Everything you wanted to know about banks, fintech companies and crypto currencies, but were too afraid to ask. Brett Scott is a former banking insider turned campaigner. What he campaigns for is quite simple – and surprising. His book is called Cloudmoney, but could more accurately be titled "In Praise of Cash". We are all now well versed in concepts like “big data” and “surveillance capitalism”, where our every click online is collected and owned by big corporations. But we tend to forget that every tap we make with our credit card, every online purchase, is recorded and kept. Banks and increasingly, fintech companies like PayPal and Amazon, have extraordinary power, which is becoming more and more concentrated. How to fight this concentration of power? The answer lies in cash. Cash is anonymous and offline. Every cash transaction chips away at the powers of fintech companies. To pay in cash can be considered almost a revolutionary act. As fintech companies and banks consolidate their power and control over currencies, they try at every step to veer us away from cash transactions. Amazon has even campaigned against laws that would require retailers to accept cash. That is a simple summation of Cloudmoney. Brett Scott is an excellent explainer of the arcane world of money and finance. He starts with a brief history of exchange systems, through to banking and state issued money, and finishes with the mind boggling world of crypto currencies. The latter, with their ability to remain anonymous, offer some alternative to evading the tentacles of the fintech behemoth. However, Scott believes crypto is a complicated story, one yet to be fully played out. A excellent primer on the how money systems work, and how they have accrued too much power in the digital age. Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets, by Brett Scott. Published by Jonathan Cape. $35 Review by Chris Saliba Comments are closed.
|
AuthorNorth Melbourne Books Categories
All
Archives
March 2024
|