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2020-06-08
I have the immense good fortune to live in a town that for now has no cases of COVID-19. (We think so anyway.) Not facing the immediate threat of severe illness, I'm freed to fret over some of the second-order effects of social distancing.
I always like visiting the farmers' market. Everyone enjoys cutting out the middle-man. Australia being rather large, you can go to the supermarket and buy "Australian-grown" food that has been transported thousands of kilometres all the same. Anything that encourages buying seasonal local produce is a win for the environment and the local economy.
Another middle-man who misses out is the financial sector. I take particular pleasure in being able to leave my phone at home, buy my sustenance for the week from local vendors using cash, and leave no digital record whatsoever of my activities. As digital records go it's hard to imagine anything more benign—but especially since it is so benign, what reason is there for them to exist? Whom would that serve? Certainly not me—I already got my food.
Since I have so few opportunities to conduct my business anonymously, I take my chance to do so, even if it draws the bemusement of some friends who take a peculiar pride in being "almost entirely cash-free" for X number of years.
Now, of course, we are trying to limit the spread of coronavirus, and cash is dirty. Some of those same friends have pivoted to pointing out what an arsehole you are if you force a vendor to accept cash right now. And you know, they're probably right. Even so, we don't need to be quite so gleeful about losing the advantages of cash.
When I visited the market last weekend the bum-bags stuffed with coins were mostly gone, replaced with tablets and bluetooth card readers. I took no joy in every little transaction being routed via Visa, my bank, and possibly Paypal as I visited the milk vendor, the potato vendor and the apple vendor. My cash lay useless in my wallet.
I don't see a solution. I'll just have to suck it up. For the first time in my life I wonder if the blockchainers are on to something... but there are so many other issues with that. (The main one that comes to mind is that mainstream adoption of any of the existing coins implies creating stupendous wealth for a bunch of nerds and criminals—for doing what exactly? Not growing food, in any case.)
The sad thing is that I don't think this stigma will go away. Even if a COVID-19 vaccination was invented quickly and we established herd immunity, people are going to be weird about touching other people's stuff for years. That's more than enough time for Visa and Mastercard to suck in the remainder of legitimate commerce. With fewer people using it, governments will find it easier to restrict cash transactions to crack down on black markets and money laundering. That process is already well underway in Australia.
I guess this is our future now. No food for you unless you grow it yourself or run it past the bank first.