Banks, governments, credit card companies and fintech evangelists all want us to believe our cashless future is inevitable and good. But this isn’t a frictionless utopia says Brett Scott, and it’s time to fight back
‘Cashless society’ is a euphemism for the “ask-your-banks-for-permission-to-pay society”.
The future presented by self-styled innovation gurus has no scope for flexible, unpredictable or invisible people. They represent analogue backwardness. The future is a world of endless consumer choice built upon an inescapable digital uniformity of automated rules, a matrix outside which you can neither exist nor think.
We face creating an entire generation of people who do not know what it feels like to not be monitored.