The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Cashless society

ATMs and Debit Payments Go Down In Canada

So, I’m not sure if it’s all ATMs, but I know Interac (our debit) is down. This is also apparently affecting 911 (emergency) calls.

Canada has three providers of phone and internet, everyone else is either niche (satellite) or actually uses their networks. They are Bell, Telus and Rogers.

Rogers is down, with no ETA to being back up. I found out when I tried to call Canada’s tax people (the Canada Revenue Agency) and got “no network”.

The short term point here is to always keep some cash. I’ve got $25 in my pocket, which is less than it should be but at least I can buy some food and so on.

Cashless societies are bad. Not just because it’s easy for the infrastructure to go down for technical reasons or due to some disaster or war or terrorism, but because they are inherently totalitarian. The government or corporations can freeze people out of the economy any time they want. PayPal, Visa and Mastercard have done this repeatedly (many years ago it was Wikileaks, since it’s been people with the wrong political views.)

I didn’t much like the Trucker protests in Ottawa, Canada, but they should have been dealt with by the police, not by freezing people’s bank accounts. That’s tyranny. It was done, I’m fairly sure, because the Ottawa police were sympathetic to the truckers and politicians didn’t think they’d obey orders.

Likewise, many folks who use things like bitcoin don’t understand blockchain technology: it’s inherently totalitarian and its traceable. It’s a LOT harder to trace cash. If you want anonymity, cash is still king. Any society which removes cash is doing so for two reasons:

  1. So they can track much more, micromanage what people spend and shut people and organizations they don’t approve out of the economy easily; and,
  2. So that middlemen (corps, governments if they want to) can take a cut off everything.

I believe we should pay our taxes, but it’s not an absolute value. Black and especially gray markets exist for a reason, and it’s not always a bad thing. In particular, in many countries, including the US and Canada,  you can’t always get a bank account. The cash economy allows those who can’t to survive; it allows those shut out to survive, and gray and black markets put a check on government power to say “absolutely not” to people things really want or need.

That’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

The more we love to e-cash only, the more our societies, intrinsically, are vulnerable to shocks, to authoritarianism and to rentierism.

Cash is worth keeping and I would go so far as to make it illegal for most businesses to not accept cash. Cash is, in a certain sense, freedom. In another deeper sense money based societies are anti-freedom, but that’s another argument and for another time. If we  use money, we need cash that can’t go down and which isn’t inherently authoritarian.

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The End of Cash; The End of Freedom

Image by TW Collins

Recently, the Indian government took its high value bills out of circulation, in order to fight corruption. This has been bad for the economy, not just because the gray economy is large in India, but because India is a place where a ton of business is done by cash, not by credit.

In France, because of “terrorism,” cash purchases are now limited to one thousand euros.

In many countries, there is a push to move away from cash, towards electronic payments. Electronic payments are, of course, easier for governments to track.

The obvious point is about taxation; you can tax money you know about. But the less obvious point is about control and surveillance: If everything is done electronically, you can know who is doing what, because spending is doing. Nothing meaningful can be done in the modern world without money following it. People need money to live and money must be used to buy any goods involved.

Anything that can be seen can be controlled. Readers may remember when PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard all decided to cut off payments to Wikileaks. I know it’s common on the left now to hate Wikileaks, but only a fool doesn’t understand the power involved in stopping someone from getting money.

In the legal nootropics scene (substances for boosting performance, especially mental), banks have simply refused to allow nootropics firms to do business, even though what they are selling is perfectly legal. This has put people out of business. It is not a minor matter.

In previous years, banks would either not lend to Blacks or they would charge them more than whites; they judged based on criteria which was not then, nor is it now, any of their business. Who or what is discriminated against varies with the fears and mores and politics of the time.

Every time someone talks about getting rid of cash, they are talking about getting rid of your freedom. Every time they actually limit cash, they are limiting your freedom. It does not matter if the people doing it are wonderful Scandinavians or Hindu supremacist Indians, they are people who want to know and control what you do to an unprecedentedly fine-grained scale.

Meanwhile, we have blockchain technology. Blockchains have ledgers: They keep track of every single transaction performed.

Evangelists of blockchains seem to think that because they make encrypted electronic money possible, they are wonderful, but what I see is a totalitarian technology; a way of keeping minute track of every single transaction, ever.

Cash isn’t completely anonymous. There’s a reason why old fashioned crooks with huge cash flows had to money-launder: Governments are actually pretty good at saying, “Where’d you get that from?” and getting an explanation. Still, it offers freedom, and the poorer you are, the more freedom it offers. It also is very hard to track specifically, i.e., who made what purchase.

Blockchains won’t be untaxable. The ones which truly are unbreakable will be made illegal; the ones that remain, well, it’s a ledger with every transaction on it, for goodness sakes.

(Saying this will likely lead to some blockchain evangelist screaming in the comments, because fanatics can’t see the downside of what they are fanatical about, only the exaggerated upsides.)

We are moving towards a panopticon society in which everything you do can be tracked. Everything, including inside the so-called privacy of your house. As biometrics like gait tracking and infrared identification become better, as we put surveillance devices in our houses, and as we continue to carry bugs and tracking devices with us everywhere we go (and paying for the privilege of it) we are creating, as the tired line runs, a dystopian surveillance society that reaches far beyond anything imagined in 1984. (Remember, Big Brother could not record, for example.)

We are creating a society where even much of what you say, will be knowable and indeed, may eventually be tracked and stored permanently.

If you do not understand why this is not just bad, but terrible, I cannot explain it to you. You have some sort of mental impairment of imagination and ethics.

Understand, however, that getting rid of cash is part of this. Understand that blockchains, “coins” do not have to ultimately be a technology of freedom, but can easily be a totalitarian technology. Understand that virtually no one in a position of power is your friend on this: They want to know, they want to control, they want to be able to decide how you spend your money and your time, and they want to have an electronic dossier on you which is complete, and which will be usable to destroy you, because no one has never done or said something which cannot be made to look not just bad, but terrible and illegal, especially if you can pick, say, ten quotes or actions out of a lifetime.

The only way to protect yourself against the surveillance state will be to become a complete and utter drone who has never done or said anything interesting. It’s too late for the olds, but those who grow up in it will understand, and will become nothings because of it.

We are moving very steadily towards a totalitarian state which will make the Stasi look like bumbling amateurs, and we are doing so with little murmur, and often voluntarily.

The only thing likely to derail this, oddly, is catastrophic environmental change and collapse.

Yay?


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