Thread by @jamewils

"The death of cash is the result of a plan – to cede control of money away from the banks and even governments, and place it instead in the hands of the new players: tech companies."

-Done! The Secret Deals That Are Changing Our World by Jacques Peretti

#500DaysOfDemoDisaster

When we pay with cash, neural pathways light up like a Christmas tree. This is the flinch moment we experience when our hands are forced to part with money. In that instant, the brain is telling the hand not to let go.

An experiment was being carried out by a Serbian neuro-psychologist at MIT into what happens to the human brain when we pay in different ways.

Prelec set up an MRI scan with the students who had bid in the silent auction with cash and what he found out next was to change the future course of money.

One of the main objective of #DemonetisationScam is nothing but "to make people more indebted"

Debt is also the modus operandi for governments claiming ‘growth’ by factoring credit-fuelled consumer spending into GDP. Debt provides a politically expedient role, window-dressing a stagnating economy by faking a healthy balance sheet.

If I hand you a ten-pound note or a dollar bill, no one is making money from that transaction. It is cash from one hand to another. But if I make the payment digitally, someone has to facilitate that payment. The space between you and me becomes the place where money can be made.

This is the space the big tech giants – Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft – all want to own, and it is a race to own money itself, and thus redefine what it is. Which is to make you the currency.

These giants call themselves ‘tech’ companies, but tech is a stepping stone – they want to become the new banks. And with the implosion of the old banks came their chance to take the first step.

"Aren’t you simply seeking to use cash as a Trojan Horse to collect revenue from the poorest because you can’t collect it from the richest?" I asked Rogoff.

He shrugged. ‘Cash isn’t going to disappear as quickly as anyone might want it to, and I’m not saying it should. It serves a purpose for sure.’

However bad the banks have been with fraud, Eriksson declares, they will prove to be paragons of vigilance next to the tech giants. Eriksson is no anti-capitalist protestor. He ran the biggest anti-fraud police force in Europe.

The psychological contagion cash carries is fear of poverty, and this is the true success of the digital revolution – to make us believe cash is synonymous with social inferiority, and using it, even coming into contact with it, could mean contracting the contagion of failure.

These are excerpts from this fascinating book. It's a must read

PS: This one line in the first chapter caught my attention.

"We are more concerned when data mining strays into the realm of our health, which is the space the tech giants are coincidentally most interested in."

Nilekannis are now licking their fangs dreaming this possibility!