The Horror of a Cashless Society
Coffee for Coordinates
I am a cafe snob. I love great coffee, croissants and egg breakfasts. Last summer, living directly in Melbourne CBD or "Downtown Melbourne" for the yanks, I started noticing something on the retail face of the slick residential hi-rise just across the road from where I was staying. There was a newly erected huge croissant stylishly window-wrapped on the building's large modern windows.
As background, I had previously found it a little disappointing that I was in Melbourne of all places and somehow there had been a glut of decent cafes near my place. So it was with great excitement I discovered this opening herald for a specialty cafe.
On opening day there was a long queue but that was okay as I knew I would be getting a great coffee and a perfect if expensive flaky croissant to satisfy my morning delerium. I ordered at the cashier and when asked to pay I pulled out the $30 from my wallet to be immediately told they only accept card payments. What's more they wanted a 2% fee for the transaction.
At first I was shocked - then furious - then I became offended. I only had cash on me - legal tender I expected to be accepted anywhere in Australia. I had just wasted half an hour of my life I will never get back and not only was this cafe rinsing all their customers with overly inflated prices but they were adding a compulsory processing fee on top as a slap in your face!
The only thing I would be tendering that day was a well deserved 1 star review for my trouble and I suggest dear reader you develop a similar policy for businesses that refuse to accept cash. Card only businesses deserve to be shamed and their competitors promoted.
The fact is that this cafe is contributing to a massive social problem globally. The ubiquity of electronic payments now generates an exploitable surveillance infrastructure and must be frustrated by the well meaning people of this world in the name of freedom.
Every time you tap for bread, coffee, medicine or a train ticket your card provider logs your identity, location, time and most importantly your habitual purchases. This information can be used to negatively affect many areas of your life such as your credit score, insurance premiums, or in some cases, result in arbitrary brutality from an abusive violent partner or even get you arrested.
I am aware of the breath of surveillance so I choose to transact in cash. The fact that this cafe prevented me from transacting privately and is coercing me to share my information with people and groups I don't know or trust is a breach of my rights. Many governments are making certain larger cash payments illegal but this is unjust. Just because I use cash to lawfully purchase a car or a computer does not and should not label me a criminal.
Paying privately is a recognised as a human right and there are only two ways people can exercise that right. Paying with cash or privacy preserving cryptocurrency. Here I want to argue why we should be encouraging businesses to accept both cash and privacy preserving cryptocurrency as a means of payment.
When every purchase is tracked the currency is automomy
Every purchase you make either infers or explicitly demonstrates your location, habits, preferences, health conditions, associations, religious practice and personal relationships. This becomes a rich behavioural map for an analyst. Entities with your data will manipulate you.
Your credit card company does not care about you personally. Not only do you pay them subscription fees, late payment charges and transaction fees, but credit card infrastructure companies such as Visa and Mastercard are documented for mining transaction history behaviourally and monetising it by selling private information to data brokers — all without your knowledge or honest consent.
They don't care about you, but marketers, insurance companies, banks and governments care about your data, and they will pay a high price for it. Not only do you not get any of that cash - you are left open to being manipulated into a purchase at best and coercion to self-censorship or even imprisonment at worst.
The unique predictive nature of financial data
Financial data coupled with rich analysis is uniquely positioned to be used against your interests.
Data analysis is insanely predictive. In 2012, a father stormed into a Minneapolis-area Target, furious that his teenage daughter had received mailers full of baby-product coupons and accusing the store of encouraging her to get pregnant. The manager apologized. When he called back a few days later to apologize himself, the father admitted that there had been "some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of" - his daughter was, in fact, pregnant, and Target had figured it out from her shopping habits before he had (1)
This is a documented incident from 14 years ago before modern AI. There are a number of conceivable scenarios that should frigten the pants of any well meaning honest person.
- In fact financial data is uniquely revealing in that it captures intent, association, and timing in a way browsing history doesn't.
- Furthermore it is uniquely durable in that it is usually mandated to be kept for years.
- Lastly it is uniquely under-protected in that it does not usually fall under GDPR style laws in several jurisdictions.
Let's go through some concerning but legitimate scenarios:
| Who | The Data | Ramifications |
|---|---|---|
| Hong Kong Democracy Activists | Donations to protest, bail, and legal-defense funds, transfers to exiled organizers. | Account freezes under the National Security Law. HSBC froze Jimmy Lai's family accounts. The 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund was forced to disband after its funds were frozen. Apple Daily collapsed within weeks of its assets being seized in 2021. |
| Whistleblowers and the journalists they contact | Plane tickets to source cities, hotel bookings near newsrooms, burner-phone purchases, encrypted-service subscriptions | Subpoenas to identify leakers; financial trails increasingly supplement metadata in Espionage Act prosecutions. Chilling effect on source-reporter contact. |
| People seeking abortion across US state lines | Pharmacy charges for mifepristone/misoprostol, clinic copays, gas and hotel along the route, period-tracker subscriptions | Texas SB8-style civil bounties; criminal "aiding and abetting" charges in states like Idaho and Alabama; subpoenas of out-of-state pharmacies and tech firms. The Nebraska case against Jessica Burgess used Facebook DMs but the same playbook applies to financial data. |
| Sex workers | Cash App / Venmo / Zelle receipts, Stripe deposits, OnlyFans payouts | Lifetime de-banking under post-FOSTA/SESTA risk policies (Chase, Wells Fargo, PayPal have all closed accounts en masse), seized balances, public Venmo transactions outing workers to family and employers, evidence in trafficking cases that sweep in consenting adults. |
| Recreational drug users | Data matched Venmo memos, repeat head-shop purchases, ATM withdrawal patterns | Custody disputes, employer background checks, denied insurance, and immigration consequences - cannabis is still a federal bar to green cards even when bought legally in California. |
| Trans people in hostile US states | HRT prescriptions, payments to gender clinics, travel to care states | Texas DFPS investigations of parents of trans kids (2022 onward); out-of-state prosecution of providers under shield-law-piercing statutes; employer and insurer discrimination. |
| LGBTQ+ people in criminalizing countries | Grindr/Hornet subscriptions, donations to LGBTQ+ NGOs, payments at queer venues | Entrapment and prosecution in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Uganda, and elsewhere. Grindr location data was sold commercially and used by a US Catholic publication to out Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill in 2021 - the same data is for sale on anyone. |
| Domestic-abuse survivors | Joint-account charges for therapy, plane tickets, prepaid phones, purchases near a shelter | Abusers track exit attempts in real time, locate safe houses, and intercept the leaving - one of the most under-discussed surveillance harms. |
| Uyghurs and other Chinese minorities | Donations to mosques, religious-text purchases, halal-food spend, calls and remittances abroad | Folded into Xinjiang's IJOP predictive-policing system and used to flag people for "re-education" detention, as documented in the leaked Xinjiang Police Files. |
| People with stigmatized diagnoses (HIV, mental illness, addiction) | Pharmacy spend on PrEP, antipsychotics, methadone; repeat copays at specialty clinics | Rx-data brokers like Milliman IntelliScript and ExamOne sell prescription histories to life, disability, and long-term-care insurers - which GINA does not cover - enabling denials and surcharges. |
| Protesters and bail-fund donors | Donations to legal-defense funds, travel to protest cities, gear purchases | Stop Cop City defendants in Atlanta were indicted under RICO partly on the basis of bail-fund donations and reimbursement Venmos; Canadian truckers' accounts were frozen without court order under the 2022 Emergencies Act; UK's Public Order Act expands financial powers against disruptive protest. |
| Undocumented immigrants | Western Union / MoneyGram remittances, ITIN tax filings, money orders, consular payments | ICE has purchased data from Thomson Reuters CLEAR and LexisNexis Accurint, and obtained sweeping money-transfer records via Arizona's TRAC subpoenas — enabling enforcement against people who never appeared in any government database. |
| Anyone with genetic data on file | 23andMe / Ancestry purchases, fertility-clinic payments, genetic-counseling copays | GINA blocks genetic discrimination in health insurance and employment but not life, disability, or long-term-care insurance. 23andMe's March 2025 bankruptcy put roughly 15 million users' genetic profiles on the auction block. |
| Citizens of de facto social-credit systems | Aggregated spending, gambling, late payments, association with "low-score" contacts | China's Social Credit System has restricted travel for tens of millions. The Western analogue is fragmented but real: credit scoring, insurance algorithms, and platform de-banking (Nigel Farage at Coutts, PayPal's recurring bans of dissident orgs and journalists) produce similar exclusion effects without a unified scorecard. |
After reading this it is tempting to suggest we could use just cash for things that are controversial but there is a vested interest and a coordinated effort from financial infrastructure providers to push everyone to digital payments and in a near cashless society the protections that cash applies for people concerned about financial surveillance based pursecution become moot.
What can we do about this then? I suggest a campaign of shame and assertive intimidation against businesses that fail to accept cash. This should be someething that is simply socially unacceptable. Refuse to carry plastic. Get in a habit of only carrying cash. This means you can only frequent businesses that accept cash. I hold a 1 star review policy for businesses that refuse to accept my business in cash. We need to push back politically aagainst government efforts to limit cash related transactions for second hand goods such as cars or computers.