The so-called “cashless society” should be called the “bank-payments society”

My new essay on the dark sides of the cashless society has just been published in Aeon Magazine.

“The cashless society – which more accurately should be called the bank-payments society – is often presented as an inevitability, an outcome of ‘natural progress’. This claim is either naïve or disingenuous. Any future cashless bank-payments society will be the outcome of a deliberate war on cash waged by an alliance of three elite groups with deep interests in seeing it emerge.”

These groups include the banking industry, “which controls the core digital fiat money system that our public system of cash currently competes with. It irritates banks that people do indeed act upon their right to convert their bank deposits into state money. It forces them to keep the ATM network running. The cashless society, in their eyes, is a utopia where money cannot leave – or even exist – outside the banking system, but can only be transferred from bank to bank.”

The next group is the private payments industry “that profits from running the infrastructure that services that bank system, streamlining the process via which we transfer digital money between bank accounts.”

The third group is the state, which is “united with the financial industry in forcing everyone to buy into this privatised bank-payments society for reasons of monitoring and control. The bank-money system forms a panopticon that enables – in theory – all transactions to be recorded, watched and analysed, good or bad. Furthermore, cash’s ‘offline’ nature means it cannot be remotely altered or frozen. This hampers central banks in implementing ‘innovative’ monetary policies, such as setting negative interest rates that slowly edit away bank deposits in order to coerce people into spending.”

To read the full article, see https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is-good-will-be-lost