Privacy vs 'Progress' - The Case of Cashless Society | Brett Scott [Author]

[applause] Great. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for coming out this morning. I know this is pretty early for Berlin. I really appreciate that and I'm very thankful for this opportunity to speak to you.

Actually, this place is pretty amazing. I've spoken in a lot of places in the world, but this venue is epic. Kind of wish I had some kind of instrument to record here. Oh, cool. I've actually been learning the piano recently, so I could probably give it a go.

I am again economic anthropologist and a former financial broker and I'm actually doing a lot of work in the last few years on the case of cashless society and the dangers of cashless society. And the talk today, there we go. Privacy versus progress is the talk I'm going to give today about cash society and I put progress in inverted commas there because I'm going to be talking about dominant conceptions of progress. Uh should I ditch the slides organizers or should I continue with the they're coming? Anyway, I've been talking about the sort of dominant conceptions of progress and how they mess with our ability to think more creatively about a better world.

And um I wrote a book in 2022 called Cloud Money um cash cards, crypto and the war for our wallets. And it goes into essentially how in a large scale capitalist system what the big process has been has been happening over the last um 30 or so years is a fusion between big tech and big finance. Right? These are the biggest industries in the world and how this is actually manifesting in the cultural realm as a cultural demonization of things that are slower and more analog. So for example, cash, how it's seeping into the public imagination that cash is somehow slow and dragging the system.

You can kind of imagine this sort of snake that's trying to expand and it's trying to shed this skin as it's getting bigger and bigger. And cash appears like this to people in the sort of cultural domain is this thing that's slowing the system down and exerting some kind of drag. And I analyze this from a kind of macros perspective. um looking at how in capitalism there's certain processes that play out that lead to these processes of acceleration and expansion and eventually this cultural demonization of anything that stands against that. All right.

And I'll also go into how this term cashless society is basically a euphemism for a society where every economic interaction is going to eventually have to go via these gigantic oligopoly of big tech and big finance. And how this is then presented as being progress. this state of capture is presented as being progress. All right? And I'll go into the dangers of this situation.

Now, one of the big ones, of course, is actually privacy. There's huge amounts of surveillance that go on these digital payment systems. You guys will know about this, right? Um, but data, financial data or payments data is one of the most powerful forms of data and it's deeply sought after by a lot of people, a lot of big big corporates. But not only surveillance, there's also huge issues of exclusion.

All right. So when I say exclusion here, that actually takes multiple different forms. It includes people who cannot access these systems or who don't want to access these systems. But it also includes people who can be blocked from these systems deliberately censored. So economic censorship.

Now for a sort of cipher punk community, surveillance and censorship are the kind of key topics. But actually there's many other issues with cashless society that emerge uh beyond these. I don't have time to go into these, but there's at least 10 of them. So, for example, there's massive resilience problems with these infrastructures. They're incredibly subject to hacking, power outages, natural disasters, and so on.

So, there's massive resilience issues with these digital infrastructures. There's also financial stability issues. So, many people don't actually realize this, but the so-called cashless systems are actually legally and psychologically tethered to the cash system. So, if the cash system goes down, the stability of the cashless systems goes down. Central bankers know this which is why they're very scared of the situation.

Um there's also at a more sort of personal scale these are technologies of acceleration. They basically designed to increase the pace of life to increase the speed of interaction in in economies. And this actually manifests in many people's lives as an increased sense of speed but also actually increased spending. So people actually spend 20 to 40% more with digital payments than they do with cash because of the so-called frictionlessness. And this is actually a really big problem because it leads to increased problems of indebtedness.

Um, of course in a growth obsessed economy, we're told that this is a good thing. But for many people in the lower parts of the socioeconomic spectrum, this is not a good thing. Actually, many people in lower incomes not only distrust the banking sector and so don't actually want to be dependent upon the the banking sector, but also actually often prefer cash because it's a more intuitive way of budgeting. It sort of slows things down and it's easier to understand. So there's a bunch of these issues and I've spent a long time going around from many different audiences talking about these issues around cashless society and one of the most fascinating and disturbing phenomenon that I find is that people can intellectually understand these problems.

They can say yes I can see that there's a huge surveillance problem. I can see that there's exclusion problems. I can see all these individual problems. And then they sort of stand back and they say, "And yet you can't stop progress, can you? It's just inevitable."

So they have this kind of story in the back of their head that overrides all their concerns. So I became very interested in this because it's a very very damaging thing for anybody who's trying to fight for these individual issues is these progress narratives that stand in the way of people's ability to actually feel any agency to do something about them. Often in the sort of middle class parts of your society, you have this kind of Seinfelt response where they're like, "Yeah, [sighs] it's bad, but it's a shame, isn't it? And what you going to do?" That's a very common psychological response to people who feel that they can't actually change anything or maybe don't want to change anything.

But many other people have this inevitability stories. You'll also find this with AI right now. All right? Be like, "It's just inevitable." And sometimes people take on that persona of Agent Smith where they get angry and they sort of force it at you.

They're like, "It's inevitable. Don't tell me to care about this thing that you can't change. Just get used to it. You know, harden the up and just go with it." Right?

Or else you have the kind of like neo response where people feel this sort of shame where they're like, "Uh, I don't really like this thing, but I know it's inevitable and we have to carry on with it." Right. Right. And this is an incredibly damaging psychological state of being because basically it overrides all these senses of you can tell people bad things about cash to society. You can tell them bad things about AI and they will agree with you and then they'll be like and yet it's inevitable.

Let's carry on going. I've been in so many shows like this with like some presenter where they're just like, you know, I understand but like what can you do? So I became interested in like why do people have this response and what can you do to start rewiring these progress narratives? And let me get to the basic long and short of it, which is that the average person in society at some level in their body senses that they're stuck in a gigantic web. This is what this image represents here, a gigantic transnational web of billions of people, a capitalist economy essentially, where they essentially do not have any agency.

All right? You're told that you have agency in these systems. You're told that you can make market choices, but everybody at some basic bodily level understands that their individual choices do not determine what happens in the system. They understand that there are systemic processes that override their personal desires in the system and that there's default things that happen in the system regardless of their personal desire. Most people at some level understand this.

All right? And they sense two basic systemic processes. These are acceleration and expansion. They sense that the systems gets faster and that it expands and this is the basic systemic tendencies in the system. Now the system doesn't always do this.

You know we have recessions where it starts to fall apart and starts to slow down and starts to contract. But as soon as it happens all the political class steps in to try and rekick it, you know, reboot it and continue those processes of acceleration and expansion. So you feel that these there's these inevitable processes. Now, most people don't want to think they have no agency in the world. Most people want to believe they have some forms of control.

So, when you're stuck in a system where you essentially at some deep subconscious level, some bodily level understand that you don't have agency, you might start to try to place stories on top of that that tell yourself that you do, that there's some end goal to the system, that there's some end destination to these processes. Now sometimes this leads to what I'm just going to call here the high score concept of progress. This is one psychological response people going to have to the situation where they start to imagine there's some end goal to history. Now this this is also a very popular way of thinking about history in Silicon Valley among the entrepreneurial class who want to claim that there's some goal to their system or to their actions. And the basic idea is that history is imagined a bit like a video game, right?

Where you start you imagine some terrible prehistoric past where you're on level one with some tiny score and some tiny inventory and it's really and you have to then defeat these bosses. And what history is is humankind slowly defeating all these bosses and getting bigger and bigger and getting a bigger inventory, a bigger score, and higher levels, right? until you eventually end up on score level 32,000 here with a score of 42 billion or whatever. Right? And this is a very con sort of typical way that say Silicon Valley imagines history that humankind inevitably gets ever more complex and ever more um goes towards this trajectory.

Now I can deconstruct this narrative. I can show you why it's But that's not really what's important right now. What's important right now is that this is running in the background of people's consciousness like some piece of malware. All right? It sort of sits there subconsciously.

This idea that there's this inevitable trajectory to history. Um, and this is often what's jamming people's ability to think creatively about stuff. Now, more than this, this imagined new high score that humanity is always moving towards is actually imagined as a race. All right? So, you'll find a huge amount of this in the public domain in the cultural realm.

these stories about these imagined races towards this future. So the race towards a cashless society, who's leading this race, who's lagging behind in the race, you find exactly the same narrative with AI. All right, Europe lagging in the AI race, says meta executive, who's dominating the race, who's leading the race, blah blah blah blah blah blah. Right now, this is a very, very common way of imagining this inevitable trajectory to the future. these racing narratives.

You'll find it for any technology, the race to humanoid robots, the race to space, etc., etc., right? Now, racing imagery is actually quite ambiguous because on the one hand, you sort of imagine yourself as perhaps you voluntarily entered the race. Perhaps this is something you've chosen to do, but also there can also be a more dystopian, more coercive version of racing imagery, which is like you have no choice but to run.

Okay? And so we actually find within the public domain this racing metaphor breaks down into these sub stories about people who lead the race, people who follow in the race and people who are lagging in the race. All right. So for example, we know the stories about the those who lead these apparently heroic entrepreneurs who are these bold innovators who are leading humanity ever forward into this uh imagined future. Um, I prefer to think about these people as a slightly sociopathic class who monopolize society's resources and get everybody else to do their work for them.

But in the public domain, these people imagined often as heroic individuals without whom we would be lost somehow, right? And then there's a sort of secondary story which is about those who follow in the race. Right? This is all these stories you'll see about how you're supposed to keep up with AI. Don't get left behind.

Learn how to do it. Keep up, keep up, keep up. uh the political class often positions themselves on the sidelines of this imagined race. All right, so look here's Angela Merkel saying, you know, Germany mustn't get left behind in the AI race. France is back in the AI race.

So the political class often reinforces this narrative about this inevitable future that you have to race towards. And if you don't, you're going to be left behind. So you see all these stories about who's going to be left behind by cashless society, who's going to be screwed by this. But you find exactly the same stories about AI. Use AI or be left behind.

Enter the AI world or be left behind. This is a very common story. And all of these subnarratives are part of the same overarching race narrative which is part of the same overarching progress story. Now, if you're imagined to be uh refusing to go with this, you're imagined to to sort of be living in some parallel past world where you're going to be bypassed by the rest of society, a bit like these Amish people here on the highway. And many people have internalized this story.

Um, actually, if you go back to the early 1900s and you look at these stories from that time, you'll see the same anxiety about people with horse carts that they're going to be taken over by this future of of automobiles um, and be left behind in this in this society. So many people regardless of whether they're sort of consciousness of of of this or not have actually internalized the story that they have to keep up and stay relevant and remain competitive in this imagined inevitable trajectory towards this future. And this is what leads to these types of responses where they're like don't make me think about these things. I have no choice but to go forward with this trajectory. They can get angry actually when you when you ask them to think about something like privacy.

They're like I understand this but what do you want me to do? Do you want me to go against the inevitable trajectory? you asking me to go against this thing, it's going to go against my interests. All right, I have to I'm forced to do this. So, this is a very very big problem.

And then you have this this class of people who basically specialize in reinforcing this narrative. These venture capitalists like Mark Andre who talk about this future is in this weird carrot and stick way where they're like, if you go towards it, you will reach utopia, but if you don't, you're You'll be thrown out of society. You'll be destroyed. All right? And this is the story that they have.

And this story is a bit like a kind of spell that's sort of cast over society constantly. And weirdly, you know, I do a lot of work on cash. When I go and speak to, for example, the industry, the cash industry, the people who actually make the banknotes, they've internalized this this this thing that their industries on the way out. And what their response is, what they try to do is to say, we will show how we will remain relevant in the digital future. We will show how we're following.

we'll we'll we'll show the youth that cash is still cool and we'll we can do these digital things. All right? So, they try to show how they following Mark and Dre. And I I tell these guys, I say, "Do not under any circumstances do that. Show how you're leading to a different future, not how you're following in this path of Silicon Valley."

People actually have a huge desire right now for a different story about a different path into the future. Bear in mind that Mark Andre and these people talk about only two directions. They say you can go forward or you can go backwards and those are the only two options. But actually there's multiple paths forward and you can articulate different versions of the future. Now one of the reasons why this is super important right now is people's perceptions of big tech are plummeting.

There's a big opportunity right now to articulate a different version of that forward facing narrative. So back in the 1980s people still had this utopian narrative about computers and Nobody believes that anymore. People basically now understand in their bodies that they are captured by these systems. They understand that they're addicted that these systems follow them everywhere that they have no choice but to use them and and they actually many many people are stuck in this state of double think where they're like I have to use this but actually simultaneously it's making me ill. I feel kind of sickened by these systems.

So this is a big opportunity to start articulating something different because people also realize that not only are these systems seeping into their bodies, but they're controlled by these over here. People understand that, you know, they understand that the this these systems are controlled by people who are deeply linked into the political class and who do not have their best interest at heart. Approval of the internet is plummeting. There is especially among young people right now who actually increasingly there's lots of polls showing that they believe the world before the internet was better. Um especially in the context of all their jobs being wiped out and perceptions of AI are really really negative around society right now.

So this is a very good opportunity to start uh presenting a different version of of these of the future. I got 30 seconds left. That's why I'm racing talking about racing. Many people also understand that actually these stories about an inevitable race is actually a story about a rat race, a kind of treadmill that they're racing on a kind of accelerating treadmill going nowhere. All right, so this is a really good opportunity to start saying there are different paths into the future with different things.

We don't have to optimize endlessly for efficiency and speed and scale. We can actually optimize or like promote resilience, autonomy, community. These are things that people are desiring and you sort of step forward in that direction, people start to follow. Let me give you one last example here. The vinyl industry has been steadily increasing in popularity.

As people realize things like Spotify are actually right? People feel an increasing sense of losing any connection to music. As Spotify spreads around the society, people want a connection to music back, right? This is growing. Often when I'm when I'm talking about cash, I I speak to cash.

I speak about cash as being the bicycle of payments, not the horse cart. Bicycles are older. They're slower and yet people love these things, right? People actually see different values in something like like bicycles, right? You have autonomy, resilience, community.

And these are the kind of things I think we got to be talking about when we talk about privacy. All right? Don't fixate only on privacy. Don't fixate only upon the defensive aspect of that. talk about the positive elements that people can get behind as they walk towards a different future.

I know that's a bit of a willy way to end it, but I hope to hope it's a kind of provocation for you guys. If you want to see my work, that's my substack over there. That's my email. Thank you so much. [applause]