Dollars and Sense

And in other news, Sweden plans to be entirely cashless by 2030. More people than not are using plastic to pay for goods and services, and I admit, I count myself among them—for big ticket items that require some time to pay off in full. (Remember, I live from paycheque to paycheque.) And though my Starbucks card is on automatic renewal, I prefer to use cash for my café habit. Small amounts call for a fiver, or coin of some kind … and what about the office water club? I manage that account, and I can’t see me going wireless to collect dues, even though most of the members must make a special trip to the bank when I send out the bi-monthly bills.

Is it good to abolish cash in favour of electronic transactions? If money makes the world go around—and it does—I hesitate to entrust all of mine to technology. Aside from the familiar glitches that occur when Mercury is in retrograde or the network crashes due to high volume usage, what happens when the power goes out? I saw Goldeneye. I know what an electromagnetic pulse is. We depend so heavily on electricity, and now we’re practically helpless without our computers. A systems hiccup recently sent all the folks in my office to an early lunch because we couldn’t do our jobs with dead rigs.

I, Robot indeed.

Years ago, during a treatment  with my voodoo medicine man, he told me of a town in Japan where they have no technology at all, where transactions are handwritten on paper and people actually speak to each other instead of texting or emailing or whatever. His point was the irony of such a backward community existing within the borders of a technological superpower, but I stumped him.

I said, “That’s brilliant. If I wanted to rule the world, I’d make sure my people could function without the technology I sold to everyone else, then I’d do the EMP thing and kill all access to, heck, everything.”

Money has not always come in the form as we know it, but there has always been a tangible way to pay for goods and services. Debit and credit cards do not deal in tangibles, so when global systems crash for whatever reason, be it terrorism or act of God, the world had better have stashed some cash in the vault or we won’t be able to buy our morning coffee.

And that will make us all very crabby.