Cashless restaurants are racist. And delay driverless cars too
Yes, they do.
In certain urban neighborhoods, cash feels as useless as a fistful of Monopoly money, says GQ.
For the many millions people, in any country, who are “unbanked and underbanked”, cashless commerce and online shopping means less and less opportunities to buy what they need. Not just in “restaurants” (a word that covers everything from Michelin-starred venues to fast-foods): even “essential retailers like pharmacies, supermarkets, bookstores, and electronics suppliers can become reach for marginalized populations”.
The general trend here is that retail policies, when hypercharged by digital infrastructures, often “proxy for racial [or otherwise discriminatory] politics”.
To stave off this trend, last week, New York City council became the third major city, behind Philadelphia and San Francisco, to pass a measure banning cashless restaurants.
In general, notes GQ, “new laws cementing cash as a universally accepted legal tender present a way to peel back one of the layers stratifying the retail economy”. Another road to solve this problem is postal banking plans, that is “adding affordable banking services to the already existing network of post offices across the [US]”.
True, but there is more. Much more
The reasons to “cement cash” in laws are excellent, especially when one thinks about what cash is, and to how it affects much more than “retail”.
100 cashless? A nightmare. See bottom of post
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What is cash, anyway?
Back in 2018, I wrote about why a 100% cashless society " society would be great… except for a couple of things. Read that post, note how those problems would persist even if there were no discrimination at all against any social group, then come back here. Today, I would like you to consider one or two more sides of this coin:
- The real value of “cash”, at least as important as lack of discrimination, is anonymity. But “cash” does not need to be physical, non-digital stuff. It is possible to make anonymous digital money". And NO, I am not talking of Bitcoin. See the “free as in freedom” digital cash links here
- Besides retail, which in this context means “buying what one needs to survive”, we need cash for something that is just as essential: unrestrained, anonymous mobility
We need, that is, real, really usable “digital cash”, or “(city-level?) digital platforms for anonymous payments” also to grant everybody’s right to driverless cars done and used in the right way, that is shared and anonymously. The sooner, the better.
Image source: “India dreams of cashless society as demonetization nightmare unfolds”
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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