The Technocratic Dream Of A “Cashless Society” Entrenches Inequities
“Civil liberties are going to be absolutely thrown into disarray.”
Walking near my hotel one evening in Washington, D.C., I came upon an older Black man sitting on the ground, searching the faces of passersby, sometimes asking for money.
I had one large bill. (This was in the before-time, when we had no broad knowledge of the COVID-19 pandemic and its protocols.) After asking bartenders, servers, and even patrons at a nearby bar to break the bill, someone let me know, with an air of prideful inevitability, this was a “cashless” venue. Never mind the stamp of “legal tender” borne on every US bill.
This was my first encounter with a merchant that outrightly refused cash. There would be more.
A QUESTION OF HUMAN, CIVIL, AND PRIVACY RIGHTS
For nearly three years, the pandemic has served as the common excuse for all kinds of uncommon things. Early reports of “paper” money serving as a viral vector enabled merchants’ fairly smooth transitions to cashless transactions. Some only accepted exact payment, citing a coin shortage. Others refused cash and coin entirely, accepting payment by digital means only — what the ACLU called a “technocratic dream.”
Genevieve Leveille is the founder of London-based AgriLedger, a blockchain company addressing growing populations and global food supply. “Eventually, there will be no access without a digital way to pay,” she said.
This is a reality in China already, where in some cases, fiat currency is being taken out of circulation and destroyed, explained Leveille, a specialist in digital identity, blockchain, and biochemistry.
On a visit to India, Shankar Narayan, an independent technology and surveillance consultant, tried to hail a cab home from the airport in the middle of the night “with cash that didn’t work.” It was around the time several years ago when the Indian government had withdrawn large denomination rupee notes of ₹500 and ₹1000 — an attempt to force cashless adoption through demonetization, he said. “ATMs stopped working. I mean, it was a total nightmare.”
Fortunately, “it was still possible to get someone to accept cash if you just gave them enough of it,” he said. But this isn’t sustainable so it’s not a solution.
“In order to conduct cash transactions in India, people have to go around with wads of hundred rupee notes, making cash even less convenient, considering a lot of people lost their savings through the demonetization.”
Narayan believes the ultimate goal in all of this is control over peoples’ movements, and the AADHAR national ID card — a unique, 12-digit number — makes that possible. AADHAR contains biometric data and demographic data, without which a person could be barred from food ration systems, unable to obtain a cell phone, or make financial transactions. “You can’t do anything in India anymore without it,” he said.
Limited digital pathways to basic needs present significant barriers for the unbanked, an already vulnerable group that often includes those with mental illness, the elderly, and the unhoused. It’s across these broken systems, Narayan said, that technology can feed and reinforce marginalization and alienation.
“It’s a strategic elimination of agency. You’re not a person anymore.”
Narayan points to Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine, a kind of punch card system invented in 1884 to gather and store US census data and ultimately used “to track and roundup Japanese for internment during WWII” in a later iteration.
Narayan notes the same rippling inequities in the financial industry, “the tracking and commodification of all movements of people by the purchases they make.” This surveillance yields a ton of consumer data which “can be commodified and fed back into inequitable systems [to] inform decisions about credit, loans, where you get to live,” all kinds of things.
Race, as many studies have shown, can impact access to better education, wages, and neighborhoods; and race is a significant factor in the workings and aftereffects of these technologies. Of all the racist algorithms in use, Narayan said, by industry, fintech stands out “because the people building it have never been anything other than openly avaricious and concerned with the bottom line.”
These practices date back to the American chattel slavery era.
A 2021 report by Data4Black Lives examines “the roots of data capitalism in chattel slavery and its evolution over time, exploring its pernicious consequences in the workplace, consumer marketplace, and public sphere.” It was early surveillance capitalism, a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff, that refers to the “undermining of personal autonomy and eroding democracy.”
So, what could a multinational shift to digital currency mean for that man on the street in the nation’s capital, and the hundreds of thousands of other Americans who may not qualify for a bank account?
“Civil liberties are going to be absolutely thrown into disarray,” Leveille predicts. “Imagine all of the immigrants or people who are marginalized. How are they going to be paid?” she asked. “If by digital fashion, this denotes their presence in the country.”
This tech is entrenching inequity in a way that many of us would probably argue is illegal, she said.
MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS
Society is moving toward obscure algorithmic systems that are primarily controlled beyond the reach of our current regulatory systems.
Narayan knows the players and the game. “Government regulators talk with tech companies about what community wants, rather than bringing community into the room,” he said. And because of political donations from tech companies and their massive lobbying power, “there’s no political will in Congress to regulate the space.”
Added to these closed-door political maneuverings is an overarching illiteracy about technology. “Sometimes lawmakers have stepped out of legislation, and are hired [by Big Tech] to lobby for them.” Describing the scenario as a “revolving door between tech companies, lobbyists, lawmakers, and government personnel,” he said, often lawmakers in this cycle don’t even have the knowledge base to push back.
“Civil liberties are going to be absolutely thrown into disarray.”
The popular conclusion of a better life through technology is knee-jerk tech solutionism particularly prevalent, he said, in partnerships between government and technology companies, and plain to see in their rush to adopt “Black Box” responses to questions communities haven’t asked.
It’s behind these walls that algorithms — designed by tech companies — manage and control a lot of government processes, and where inequity is enlarged.
“That’s exactly why they’re enthusiastic about this cashless society, right? Because it’s moving people into a space where their data can be commodified and decisions about them can be made.”
The likelihood of being unbanked increases to nearly 14% for Black households, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland reports, and costs to open and maintain bank accounts are higher in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods.
“This whole trend towards intangible currency builds on the previous exclusion of people from banking systems, and worsens preexisting consequences of poverty,” Narayan said. “These systems are locusts of control.”
ON SURVEILLANCE AND ‘SMART’ SHOPPING
In an attempt to experience what we’re up against, I set out to pick up a few things from Amazon Fresh. For years, patrons of Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh have been invited to ‘Just Walk Out’ — a cutesy phrase referencing surveillance technology behind the company’s cashless experience, since licensed by the conglomerate to many more retailers.
Just inside DC’s flagship store at Logan Circle, a scanning device required a form of digital payment before an electronic turnstile would give access. Once inside, I felt shrunken and overwhelmed by the surveillance of this hyper-efficient capitalist design. The place felt akin to a lab, sterile, despite the leafy greens and other brightly-colored produce arranged to perfection. I was glad to leave the store to its few sedentary employees, its cashier-less payment process running in the background.
My distrust in this technology has an ironic history and birthplace. Six years ago, from my desk in the legal department at Amazon HQ, I had a bird’s eye view on construction of the first Amazon Go store in Seattle. Back then I was refused entry, being a contractor rather than an employee, and the store wasn’t yet open to the general public. In my recent experience of its operation as a customer years later, my stockpiled apprehensions were justified. It’s everything I’d imagined … and less.
Incidentally, this particular cashless store is just a block away from where the man sat begging a few years back.
It’s by these interdependent conditions — long-running, low-wage earnings which can introduce housing instability and more — that people are cut away from the American fabric and driven into crevices of invisibility, Narayan said. It’s violence.
“The digital world has a way of driving imbalance.”
WIDENING THE CLASS DIVIDE
This “skip the line” model of consumerism, a convenience by some measures, puts patrons to work scanning and bagging items themselves. Retrofitted through operations across several industries in metropolitan cities, cashless tech also makes shoppers complicit in the growing number of displaced cashiers and other workers.
With an hourly mean pay of $13.11, too many cashiers already subsist near poverty levels.
“Something as fundamental to life as food, as innocuous as grocery shopping could be a new class differentiator.”
In a Pew Research Center survey released in April 2019, more than eight-in-ten respondents (82%) said that by 2050 “robots and computers will definitely or probably do much of the work currently done by humans,” exacerbating inequality between the rich and poor.
It’s precisely this kind of job loss and displacement — resulting from so-called innovation — that can escalate pressing socioeconomic realities that may be of little consequence to tech developers in the first place. In the wake of cashless technology, something as fundamental to life as food, as innocuous as grocery shopping, could be a new class differentiator.
When asked about the possibility of a central bank and adoption of one world digital currency, Leveille said, “I’m not for it.” She fears the loss of “an amenity of fiat,” and wants to retain financial autonomy. “If you freeze my account, I can still use cash,” she said. “I can eat.”
Narayan said, “There’s a need for a newer and stronger regulatory framework addressing questions that tech companies will never willingly ask, or be incentivized to address on their own.” The problem is tech companies won’t invest in their products being nondiscriminatory if their competitors aren’t doing the same, and competitors won’t do it either as long as regulation doesn’t exist, he lamented.
Narayan wants to see equitable approaches in technology with a redistribution of power, with values and goals of tech companies centered on Black and brown communities invited to the table and empowered to say “no.”
