Monday, May 09, 2016

Money Money Not Money

In my professional guise, I've been doing a lot of work lately on digital currency, so my radar is attuned to stories about the rise of non-physical payment systems. Imagine my excitement, then, when I came across an amazing confluence of technology, disco-pop, and Scandinavians.

In 1976, Bjorn Ulvaeus co-wrote 'Money Money Money' with ABBA bandmate Benny Andersson. Now, four decades later, Ulvaeus is one of the leaders of the movement in Sweden to eliminate the use of physical cash. Today, many Swedish banks don't deal in cash, and the nation is among the world's leaders in digital commercial and person to person financial transactions. At the official ABBA museum in Stockholm, which does not accept cash, a sign at the entrance reads,

"I challenge anyone to come up with reasons to keep cash that outweigh the enormous benefits of getting rid of it. Imagine the worldwide suffering because of crime, from drug dealing to bicycle theft. Crime that requires cash. The Swedish krona is a small currency, used only in Sweden. This is the ideal place to start the biggest crime-preventing scheme ever. We could and should be the first cashless society in the world."

As implied in the message above, Ulvaeus is pushing a cashless economy as a means to eliminate significant types of criminal activity. Ironically, a former head of the Swedish police force and Interpol director thinks Ulvaeus' ideas are dangerously elitist.

Bjorn Eriksson (Bjorn on Bjorn crime!) is one of the founders of  Kontantupporet (which means 'Cash Uprising', and is not at all some sort of Jim Henson character), a reaction to the increasingly digital Swedish economy. Eriksson's movement sees the trend away from cash as being primarily beneficial to large banks at the ultimate expense of consumers. In his telling, digital transactions enable large institutions to reduce transparency and dictate consumer behavior in ways made difficult in cash-based societies.

Ridiculed as the leader of a vanguard of geriatrics (and conflicted by the fact that he leads an industry association of private security firms that stand to lose a great deal in a society with no cash assets that must be physically protected), Eriksson nonetheless positions himself as protecting individuals from a corporatization of the monetary supply.

There's an interesting libertarian/dystopian argument against the elimination of cash from our transactional lives, but it seems a foregone conclusion that physical cash is a dying medium. As the Wired article notes, even panhandlers in Sweden have figured out how to accept digital currency. And to this fiscally-inept interested viewer, the fewer moving parts to the system, the better.

But as ABBA says, it's a rich man's world, so perhaps we best be aware of the motivations underlying technologies that purport to make it easier for us to spend our cash, or its equivalents.

22 comments:

mayhugh said...

Aside from a couple of visits to legal gambling parlors, I don't think I've carried cash since 2011. I just don't like having a bunch of crap in my pockets.

In terms of financial institutions being able to hide things electronically, they could adopt a Dodd-Frank type bill for regulating the industry. I don't know what the Scandinavian name equivalent of "Dodd-Frank" is, but I would like to find out.

Money Money Money is one of the weakest offerings in the ABBA mainstream collection. Waterloo and Knowing Me, Knowing You are personal favorites.

zman said...

Mayhugh always struck me as more of a Dancing Queen.

I like cash. It rules everything around me, cream, get the money, dolla dolla bill y'all.

Credit cards require interchange fees, and if every transaction required an interchange fee then we'd effectively have a tax on every transaction. Although that cost might already be baked into the cost of everything given the ubiquity of credit card swipers. I also don't like the idea of having every purchase I make captured and recorded electronically.

How do you make it rain if you don't have dollar bills? I guess you can use your credit card to buy "rain drops" but then you have this record of the transaction. Not ideal.

rob said...

there are already peer to peer payment apps, here and elsewhere. sweden's is called 'swish'. not that there's anything wrong with that. i don't think those things cost on a per transaction basis - the value to the banks is in the cost savings associated with not having to handle as much cash.

mayhugh said...

I'm going to sound like a 70 year old, but I am never not impressed by the convenience of Amazon. The convenience of being able to buy something with essentially one click significantly outweighs my concerns with respect to purchase monitoring or cyber crime.

Dave said...

men carry cash. it's anonymous, and it's valuable. just try and take it from me. i always have some cash on me, in case the shit goes down. and, like ron swanson, i've got a bunch of gold as well.

Danimal said...

i have hundreds of pet peeves. one of them is when my wife doesn't have cash to pay a babysitter, pay for a pizza, tip someone. of course it only angers me when i am without cash.

other pet peeves: no personal greeting on one's cell phone voice mail
sock monster
and there are many others, hundreds

rob said...

sock monster. that'll getcha.

rob said...

my daughter stayed home sick from school today, but she didn't want to miss her cello lesson. so she and her instructor did the lesson via facetime. the future is excellent.

mayhugh said...

Some of my pet peeves:

Sleeveless shirts at a restaurant (men only)
Cruising in the left lane
Using 2 spaces to park (or in the case of the dude who drives the F150 and shops at the same Giant Food, 4 spaces)
Anyone not in my household adjusting my thermostat
When you get food delivery with a group and someone doesn't close the box/lid/bag and consequently lets all the heat out


Dave said...

pet peeves:

misusage of lie/lay
inability to use the weak foot
my son making me wrap his jammed thumb while he sleeps because he insists that he's going to re-injure it--

i'm about to go conduct number three, despite it being a pet peeve

zman said...

After 3-1/2 days of colossal sickness culminating in a Mother's Day involving a 101 degree fever, the shivers, a trip to Urgent Care, and prescriptions for an antibiotic and purple drank cough syrup, zwoman can get out of bed and function to a limited degree. She insists on calling the purple drank "purple nurple" which is funny but I'm worried that when she says stuff like "That purple nurple you gave me was great!" or "Who knew I loved purple nurple so much?" my son will repeat the story to his teachers and they will think we're up to weird stuff.

TR said...

My list of pet peeves is about a million items long. That's what happens when your basic instinct is to dislike those around you. But the big ones are folks who chew gum w/ their mouths open, folks w/ annoying/loud cell phone rings, and dudes whose main drinks are crappy domestic beers.

Clarence said...

Gheorghe: The Blog

Dedicated to the premise that life should be bitched about

Clarence said...

And it won't eliminate bicycle theft of the thieves are just trying to get home from the Delly faster

Clarence said...

Take a Chance on Me
Voulez Vous
SOS

And for sensitive souls like me
The Winner Takes It All

TR said...

I'm not ashamed to say the roar of guns and cannons almost made me cry.

TR said...

Way to shit the bed, Man U, even if you had to battle thru a war zone and the worst hooligans in the Premier League and deal with the magnitude of that team's last match ever in their soon-to-be former stadium.

Dammit.

rob said...

'dueling bjorns yo'. nothing? assholes.

also, fuck man u.

TR said...

NBA playoffs would be a lot more fun if OKC won tonight, but hard to see it happening. And the refs are way too whistle-happy.

TR said...

Good to know I am still the mush. I think that as the game ended, the Spurs fans realized they may have seen Duncan play his last game at home. Poor guy is a shell of his former self. I don't think fans came into the game expecting that to be his possible last game.

Westbrook was an absolute beast all night. He had his bad moments, but far more spectacular ones.

Clarence said...

Boozing with Rootsy in the Star City. F yeah.

Dave said...

used zman's porsche post along with ship of theseus thought experiment in philosophy class yesterday