Our payments are becoming very dependent on Apple Pay

the Dutch bank warns against the disappearance of cash† The bank is concerned. First she speaks maternally about people who do not keep up with modern times and who find it difficult to pay digitally. “Think of some elderly or illiterate people.”

Yes, yes, the elderly and the illiterate, you mutter, very important, they must be protected, we’re going to do it. But luckily we are not old and not illiterate ourselves, so let us just pay via a computer program on the smartphone. It’s with illiteracy just like with the rest of the trouble we read about in the paper: Gott sei Dank nicht bei uns†

But then the bank starts talking about it internet of things and predicts that we will have to deal with this ‘in the slightly longer term’. You actually know it too. We walk around in a hyper-connected world where information sources talk to each other and then make independent decisions. Recently, those sources can initiate payments on their own, based on real-time data analysis. De Nederlandsche Bank puts it a little more simply. “For example, your refrigerator can order and pay for products that are almost empty.”

Useful. The Internet of Things doesn’t just pay, it orders. It decides. Your coffee machine places a new order for Nespresso cups and apparently knows whether your household can afford it financially and morally. The thermostat keeps track of the newspaper and follows the development in Ukraine to be able to turn down the heating independently. The refrigerator can be updated about the climate.

The world is changing drastically. I read the lines of Rodaan Al Galidi somewhere. “The world is/ fragile/ like a birthday cake for a three-year-old.” There is unpredictability in the air, instability and enigma. It is therefore understandable that humanity has a penchant for software that helps to process information and simplify operations. Who wants to walk around with 10 and 20 cent coins in this fast-paced world? If you can also pay contactless?

The Dutch Central Bank warns reluctantly. It’s not that she disapproves of the new possibilities, on the contrary, she is cautiously delighted with it. But as guardian of public money, she also points out the disadvantages of all that private money that is now flowing through the world. The digital euros in your banking app are issued by your own bank and that bank is a commercial party, she writes. Although you can exchange private euros for public euros, the digital infrastructure of the economy is in private hands. Is that always wise?

Maybe not, now that the world is changing. After all, the European payment system becomes very dependent on large companies outside Europe. card companies. Tech giants. Apple Pay. Google Pay. Major cloud providers that providing ICT services to the financial sector† If you transfer a tenner to each other, there is a gigantic commercial non-European electronic infrastructure behind it, accounts, storage, energy-guzzling data centers in the poor polder.

Now that even beggars walk around with card readers and there are no more ATMs to be found anywhere, it is apparently high time for De Nederlandsche Bank to advocate for cash. The digibes need to be protected, she begins carefully. Yes, do you think bored, the digibites are vulnerable, I’ll put on a mouth cap if I encounter one. But then you really have grossly overestimated your own literacy, because with the disappearance of cash, more changes than you realize.

Not only does the public money disappear, the money disappears in the first place. Instead of money, there is now financial information. It can make connections with other information, which provides value for others, and that quickly costs you more. If you pay by card, you give away personal and transaction details. If you pay via facial recognition on your phone, you also give biometric data as a gift. You pay extra with a claim of ten public euros on De Nederlandsche Bank and a lot of valuable information.

The Nederlandsche Bank is a polite institution. She blames the disappearance of cash on the commercial parties and on government policy. What she dares not say is that it is the social bird-swarming behavior of consumers who find a cashless society useful and thus serve the big companies like useful idiots. Elderly vulnerable? We are all vulnerable. The world is vulnerable. It can’t hurt to look after yourself a bit, because you are more illiterate and more digital than you think.