MUNICH: In many major cities, it’s become possible to get by without ever having to withdraw cash. Even street vendors now often accept digital payments using mobile payment services like PayPal or Apple Pay, meaning no matter how small the sum, we’re spared the trip to the ATM.

Author, journalist and activist Brett Scott explores this trend in his new book Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto And The War For Our Wallets, challenging his readers to question whether cashless payments should really only be thought of as “inevitable progress”.

Cloudmoney is about the politics of money, the power dynamics of digital payments as opposed to cash payments, the corporate and governmental actors involved, and the rebellions such as cryptocurrency movements that have emerged in this environment, according to the author.

In understanding the world of digital finance, Scott argues, it’s vital to distrust the narratives created by the tech and finance industry, heralding a new monetary age.

“Entrepreneurs, like surfers, enjoy telling exciting stories about the waves they ride (while giving tips on how to stay upright), but are less interested in mediating the confluence of hidden forces, like winds out at sea and coral reefs, that produce big swells,” writes Scott, also a former broker.

Private companies are aggressively trying to establish transnational mobile payment services, says Scott, calling for more resistance against this digital acceleration, including from states who need to muster the courage to assert their sovereignty and buck the tide of global surveillance capitalism by promoting their domestic cash system.

In the author’s home city of Berlin (he lives there, but is originally from South Africa), more and more shops and pubs are springing up that no longer accept cash. In Germany, where people tend to be more concerned with data privacy than in some other places, that’s still not the norm. Scott sees a clear repeat of a process that already happened in London several years ago.

According to the author, fintech companies, payment providers and banks always target young, trendy people first as they already feel at home in the digital world, dominated by the big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Apple.

For that generation, Scott argues, it’s easier to accept the ascendancy of the Big Tech and Big Finance firms, which already wield more influence and power than ever a company before them.

“Billions of people are being locked into interconnected systems that enable hitherto unimaginable levels of surveillance and data extraction, and bring with them grave new potential for exclusion, manipulation and delusion,” writes Scott.

“The fight to lock people into dependence on those systems is becoming a geopolitical struggle between major powers, supported by their corporate allies.”

The author describes how, in 2014, he worked with the open data company OpenOil to unravel BP's elusive corporate structure, finding that the BP parent company was a network of more than 1,100 subsidiaries linked by a complex web of financial circuits across the globe, essentially amounting to a “mega-firm”.

About half of world trade now takes place within corporations rather than in open markets, according to Scott.

In its essence, Cloudmoney is the story of “a merger and an acquisition. The merger is between the forces of Big Finance and those of Big Tech. The acquisition is of power: once the merger is complete, Big Finance and Big Tech will have power over us on a scale never before seen in human history.”

In the book, Scott also describes how cryptocurrencies, originally conceived as a counterpole to the powerful entities of Big Tech and Big Finance, are now part of an emerging synthesis that could reinforce dystopian trends as well as combat them.

Cloudmoney is also a plea for a rethinking of our attitude towards cash.

“Cash protects privacy, and it is resilient in the face of both natural disasters and banking failures,” writes Scott.

However, cash is “increasingly being presented as an outdated barrier to progress, and one which must inevitably give way to a new world of digital money, or what I call ‘cloudmoney’.”

From hacker attacks to software bugs and power cuts, there are plenty of issues when it comes to digital payments. In 2018, 5.2 million payment attempts were blocked during a 10-hour outage in Visa’s European systems.

States are increasingly nervous about their alliance with the digital payments industry, says Scott, with security advisors expressing concerns about the risk of cyberattacks, payment infrastructure failures or even terrorist attacks on digital payment systems that could bring entire economies to a standstill.

Cloudmoney offers a different perspective on the rise of cashless payments, often marketed to us as an indispensable asset amid countless apps and services.

The book also provides valuable know-how on the flows of digital money and the different actors involved, in a personal and accessible style.

 - dpa