The book is filled with some interesting stories and analogies but some of them were off the mark and took away from the book. Private companies entrenching themselves as the owners of the financial rails of public money. Pushing global gentrification of standardized corporate chains over traditional small business Can exclude people & business from the financial system Are subject to failure and vulnerabilities Dematerialize money into their own digital chips It is a stark reminder that when we use digital money we are not just using more convenient money but instead strengthening and relying on a network of bank and tech companies who are, among other things: To entrench itself fully in our lives, and stick to our bodies, corporate capitalism needs the money to be digital, and for the ground-level touchpoints to be replaced with standardised apps, hosted in smartphones that follow us wherever we go." "Financial corporations dream of a ‘cashless society’ in which even these tiniest of nodes in the capitalist market will be tethered to their accounts, inserting the banking sector into every pixel of the economic picture. digital transfers) they want to move workers to digital money. He describes the core of capitalism as being corporations and the periphery as the workers, and because the core operates in digital money (e.g. What it did well was delineate the often overlooked boundary that exists between the conveniences of cashless and the jump to corporate ownership of the means of payment. For those who have little to no knowledge of fintech then it's a good place to start but I really found it lacking in a few areas. Who benefits from a cashless society and who is left behind? And will the departure of cash also signal the departure of true privacy?Ī really good into book on digital money from a leftist perspective. In Cloudmoney, Brett Scott uncovers a long-established lobbying infrastructure set up by an alliance of partners, including financial institutions, governments and international agencies, to wage a covert cold war against cash. However, the great information firewall is being completely offline, leaving data black holes. In our large-scale modern economies, a significant amount of a person's life is spent buying things, and this data provides a clear idea of their priorities, habits and beliefs. Yet, if we really want to see what a person is motivated to act upon in society, we should examine their payments data. Facebook has a treasure trove of its users' special moments and projections of vanity. Google has search patterns revealing your desires, fetishes and intellectual interests. In the great battle for global monopolization, different 'watchers' are trying to capture and hoard data. What happens when physical money is replaced completely by digital transactions? We are often told that the move towards a cashless society is 'natural progress', but there is seldom reference to the powerful groups that are vigorously pushing for it. Cloudmoney take us to the frontlines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom: it is a captivating tour of the world of money that also asks the most important questions about our future.
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