The promise of a cashless life

Last Thursday, like most Thursdays, I met my friend Chris at our local coffee chain. We bypassed the long line of waiting people because we had ordered in advance using the shop’s app. We scanned our phones, grabbed our cups, and sat down.

“Look at them,” Chris said, nodding towards the queue. They hadn’t moved since we had entered the shop. “Poor souls. I wonder why they don’t use the app.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Everybody should use it.”

We were used to the newest tech. Chris is a full-stack software developer and we both were early adopters of whatever gadget shone brightest at the moment. Many turned out to be disappointments after you used them for a while, but the cashless promise had paid off for us. For years before the cards came up, my pants had been bloated with coins, and I’d have to regularly change the lining of my pockets when it disintegrated. I’d have jars of the stuff at home, worth almost nothing, yet taking up valuable shelf space in my small flat. And since I’d read an article about germs on money, I’d wash my hands every time someone gave me a bill, imagining what creep had touched that piece of paper before, and where they’d had their hands before that. I always had a vivid imagination, you see.

“And the criminals,” Chris said. “Transaction without any controls. Imagine that. Drugs. Guns. And all because of cash. Untraceable.”

I nodded and we enjoyed our lattes. I thought of the Douglas Adams story in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where they send a spaceship full of accountants to crash on an uninhabited planet. The accountants soon declare the ubiquitous leaves of the alien trees to be their new money, creating a runaway inflation as the leaves fall in autumn and everyone has their pockets full of them. Then they have the great idea to burn down all the trees to create a scarcity of leaves and stabilize the value of their currency. Madness? Well, it wouldn’t happen with my coffee shop card.

As with most technologies, the problems are usually not about the technology itself, but about us, the human beings who have to use it. 

But ours would be a strange universe if the international finance world did something just to make life easier for me. If this coffee card thing works so well, what’s in it for those who make it work? And why would they bother?

As with most technologies, the problems are …

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