![]() The cash system allows for an unmonitored “off the grid” space. It does not rely on external data centres, and is not subject to remote control or remote monitoring. Digital systems may be “convenient”, but they often come with central points of failure. The recent Visa chaos, during which millions of people who have become dependent on digital payment suddenly found themselves stranded when the monopolistic payment network crashed, was a temporary setback. Digital systems may be ‘convenient', but they often fail. Their job is to make you believe that it is in your interest too, and they are succeeding in doing that. It is in the interest of banks and payments companies. But a cashless society is not in your interest. The objective is to reverse-engineer a belief within me that it is inconvenient, and that cashlessness is in my interests. Twenty years ago nobody believed that cash was “inconvenient”, but every time I walk into London Underground I see adverts that address me as if I was a person who finds cash inconvenient. The basic idea is that you can get people to internalise beliefs by addressing them as if they already had those beliefs. We can also learn from Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation. It is the direct result of a hegemonic project on the part of financial institutions. Nobody was on the streets shouting for digital payment 20 years ago, but increasingly it seems obvious and “natural” that it should take over. His concept of hegemony referred to the way in which powerful parties condition the cultural and economic environment in such a way that their interests begin to be perceived as natural and inevitable by the general public. We can learn from the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci in this regard. They seek to make people “learn” that they want digital, and then “choose” it. Second, they must vigorously promote the alternative. First, they must increase the inconvenience of cash, ATMs and branches. Payments companies such as Visa and Mastercard want to increase the volume of digital payments services they sell, while banks want to cut costs. They slowly wean you off staff, and “nudge” you towards self-service.įinancial institutions, likewise, are trying to nudge us towards a cashless society and digital banking. This in turn makes it more inconvenient to use the checkout staff, which in turn makes customers more likely to use the machines. When some people then use that alternative, the supermarket can cite that as evidence of a change in customer behaviour, which they then use to justify a reduction in checkout employees. They thus initially present self-checkout as a convenient alternative. But supermarkets have to convince their customers. The underlying agenda is to replace checkout staff with self-service machines to cut costs. We can illustrate this with the example of self-checkout tills at supermarkets. ![]() ![]() If a powerful institution wants to make people choose a certain thing, the best strategy is to make it difficult to choose the alternative. ![]() In behavioural economics this is referred to as “ nudging”. I am much more likely to “choose” a digital option if the banks deliberately make it harder for me to choose a non-digital option. In closing down their branches, or withdrawing their cash machines, they make it harder for me to use those services. I am one of the customers they are referring to, but I never asked them to shut down the branches. I recently got a letter from my bank telling me that they are shutting down local branches because “customers are turning to digital”, and they are thus “responding to changing customer preferences”. Replacing them with standardised self-service apps allows the senior managers of financial institutions to directly control and monitor interactions with customers.īanks, of course, tell us a different story about why they do this. Another aim is to cut costs in order to boost profits. ![]()
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