The long history of the Cashless Society
The words “cashless society” are deployed regularly in the media to generate immediate interest (and clicks). It’s so interesting to so many people because the Cashless Society is a trope, a theme, a prediction dating back thousands of years sparking both fear and excitement.
What does the bible say about a cashless society?
In the christian bible, (Revelation 13) the ‘second beast’ (often interpreted to mean the false prophet) came out of the earth and “forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, … which is the name of the beast or the number of its name … that number is 666.”
This is part of the tribulation, the second stage of end times when the false prophet implements a worldwide identification system for the first beast (the antichrist), which is freely entered into by non-believers. Christians who object to the new world ID system will be unable to participate in society and many will be executed.
This scary prediction is often used by christian scholars to warn about the dangers of a cashless society and the growing digital economy.
The first beast comes from the sea (often interpreted to mean the Mediterranean region) and the second beast from the earth (Israel).
Turning Points’ Dr David Jeremiah warns that (the modern state of ) Israel’s adoption of biometric security and payment technologies is a sign of the coming apocalpyse.
“On February 27, 2017, Israel’s Parliament passed a law mandating their citizens to obtain a biometric ID card,” writes Dr Jeremiah.
“The mandated use of this technology is a source of controversy. Many are worried about their privacy and information security for obvious reasons. But it has even more sinister potential: it is a perfect weapon in the arsenal of a tyrant bent on world domination. As we know from the Bible, a despotic ruler will govern the entire world during the last half of the Tribulation period, and he will likely use technology to accomplish his purposes (Revelation 13:16–17).“
Dr Jeremiah says “technological advances [like the internet and search engines in particular] are paving the way for fulfillment of end–time prophecy.
“These innovations are creating the environment that the Antichrist and False Prophet will need to wire this world together for their evil purposes.”
Who first predicted a cashless society?
In modern times, the cashless society concept was first described in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward: 2000 – 1887, an extraordinary bestseller and one of the most influential books of the 19th century.
Bellamy’s main character, Julian West, falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. Private capitalism has been replaced by a nationalised, centralised economy.
Each citizen receives an equal amount of credit from the government each year, their share of nation’s productivity and use it to make purchases at public distribution centres.
If people have a more difficult occupation, they might work less hours per day or week than others but all citizens in Bellamy’s utopia are given the same amount of ‘credit’ issued by the government.
“Julian West is taken to a store where he sees citizens using their credit cards to obtain goods.
“The process is efficient, and the goods are priced not for profit but based on labor and material cost.”
The Nationalist Movement
Edward Bellamy’s book spawned a plethora of utopian visions of the future without money and a nationalist movement. He also became the target of widespread criticism and debate.
The Nationalist Movement in the U.S.A was formed to promote and discuss Bellamy’s ideas.
More than 160 Nationalist Clubs advocating for public ownership of industry sprung up in the next few years.
Williams Morris’s ‘News From Nowhere’ in 1890 described a future England transformed into a pastoral, anarchist-socialist society where traditional buying, selling, money, and centralized government have been abolished.
“We have no longer anything which you, a dweller in the old bad times, would call a market; that is to say, we do not buy and sell things,” wrote Morris.
“All work is now pleasurable; no one is overworked, and no one is underworked.”
Goods are freely available to those who need them, there’s no hoarding or accumulation of wealth.
“We do not need to keep accounts of what we give and take; we take what we need, and give what we can.”
Who invented the cashless society?
By the 1960s, American banks were talking about the problems and rising costs of the increasing numbers of checks (cheques) being used for transactions.
John Diebold popularised the term ‘automation’ and built some early inter-bank networks in the early 1960s.
In 1966 John Diebold wrote about ‘transactions overload’ and said “the cashless society is no longer an option but a necessity…”
Like all early pioneers of automating banking, Diebold needed to sell the vision of a future without paper to a sceptical industry. This newspaper clip (below) is from May 1961 and quotes Diebold as saying ‘non-money is upon us’ with some large businesses already using “electronic brain machines” to “compute” their weekly payroll, tax and social security payments.
Diebold won support from George W Mitchell, Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve who wrote to bankers about increasing costs and advised that “the computer can drastically change money and its use.”
Mitchell predicted checks (cheques) would disappear “much sooner than most of would suspect” and notes and coins would soon after be relegated to increasingly limited uses.
American Bankers Association Deputy Manager Dale Reistad worked at Northwestern Bank and was head of the automation division of the ABA.
He formed a “Checkless Society” committee and seems to have inspired many bankers to actively adopt computerisation. Reistad predicted the USA could become checkless and cashless by 1980.
In a Business Horizons article titled “The coming cashless society” in 1967, Reistad wrote:
“Checkless” banking may replace our current system as early as 1980.
“Innovations now being seriously developed by the banking industry may eliminate the need for numerous credit cards, checks-and, perhaps, cash—and at the same time expand and simplify customer services.
Reistad also told colleagues it was:
“nearly inevitable that the banking system . . . will reverse itself and develop a ‘checkless’ system” by 1980, soon followed by a drastic reduction in the use of cash by businesses and consumers.”
Reistad seems to have been inspired to spread the word by IBM’s chief executive Thomas Watson who addressed the ABA’s national Automation Conference in 1965.
Watson said: “In our lifetime we may see electronic transactions virtually eliminate the need for cash.
“Giant computer banks, with massive memories, will contain individual customer accounts. To draw down or add to his balance, the customer in a store, office, or filling station will do two things: insert an identification into the terminal located there; punch out the transaction figures on the terminal’s keyboard.”
Watson was primarily a salesman starting out fifty years prior to this with NCR as a cash register sales assistant when his butcher shop failed.
When will Australia, and the world, go cashless?
Now, the cashless society is often used to promote cards, mobile payments and EFTPOS merchant services deals.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has been predicting a cashless society for decades.
CBA’s “Turning Point: calling time on cash” is a whitepaper spruiking the benefits of electronic payments to retailers. CBA has been updating the document regularly to push out the date at which they predict we “go cashless” from 2015 to 2019 and 2022.
The answer to when Australia will go cashless is probably never. The answer to when the world will go cashless is definitely never.
Even nations that are almost cashless are making commitments to retain cash as a backup in case of outages and to ensure economic inclusion for all citizens.
All the advocates for a cashless future are selling cards, cashless payments and automated banking of one kind or another. There is little organic appetite for a world with absolutely no physical money.
Is cash evil and a source of problems?
In science fiction, a cashless society is usually depicted as a utopian economic paradise where needs are met and goods and services provided to citizens without monetary payments.
Cash is often depicted as a source of problems, even evil. It is usually associated with profit-taking and outright greed that leads to injustice.
Star Trek is a vision of a cashless, socialist future without money.
Star Trek’s ‘Federation’ is described by trekkies as ‘post-scarcity‘, where food, common items, even gold and jewels can be replicated almost instantly, eliminating poverty, theft and unmet basic needs. Federation Credits are used for transactions between citizens, Federation entities and others.
Outside the Federation, Ferengi merchants (who are infamously obsessed with profit) accept Latinum – a cash-like currency made from a liquid metal suspended in solid gold ingots. It can’t be replicated and comes in denominations of slips, strips (100 slips), and bars (20 strips).
The Ferengi “Rules of Acquistion” include words of wisdom like:
Rule #10: Greed is eternal and Rule #285: No good deed ever goes unpunished.
Likewise, Star Wars is a dystopian vision of a society where real money matters, poverty (and slavery) is common and prejudice usually rules.
In a key scene in ‘The Phantom Menace,’ Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn needs to purchase a replacement hyperdrive but has no ‘real’ money, only ‘Republic Credits.’
If Qui-Gon had carried cash, the entire plot of the movie series would be different and the worst of the wars avoided.
When is the cashless society coming?
The world is going to be increasingly cashless as the convenience of other forms of transactions takes market share from cash.
The world will never go completely cashless because there is no possibility of automated systems being able to generate 100% trust in 100% of the population and 100% reliability for 100% of the time.