This isn’t something that gets talked about a lot, and I have no idea how far the problem extends geographically, but if you care about poor people, if you care about sex workers, if you care about activists, if you care about privacy,
you should consider resisting the transition from cash to card-only payments that is happening in shops in some bigger cities. Including shops where only one register in a long row still accepts cash payments so anyone paying with cash needs to wait in line and sticks out.
Cash is how poor people help keep each other alive without immediately worrying about their benefit cuts, cash is what people get when they do a bit of work or sell some old stuff to feed their kids that week. Cash is how most sex workers get paid. A lot of people need to be able to make cash payments to feed their kids, pay their rent and basically to live.
Cash is also what activists use whenever they need protest supplies and don’t want their full name and address attached to the protest. Cash is how we buy any item we want to keep out of our digital footprint. But whether you’re buying a megaphone or a dildo, you can’t do so privately if you can’t spend cash.
Banks are eager to work towards a post-cash economy because it makes our spending habits so much easier to track. States want the same because it makes people so much easier to track and control. We should not want a
post-cash economyand we should resist attempts to create it.
I adopted a cash-as-much-as-possible policy a few years ago. I only use a card when I’m buying something online or for unexpectedly large Costco purchases. I started doing it out of spite because I hate credit card companies and I could afford to. It’s also nice for any local businesses you patronize–they don’t lose part of the profit from the sale to the card company.
I´m pretty much cash only, and i can think of a whole lot more situations where cards are not only impractical but stupidly impossible. like flea markets: my clothes as a kid came mostly from there, same with my kids bc my mom doesn´t see a reason to buy new stuff for more money for a couple months of wearing. how to pay 3 bucks for 3 shirts over a table w/o electricity?
and that seams to be pretty german, lots of people here don´t want cashless society.
Based on my own experience, cash use isn’t just pushed back by the widespread availability of payment by card or phone. The number of ATM’s is also being reduced in a lot of larger cities.
And when the nearest ATM is 1.5 kilometers away and people at the market run out of cash, they just stop buying things. So market-stall owners quickly get themselves one of those small attach-to-your-smartphone card readers.
I’ve already seen a LOT of farmers markets where you can pay for your vegetables with a card. The same is happening to big-city flea markets, the same will happen to smaller city flea markets.
And the number of ATM’s will just get pushed back more, while the number of pay-by-card opportunities increases. And then it becomes hard for people without transport and with mobility limits to do ‘cash only’ out of principle, so ‘cash only’ becomes one more thing only privileged idealists can do.
So, ‘cash only’ as an individual choice is nice but it’s not enough. As with just about every other problem in the world, you can not create change by ‘voting with our wallet’. Individual behavior choices do not offer an effective pushback to a systematic policy being pushed upon a population. They never do. A more solid resistance to a post-cash economy is needed if we want to avoid it.
Of course this is IMO, but use of technological progression should not be hampered, instead we need to look to the root of the problem – which is the root of society as a whole. The corruption and of course the avarice of the current rulers – if such a thing didn’t exist, if we lived in a freer society where we didn’t fear the current minefield that is politics or worry that protests equated to hostility instead of understanding, would any of you really be afraid to use cards instead of cash?
Only if we lived in a worldwide society with no states and no authorities at all and no chance of the resurfacing of states and authorities. I find it highly unlikely that the existence of money would continue without authority. So realistically… nope
Technological ‘progress’ is just change, it can be good or bad or neither, but it’s important to question what it achieves and who it serves.
Regular cash works. It doesn’t need to be pushed back. The people that are pushing it back are doing it primarily because of the control and surveillance opportunities of cards, not because it’s actually better.
Like the transition from paper tickets to digital cards for public transport, this technology is not about user comfort but primarily about information and control.
QueerAnarchism 