Cashless Society
In case you haven't noticed, cash is becoming passe. Increasingly, people the world over are reaching for those magnetically charged or transistor-powered plastic cards to pay for everything from food to fuel to fads. And as you might expect, this is no accident. Banks and governments are doing everything in their power to discard with the antiquated notion that money is represented by physical currency.
This type of switcheroo has been performed before. Once upon a time, U.S. currency was backed by gold reserves, but the deceptively-named privately-owned non-tax-paying Federal Reserve Corporation stopped this practice long ago. Since that time, money has been worth whatever the Reserve says it's worth, and what people believe it to be worth. So since money has no real value, it's already virtual, right? What difference does it make if we do away with physical currency entirely?
Well, to some folks, the coming about of the cashless society is proof positive that the Beast system, as predicted in the Book of Revelation, is here and in effect. They believe that you won't be able to buy or sell goods or even be able to functionally exist in society without being assigned a special identifying number or mark. Given the increasing popularity of biometric ID devices and the push for national ID cards, this isn't exactly an unlikely scenario.
To others, a cashless financial system would guarantee that everyone will be hopelessly caught in the dubious cycle of debt and repayment to which so many credit card junkies have become accustomed. Since all
transactions are monitored and recorded by privately-owned computer systems, anyone who has access to them, whether they be lending institutions, governments, or individuals, have the power to make your life a living hell.
Yet to the unquestioning majority, the cashless society represents the latest gift from above in our eternal quest for safety and convenience. They have been told that the discarding of currency will force an end to underground economies (therefore solving the "drug problem"), stop costly check fraud, and do away with bank robberies entirely. Besides, it sure does make it obscenely easy to order swank merchandise from Disinformation's online store!
Whatever your take on the coming cashless society, you can bet your bottom binary dollar that Visa, MasterCard, Citibank, Mondex and all the other multinational financial megacorps won't rest until inherently anonymous cash is obsolete and all transactions require their services (for a fee, of course). What better place
for the invisible hand of capitalist economics to pick than from your virtual pocket?
Whatever the case, one thing's certain: the more dependent our society's economic infrastructure becomes on computers, the more vulnerable we all become to glitches in the system, man-made or otherwise. You might not want to throw away that last bank statement before 1/1/00, or you just might find yourself reluctantly
singing, "I owe my soul to the company store"... |
