"Coins are Dropped!"

I came across this is Birmingham New Street Station the other day. These giant floor-posters are all over the concourse and pass under the feet of thousands of rail travelers every day. They advertise the Maestro Card (http://www.maestrocard.com/). Its advertising campaign is a nasty, scheming way of introducing the cashless society: using fear to make us comply. “Coins get dropped”. So if you use the Maestro Card you won’t have to worry about losing your money. They also use Con-formist peer-pressure and the engineered desire to be “cool”: “Cash is so Old Street, man. Think of what your friends will say if they see you paying with notes and coins!”

We’ve had cashless societies before. In the 19th Century many mineworkers were not paid any money, they were given "truck tokens" which could only be spent in special shops owned and run by their mine. In Roman times and in many other ancient societies where slavery was accepted and commonplace they had a similar system. A slave was considered the property of their master and received no wages; however a slave-owner had to provide food and accommodation etc for his slave. This would mean a lot of organizational work and shopping etc, so some just used to save themselves the bother by giving the slave tokens and saying "Go and get whatever you need." The slave could then take the tokens to special warehouses and exchange them for goods of his choice.

If we accept a cashless society or even one where our financial transactions are monitored, then we introduce a global truck system. Without cash we no longer choose what we do with our own money, because we have no control over it; and the banking system alone will choose what we buy, when and where we buy it and even if we buy anything at all. A lot of people pay with plastic today, and occasionally the machine at the till will refuse to accept your card. This is not a problem nowadays because we still have the option of paying with cash. What do we do when there is no cash? There’s nothing we can do! The system has complete control over all our financial activity. In the novel Better Than Life, a book based on the ingenious sci-fi comedy series Red Dwarf, Rimmer punishes a man by taking out a court order that stops him from buying Heinz baked beans; instead he has to put up with inferior supermarket brands! This may sound funny, but many a true word is spoken in jest. In the cashless society just such a punishment will become possible. And if the authorities ever get really pissed off with you then all they have to do is turn off your card. Aaron Russo says just this in his famous interview with Alex Jones (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5932575671781803477&ei=sB8MSa2hBYLi2gKjofi-CQ&q=aaron+russo+interview). What would you do then? Nothing! Unable to buy anything at all, including food, you’d quickly starve to death. This is the kind of world we will live in unless we reject the cashless society.