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10 reasons to fight cashless contagion - by Brett Scott

brettscott.substack.com · 2,482 words · saved by 1 readers

Imagine referring to whisky as ‘beerless alcohol’, or to Metallica as a ‘folk music-less band’. Those descriptions are deeply uniformative 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 so

Cashback 10 Reasons to Fight Cashless Contagion Total payments uberfication is a virus, and we need to build resistance to it Brett Scott Nov 01, 2023 86 50 11 Share 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

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