Cloud Money

Cloud Money by Brett Scott
Vintage Publishing, July 2023, 978-1-5291-1148-4

A few weeks back, I had a pint in my local bar, the first time I’d been there for a while. For a period in the 1980s, along with what seemed like everyone I knew, I spent almost every Thursday, Friday and Saturday there. Those were the days when you could get spectacularly drunk of an evening for £10. Tragically, I still can.

The pub underwent a refurbishment about 20 years ago but most of the changes are superficial: walls no longer stained by decades of tobacco smoke, merely painted to look like they have, wine now served as an alternative to beer, gone are the sticky carpets, gone are the dead spider plants, gone is the old toilet door with THE SMITHS hand engraved by penknife on it.

Gone too is Tommy, dear old Tommy. He used to drink there long before the revamp, in fact, long before they bothered to clean the toilets. Tommy's favourite tipple was rum & peppermint, something he attributed to his days in the Royal Navy. It's only now that I write these words that it crosses my mind that his love of rum & pep may have been completely unrelated to his naval career. Indeed, for all I know the nearest he got to a ship might have been a pleasure cruise to Inchcolm Island. But he talked a good - if surreal - game: his routine greeting to anyone who approached was to feign a stagger, grab hold of the bar and ask who was steering the ship.

However, one fundamental change is that the default method of payment in what is still essentially a fairly basic - if now slightly spruced up - local bar, is electronic. My beer was presented to me together with a digital card reader. Back in the 1980s I have a memory of cashing the occasional cheque (sheer laziness on my part, there was an ATM about two minutes’ walk away). But it was strictly cash only, no beer on tick, and the concept of electronic payments was the stuff of - admittedly dull - science fiction. However, in recent years, and especially since the pandemic, I’ve become used to paying for everything by card, to the extent that I can’t remember the last time I carried cash at all.

Brett Scott’s book Cloud Money explores the rise of the card payment industry. He gives a history of money and banking, set out in very readable terms, before moving on to the evolution of digital money. Big finance has been super successful in persuading us all of the convenience of digital money and has managed to convince us that we are choosing to use cards rather than cash. One of many examples which should concern us is the Better Than Cash Alliance, part of the UN Capital Development Fund, which promotes the establishment of digital payments over cash in under-developed countries. This institution is funded by - among others - Citigroup, Mastercard and Visa, who clearly have a vested interest in doing so.

Scott points out that cash was - and still is - also convenient, designed to be so, and the reality is that we are being coerced into switching to cards by the banks because it benefits them. Not only that but there is a price to pay: the data in the form of digital footprints we give to the banks every time we make a payment.

Despite Scott’s plain English guide, I still don’t understand what cryptocurrency is all about but I suspect, if they’re being honest, very few people do. A minor quibble in an otherwise excellent and timely book.

The book’s subtitle is “Why the war on cash endangers our freedom”, a grandiose claim but I can see where Scott is coming from. My big take is to start withdrawing cash from my bank account because at some point a banking system reliant on electricity will go down and “cash doesn’t crash.”