Keith Hart on Fri, 3 Mar 2017 00:49:57 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> In Praise of Cash |
Thanks for the wake-up call, Brett. It is useful to start a war between cash and bank money, if we are indeed sleepwalking into an insidious totalitarian bureaucracy. But I have found that bureaucracies look a lot more monolithic from the outside from the inside and your take on money may confirm ignorance more than reduce it. Money was based on credit thousands of years before coins were invented. In David Graeber's terms, money as bullion predominated in the Axial Age of rival ancient imperialisms and in the more recent age of western imperialism. Credit money was more common than metal currency in the middle ages and may or may not be on the rise. But of course throughout that history and again today money was always plural in several forms. To simplify, in the last two centuries or more, bank notes and base metal coinage were added to gold and silver coins coins, then bank deposits, supervised by a Central Bank, to these two layers which were linked by gold backing for paper. Nixon ended this link in 1971, triggering the immediate invention of money derivatives, an explosion in FX between competing currencies (daily turnover of $5.3 trillion in 2013) and the progressive detachment of the global money circuit from production, trade, politics and law. The addition of layers to the money system has not stopped. Mobile money (m-pesa) has 25 million accounts in Kenya and Tanzania. The Bank of England is considering letting innovators in financial technology bypass the bank deposit system and go straight to central bank money. Money is now issued by a distributed global network of corporations (not just governments and banks), often in special forms that lack the all-purpose functions (exchange, payment, account, store) of national monopoly currency, thereby reverting to the type of special-purpose money that was normal before the central bank revolution c. 1850. Much of the action these days is generated by the payments industry which is not simply an undifferentiated part of the banking conspiracy (Bill Maurer How Do You Want to Pay?) So, do you hope that your call to arms in defence of cash will help people understand the tidal wave of money that threatens to overwhelm us all? Keith On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 11:35 PM, Brett Scott ]brettscott@fastmail.com> wrote: I just published this big essay in Aeon Magazine, looking at the dark sides of 'cashless society' (aka. the bank payments society): https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is-good-will-be-lost. This follows from an earlier essay I did called The War on Cash. The battle to protect cash is one full of ambiguities - it feels somewhat like trying to protect good ol' normal capitalism from a Minority Report surveillance-capitalism. <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: