[ad_1]
“We don’t have any cash” is written on the glittering glass door of the cafe I frequent. The sign precedes the glossy list of covid-19 measures taped to its side, but together they offer a unified statement of contactless efficiency – the promise to experience public space, social interaction and consumer shopping with the utmost convenience and cleanliness. But for all the friction the cashless coffee shop aims to eliminate, it reproduces far more severe social barriers and inequalities.
For individuals and communities, transactional technologies (digital wallets, mobile payments, and the like) can increase their autonomy in decision-making, their resilience and resilience in times of crisis, and their ability to combat victimization, exploitation and humiliation. Confidence in these technologies fosters long-term planning and capacity to build—wealth, infrastructure, the foundations of well-being for future generations—as well as experimentation and risk. Of course, the conclusion is also true: malicious versions of these tools can steal communities and individuals from their agencies.
Cash is the best transaction tool we have ever invented to increase community and individual autonomy. offers many possibilities.
difficult to reproduce. It doesn’t need someone else’s signature to spend cash. It doesn’t specify where or what you can spend it on. It’s anonymous: no one needs to know who you are for you to spend. It does not generate any data about your transaction for third parties. Transactions without charge to the payer or payee. You know how much money you have on hand: It can’t be frozen in your account on a whim by an opaque third-party payment processor, or reversed by a scammer, or consumed by fees until you open an overdraft account without your knowing it. It does not rely on multiple layers of fragile infrastructure, consisting of both hardware and software, to operate at the point of sale.
What if the cash goes?
There are some lessons from history that should be noted. Defined as a universal, public, printed monetary instrument, cash is a relatively new technological and political achievement. Historically, money has often been private and plural. In the United States, government-issued currency was not fully consolidated until after the Civil War. Previously, foreign currencies, special notes, and scripts produced by railroads, insurance companies, corporations, and other private businesses were in circulation alongside currency issued by the U.S. Treasury.
This monetary cacophony meant that daily spending required considerable street intelligence. The bonds may have come from a failed or fictitious bank, or they could be a fake copy of a note from a functioning real bank. Promissory notes accepted at face value in one city could only be accepted at a lower value in others. Daily life involved navigating a messy, complex monetary media environment.
The chaotic situation has also created highly layered transaction communities. While the rich used redeemable notes issued by stable banks for letters of credit and bullion, the poor were more likely to use low value bronze or copper “small coins” or deprecated notes.
The future of transactional media may be similar to its past. An industry consultant once told me that “cash will be the ‘c word’ in the future, not something good people use.” Indeed, the future is likely to be cash-light rather than completely cashless. Only those who are in cash situation will trade on unequal terms.
Cash today is a universal printing technology – a form of mass communication. But it has major flaws. Cash can be lost, destroyed, stolen. Most importantly, perhaps it cannot be spent online and therefore communication does not move at the speed of the rest of our lives.
We do not yet know the shape of tomorrow’s transactional media or the terrain of its transactional communities. We can work to avoid money acting like today’s social media platforms: rooted in customized and data-driven business models.
I often hear variations on the phrase “If cash were invented today, it would be illegal” in the cryptocurrency community. The point here is that cash is low cost, hard to censor and hard to spy. It’s hard to argue with this line of thinking at a time when nearly all of our communications, transactional or otherwise, are channeled through monopolistic and controlling platforms that collect rent in the form of fees, data, or both.
At the same time, we need to ensure that new forms of money are reliable and stable in value, something that has proven difficult for cryptocurrency to achieve. Despite all its unique possibilities as a transaction medium, cash – and whatever its digital heirs – must be stable in value for it to work well.
As I pay for my Cortado, I look at that “Cashless” text with the eyes of a researcher. The stakes are high. We are authorized or disempowered by the trading tools we have access to. When imagining money for the internet age, the big question is how to design public interest pay media. We need something that does everything cash does well – but also what cash doesn’t.
Lana Swartz is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and is the author of: The New Money: How Payment Has Become Social Media
Please consider to support MIT Technology Review journalismsubscribe to.
[ad_2]
Source link