Cloudmoney
Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Axiom Award Gold Medalist for Business Commentary
The reach of Corporations into our lives via cards and apps has never been greater; many of us rarely use cash these days. But what we’re told is a natural and inevitable move is actually the work of powerful interests. And the great battle of our time is the battle for ownership of the digital footprints that make up our lives.
In Cloudmoney, Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and Big Tech requires “cloudmoney”—digital money underpinned by the banking sector—to replace physical cash. He dives beneath the surface of the global financial system to uncover a long-established lobbying infrastructure: an alliance of partners waging a covert war on cash. He explains the technical, political, and cultural differences between our various forms of money and shows how the cash system has been under attack for decades, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress.
Cloudmoney takes us to the front lines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom, from marketing strategies against cash to the weaponization of COVID-19 to push fintech platforms, and from there to the rise of the cryptocurrency rebels and fringe groups pushing back. It asks the most pressing questions:
Who benefits from a cashless society and who gets left behind?
Is the end of cash the end of true privacy?
And is our cloudmoney future closer than we think it is?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Scott (The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance) sounds the alarm on a world without cash in this trenchant if uneven account. The cashless movement is gaining momentum, he writes, thanks in part to the pandemic, when paper money was seen as a disease vector (in 2020 the use of notes plummeted by almost 50% in the United Kingdom alone). 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. Scott's depiction of the invisible web that facilitates digital transactions is sobering: "Cash is a bug, jamming the emerging fusion between finance and tech, and given that those are the biggest players in our economic network, they are jointly pulling away from it." Unfortunately, in explaining financial concepts, he often relies upon clumsy analogies that muddy things more than clarify them (global monetary systems are a "nervous system," central banks are a "Giant in the Mountain," and bad posture is a metaphor for "the passive element" of digital payments). And while he makes a solid case for concern, he comes up short on solutions. This one's likely to leave readers wanting.
