Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets
Brett Scott’s Cloudmoney takes a detailed look at the prosecutors and beneficiaries of the ‘war on cash’ and the march towards non-physical living.
Information from the publisher
Many of us rarely use cash these days. And the reach of corporations into our lives via cards and apps has never been greater. But what we're told is natural and inevitable is actually the work of powerful interests: the great battle of our time is for ownership of the digital footprints that make up our lives.
Who benefits from a cashless society and who gets left behind? Is the end of cash the end of true privacy? And is a cashless future closer than we think?
Cloudmoney tells a revelatory story about the fusion of big finance and tech, which requires physical cash to be replaced by digital money or 'cloudmoney'. Diving beneath the surface of the global financial system, Brett Scott uncovers a long-established lobbying infrastructure waging a covert war on cash, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress.
From marketing strategies against cash, to the weaponization of Covid-19 to advance fintech platforms, and the cryptocurrency rebels and fringe groups pushing back, Cloudmoney takes us to the frontlines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom.
Cloudmoney describes the ‘war on cash’ that has been prosecuted by financial institutions over at least the last three decades. Physical money has gradually and deliberately been marginalized through being associated with tax dodgers and general criminals. This process was cynically accelerated during the pandemic by focussing on the negligible risk of disease transmission via cash – unlike card terminals…
The book also digs into the reasons why cash is resented by surveillance capitalists and transhumanists alike: for the former, the market value of insights into human behaviour that computerized payments provide and for the latter, the opportunity for us to free ourselves from being human.
Publisher’s website
Reviews
' A brilliant, fascinating and utterly accessible book... If you want to understand what money is - and what it is in danger of becoming - start right here. ' - Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics
'A wonderfully revolutionary text.' - Yanis Varoufakis
‘…Scott considers the virtues of hard currency—including its tactile nature and the fact it doesn’t track data—and portends a cash-free future wherein government and the finance-tech industry monitor transactions and extract fees…’ - publishersweekly.com.