A Cultural History of Money in the Modern Age by Bloomsbury Publishing;

Author:Bloomsbury Publishing;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Yet there are new risks, too, and a pro-cash lobby is forming to highlight them (see, e.g., Lepecq 2016).15 The business models of contemporary experiments with money rest on a combination of assessing fees on the movement of value through privately owned infrastructures (already the primary way card companies and banks turn a profit) and speculating on the uses of personal and transactional data, usually for marketing. As more money flows through these channels, new questions will be provoked about infrastructural breakdown; about fraud, cybersecurity, and identity protection; and about privacy, data security, and vulnerability to third-party surveillance.

Cash, in short, has redeemable qualities that motivate its “surprising resilience” in everyday life (Bagnall et al. 2016: 2). Cash is publicly issued, state-backed, and state-maintained; it is widely accepted and has no significant technological barriers to use; it is free insofar as no fees are imposed on its passage; and its transactions settle immediately. Cash’s portability makes for low handling costs, and its fungibility allows for straightforward budgeting. While the costs to store cash are real, they are progressive, in that they increase the more physical currency you save. Thus, even as it has become more common to save and transact online or on one’s phone, even as most of the total monetary value in the world exists in digital form—entries on the ledgers of banks and central banks—cash is not disappearing.16 It remains useful for low-value transactions (such as, to return to an earlier theme, for gifts); in a contingency role as back-up payment instrument; for those seeking out an ethics of connection alongside the instrumentalism of exchange; and as an accessible store of value for the poor, for informal workers, for migrants and refugees. In the modern age, this is a substantial proportion of the global population.

We should thus question claims about the inclusiveness of cashlessness (Dalinghaus 2017). New concerns have emerged about a hierarchically segregated world, in which (as one report put it) “those on the lowest incomes become disconnected from mainstream commercial life by their dependence on traditional forms of currency” (Forrest 2017). The role of cash in living together becomes a new frontier to explore: “If we cannot find a common payment ecosystem, we may find ourselves wandering through divided cities, separated by the sound of bleeps and the shuffling of cold, hard cash.”

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