents will give up. In my experience, they try to neutralise the Balance of Power arguments by cherry-picking single negative elements of cash, and then presenting those as if they were a killer argument to get rid of the balance of power entirely. In Part 2 we’re going to train ourselves to fight off these single-issue insults and accusations thrown at cash. I’m also going to show you how to derail the typical account of why cash is in decline, through a simple visual model. Finally, we will look at the steps required to bring about a revival in cash. I hope you enjoyed the piece, and please do use the comments section to make suggestions for additional arguments that can be added.

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I’m breaking my Substack hibernation to plug my new book Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets, which is being released in the UK and many other countries today! (note: the US/Canada release follows in a few weeks time)

It took me three years to complete (with heartbreak in the beginning, a pandemic in the middle and a full-out breakdown at the end), but I really like this book. It turns that others also like it - it’s been endorsed by Kate Raworth, Yanis Varoufakis, Grace Blakeley, Stephanie Kelton, Nicholas Shaxson, Jason Hickel, Sarah Jaffe, Raj Patel, Ann Pettifor and Lionel Barber. Here are two of those endorsements.

The official blurb

Cards seem convenient, and crypto seems cool, but in Cloudmoney I lay out the case for why the cash system is more crucial than ever, and why it needs to be protected. Here is the official description of the book…

Many of us rarely use cash these days. And the reach of corporations into our lives via cards and apps has never been greater. But what we're told is natural and inevitable is actually the work of powerful interests: the great battle of our time is for ownership of the digital footprints that make up our lives.

Who benefits from a cashless society and who gets left behind? Is the end of cash the end of true privacy? And is a cashless future closer than we think?

Cloudmoney tells a revelatory story about the fusion of big finance and tech, which requires physical cash to be replaced by digital money or 'cloudmoney'. Diving beneath the surface of the global financial system, Brett Scott uncovers a long-established lobbying infrastructure waging a covert war on cash, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress.

From marketing strategies against cash, to the weaponization of Covid-19 to advance fintech platforms, and the cryptocurrency rebels and fringe groups pushing back, Cloudmoney takes us to the frontlines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom.

And here’s Kate Raworth’s summary…

Five reasons why you’ll love Cloudmoney

I’d really love it if ALL of you could order Cloudmoney, so here are five reasons why I think you will value it, all beginning with C.

1. It’s clear: it is hard to write about global monetary systems in a simple way, but the book does that. It distills the complex architecture of money into clear descriptions that a non-expert reader can understand.

2. It’s critical: it doesn’t romanticise digital money and fintech, and shows why the narratives of empowerment-through-technology have a dark side. It also doesn’t hype up crypto-currency (let’s face it - there are now hundreds of books doing that). I’m not anti-tech, but I’m not easily impressed by the unbalanced claims made by many technology movements.

3. It’s contrarian: the book cuts through the innovation-speak that surrounds financial technology, and provides an account of why we should protect the unsexy physical cash system. It also cuts through the often pseudo-revolutionary language that surrounds the crypto world, and gives a realistic assessment of what we can and cannot expect of crypto-tokens.

4. It contextualises: the book puts things in their place. It doesn’t only show how major monetary innovations and movements relate to each other, but also sets that in the context of the vortex of global corporate capitalism and geopolitics. Finally, it sets all of this within an ecological, social and - dare I say - spiritual context.

5. It provides contrast, and accepts contradiction: the book might be critical, but the point isn’t to slam-dunk digital money enthusiasts, fintech startups or crypto hopefuls, or to reject their innovations. I appreciate the enthusiasm of many people who work within those industries, but all too often their takes are given far too much airtime. The book fills in the shadow side of their narratives, serving as a contrast to rebalance them. As I note in the book’s introduction, think of this book as a darker yin to contrast with a brighter yang. Above all, I’m acutely aware of, and empathetic towards, the deeply contradictory nature of our lives in a global capitalist system, where innovations can be simultaneously empowering and destructive.

What you will find inside

I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow account of the chapters and arguments, but I’ll just leave this contents page here with you.

Still not convinced? Listen to these six!

So where can I find it?!

It’s available in physical form, e-book format and audiobook. Here’s some links to help you find it in your country:

The English version

• UK: Penguin UK

• USA & Canada: Harper Collins USA (pre-order for 5th July 2022)

• Australia: Penguin Australia

• New Zealand: Penguin New Zealand

• South Africa: Penguin South Africa

• Continental Europe (English version) - search for ‘Cloudmoney’ and your region

• India - search for ‘Cloudmoney India’

Translations

• German translation (pre-order for 14th September 2022)

• Dutch translation (pre-order for September 2022)

• Translations still forthcoming: Italian, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Complex Chinese, Simplified Chinese

But wait, what if I want to pay with cash?!

Look, I understand that most of us are increasingly being pulled into the digital tech-finance vortex, and that most people will order online. I totally understand that, but if you feel moved to take on the challenge of promoting cash, I encourage you to visit your local bookstore and to request that they order copies of the book if they haven’t already. I love to support indy bookstores, and I’d also love for you to ask them to support me. Nicholas Shaxson demands it.

Believe in the book’s mission? Help me boost it!

Let’s get real for a moment. The cash system is taking a major hit right now, and the case for why we should protect it really needs to be heard among as many people as possible. I would be hugely appreciative if you could share Cloudmoney with any friends, family, colleagues or connections who may enjoy it. I’d also love it if you could share it with total strangers. One way to do that is to click on this button…

Share

Alternatively, I constructed a beautiful Tweet thread, which explains the book. You can retweet it.

I also constructed this helpful Facebook post, and LinkedIn post, which can be shared. I don’t have Instagram or TikTok, but this gives you a great opportunity to be the first to promote it there!

Thanks for your time, and hope you enjoy Cloudmoney.