Brett Scott
@Suitpossum
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Exploring altered states of monetary consciousness. Cloudmoney now out in 9 languages
Berlin via South Africa
Joined April 2011
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Cloudmoney is described by Yanis Varoufakis as 'wonderfully revolutionary' and by the Financial Times as a 'compelling argument against the contactless society'.
I'm excited to announce that the UK paperback is coming in a couple weeks. Pre-order here
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"Cashless society is not in your interest. It is in the interest of banks and payments companies. Their job is to make you believe that it is in your interest too, and they are succeeding in doing that." My latest article in
@guardianopinion
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With Bitcoin's rising price I get many people asking me my opinion about it: Here are nine tips
1) Don't take advice about Bitcoin from those with a vested interest in seeing its price rise. That's like listening to CDO dealer in 2006. When prices go up, critical thought go down
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It's with deep joy that I present my new book to the world today. Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets.
What's it about? Cards seem convenient and crypto seems cool, but the book lays out a contrarian argument for why cash is more crucial than ever (1/20)
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The world is not data. The world is soil, sun, water, bodies, communities, sweat & oil. Data is an echo of these. It is not 'the new oil'
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I've heard a lot of people claim that Bitcoin is somehow a unique weapon to protect yourself from inflation. The current
#cryptocrash
should make you doubt that, but I used to work in 'inflation hedging', so let me offer a perspective to help you decide for yourself. Thread 1/15
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For all of ya gloating about the
#Bitcoin
price, it's only got to this point because some of us actually used it to buy things in the real world in the past. Here's my $850 pizza, $160 bondage tape & $1688 Fastmail subscription from a while ago. Show me your receipts, speculators
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Before getting shocked that money is 'created from thin air', note that all promises, contracts, property rights and companies are created from thin air. 'Thin air' just means 'legal structures', which means the whole of global capitalism is based on thin air
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Saying that 'my data' is 'my property' is like saying a CIA intelligence file on me is my property. I do not want to 'own' all that data, produced by others, about myself. I just want unaccountable institutions to stop producing it
Facebook admitted this week that they track your location even when you’ve turned off location tracking — and then sell that data to advertisers.
Your data is your property. Tech companies should absolutely not be allowed to use it without your permission.
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It's good to see people getting more critical about cashless society, but often their main concern is about governments doing surveillance of our digital payments. In reality, there are at least 9 other reasons to fight cashless society, all of which are just as important (1/10)
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To anyone currently getting wealthier due to a rise in price of any speculative non-productive asset they hold, you should dwell on these words by John Stuart Mill. When you conceive of money 'wealth' as 'ability to control other people's labour', the world becomes clearer
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Crypto logic 101:
Bitcoin is worth holding onto because it will become worth more
Why will it be worth more?
Because more people will start using it
But aren't they just holding it, rather than using it?
Yeah, but eventually we'll use it
What for?
To cash out into US dollars
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I'm going to Sweden today to talk about the dangers of cashlessness
Also, my bank just messaged to say they cancelled my card because fraudsters got my details
I'll be landing with a little stash of cash and no card in the world's most anti-cash country. Going to be fun!
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9) Ten years ago Bitcoin was highly important in spurring creativity, but now it's largely settled for being a means to make speculative investors rich, which is fine, but not deeply profound. If you're interested in crypto as a way to change the world, look beyond Bitcoin
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There's a little glitch in the romantic tales told about a future cashless society: As soon as
#Visa
goes down, the economy grinds to a halt. We're seeing a little preview right now
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My landlord: I'm raising the rent by 10%
Me: Why?
Landlord: Because the market is going up
Me: Stop talking about yourself in the third person. You are the market going up
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If bank payments are called 'cashless', we should start calling cash payments 'bankless'
Example: "I'd like to pay bankless please"
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It sucks that our default way of describing the economy is as a giant competition between independent people, rather than as a large-scale collaboration between interdependent people
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The conflict is not 'AI vs. Humans'. The conflict is 'Humans who control AI infrastructures vs. Humans who don't'
#houseofbb
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Last year I had the privilege of watching the Dutch artist Carlijn Kingma & investigative journalist
@mrtbollen
literally sketch out the global financial system in incredible detail...
(1/7)
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A pro-cash position is anti-corporate and anti-privatisation, because 'cashless' infrastructure is corporate and the digital money moved within it is privately issued by the banking sector.
Why then do I often seem to get more support from the far-right than the left? (1/9)
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There is no such thing as a 'digital economy'. There are only real physical people using real physical resources in real physical geographies, co-coordinating themselves via digital communications technologies dependent upon real physical infrastructure
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Cash is money outside the bank. If you deposit it, the bank issues you a promise saying you can get it back. You redeem this promise and exit their systems at the ATM. Thus, the banks' attempts to shut down the ATM infrastructure is an attempt to prevent you ever exiting
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I've often heard people say "I don't understand the finance sector because I'm no good at maths'. Finance, though, is not a mathematical science. It's an ancient political artform of convincing people with power to grant money for activities now, in exchange for benefits later
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Money does not 'store value', because value resides in people and ecological systems. Money might mediate access to that value, but can never hold it
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Sometimes it seems like I'm a little skeptical about Bitcoin. Yes I am. Here's why: I've never bought Bitcoin. I've only earned it. I've actually earned quite a bit of it, but never hoarded it and rather only spent it. My aim was to increase circulation to see if it could...
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Anyone who still believes Bitcoin is a 'monetary system' will have to accept that it suffered from 44% 'hyper-inflation' in the last ten days
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2) Bitcoin is fascinating from a tech perspective, but don't fall for the rhetoric of monetary revolution. I was among the early users of Bitcoin & actually tried to use it as 'money', but it's not a monetary system. It's a system of cyber-collectibles, priced in dollars
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People who use cash are not 'left behind', waiting to be upgraded to a better system. They are choosing to use a privacy-preserving, resilient form of payment that survives when the panopticon bank payments system goes down
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Elevators seem convenient, but when there's a fire in a skyscraper we bolt for the emergency stairs
Your payments app seems convenient, but when the banking sector is on fire we bolt for the cash system
A stairless society is a bad idea. So is a cashless one
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Airports are a perfect microcosm of our modern economy: State security checkpoints guide you to patronising palaces of corporate consumerism
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For those trying to understand the implications of 'cashless society': The battle is not "cash vs. card" or "cash vs. pin" or "cash vs. mobile". It's cash vs. corporate datacentres
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The idea that a strong economy *necessarily* equates to a good society is dogma that needs to be challenged. An economically powerful country might be full of people who are neurotic, isolated, exhausted & directionless
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Facebook goes down for five hours and I barely notice. Whatsapp goes down and maybe I notice a bit more. But if Visa & Mastercard servers go down for five hours in a world without cash, society will not just notice, but completely seize up
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My family is from Zimbabwe & I've been there during hyperinflation. But let me tell you, I'd far rather have Zimbabweans in charge of their own monetary system than to defer it to the oligopoly of bouji Facebook-led Silicon Valley tech-bros that call themselves
#Libra
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Within capitalist systems, labour-saving tech is never used to increase our leisure time. It's used to increase the time available for more production. This is why our lives get ever more frenetic and busy as we get ever more 'convenient' technology. Convenience is a BS narrative
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It often feels like Economics is fixated on analysing human choice, but never on analysing who gets to set the menus, or whether people have any choice but to choose from them
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It's kinda shocking how many economists still think banks 'lend out' deposits, rather than recognising that what we call 'bank lending' is the act of banks *creating deposits*, and that those 'deposits' are - in reality - digital casino chips
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Thinking that billionaires earn money through their own hard labour is like thinking that beekeepers - rather than bees - produce honey
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'Cashless' establishments *force* you to use card payment, which economists read as a rise in ‘demand’ for card payments, an interpretation that other institutions will use to justify why they too will ‘go cashless’, an action which in turn will coercively increase 'demand'
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'Cashlessness' is not progress. It is the banking and tech oligopoly seeping into those parts of society it has not yet swallowed
Unfortunately, because corporate enclosure is defined as 'progress' in our society, cash is defined as 'standing in the way of progress'
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The anthropologist in an economist world: my tribute to David Graeber
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Things I wish hardline crypto people would learn: there's a long history of critique of the financial system. You're not the first, and the mere fact that you've joined the criticism queue doesn't mean your understanding of the situation, or your solutions, are the best.
#sigh
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An ancient subsistence farmer was comparatively self-sufficient, yet deeply embedded in a community. We, though, cannot survive a week on what we personally produce (unless you grow your own food), and yet insist on maintaining a pretence of being autonomous individuals
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The phrase 'robots take your job' is plain incorrect. What happens is that your boss pays your salary instead to the employees, managers and shareholders of a technology vendor or technology services company. 'Robots take your job' really means 'tech company takes your job'
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I officially became a UK citizen today, alongside my new friends Andreas from Greece and Karima from Saudi Arabia
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One of the biggest conceptual errors people make when thinking about money is to imagine that it ‘stores value’. Value is stored in people and our ecological systems. Money merely reassigns claims upon that
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When a company says they're 'going cashless', they're actually saying: 'to do business with us, you're also going to have to do business with banks, payments companies and big tech'. There's nothing progressive about this future they're pushing us to enter
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Speculation: a popular game in which people waste electricity in order to reassign money between each other without producing anything except emotions & cringy stock photography
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7) The rising price of Bitcoin does not signal its 'success'. It just means that another cycle of media-driven speculation has kicked in. The US dollar doesn't notice Bitcoin any more than it notices any other object priced in dollars, whether that be motorbikes or lipstick
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Visa works with the entire banking sector, but they – along with Paypal and Mastercard – are also major stakeholders in Facebook’s Libra payments project, which itself plugs into the banking system. These are not ‘competitors’. They are a quasi-cooperative oligopoly
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10 years ago I had two job interviews with the Lehman Brothers hedge fund division. I sat on the 35th floor while the interviewer said "don't believe the stories you hear in the press about us, everything is fine"
#10yearson
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3) By all means pass your money to a seller of these collectibles, but don't do so under the illusion that you're engaging in rebellion, or that you're doing prudent investment. You're doing what you're doing, which is buying a collectible from someone who is taking your money
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5) In fact, its only feature is its logo and the language that surrounds it. Without that the tokens are basically just blank digital objects, the digital equivalent of passing around fragments of limited edition clear glass beads
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If everyone quit their job & day-traded full time, nothing would be produced & the stock-market would collapse. By definition, speculation requires production if speculators are to make gains. Thus, speculation can only ever offer 'financial freedom' to a small sliver of society
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Sometimes people think I'm being conspiratorial when I say 'banks are pushing for a cashless society', but it's not like they're hiding it...
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Facebook's
#Libra
is a 'currency' in the same way that PayPal is a 'currency'. In other words, it's a tertiary layer built on top of the underlying banking and central banking system
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Marxist theory taught via beekeeping: Beekeeper sets up beehive. Bees make all the honey, but keeper extracts surplus, leaving just enough for bees to survive. Bees rebel, sting keeper, socialise the hive, live in swarm harmony, keep surplus, get drunk on mead, work less
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6) It's precisely this featurelessness that leads to the volatile price swings. The token is essentially hollow, which means there's no real-world tethering. Even CDOs were eventually 'anchored' to the real economy, but Bitcoin is largely driven by media-induced network effects
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4) Unlike many other collectibles, Bitcoin has no actual features, other than the fact that it can be moved around. It has a highly innovative issuance & movement mechanism, but that's somewhat meaningless if the thing being issued and moved is featureless
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We have plenty of smart people building smart technology. But what we really need is empathetic people building empathetic technology
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'Financial inclusion' is a positive spin put on 'the spread of large-scale financial institutions into parts of society they previously avoided'. There's no point talking about inclusion without also talking about the power dynamics of the thing people are being included into
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When it comes to money, we experience the world as squirrels. We see money as a mysterious acorn that we must get from other squirrels
By contrast, the state experiences the world like an oak tree. It issues the acorns & wants squirrels to take them to spread the forest (1/13)
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Blockchain startups may lead the world in tech, but they're in the dark ages in terms of gender equality. Show me a team with even 10% women
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In a crisis, each person has 3 inner personas:
Statist: "Authorities must sort this"
Individualist Libertarian: "Back off! Save yourself! To the bunker!"
Communitarian Anarchist: "Let's form mutual aid networks to help each other"
Let's nurture the 3rd. It's good for the soul
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'Decentralization' originally meant "replacing a centrally-controlled large-scale infrastructure with locally-controlled small-scale infrastructures". The blockchain community, on the other hand, uses the term to mean "a large-scale infrastructure controlled by nobody"
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Last night we pinned up '33 Theses for an Economics Reformation' to the doors of London School of Economics with
@RethinkEcon
. Fiery sermons delivered by
@ProfSteveKeen
,
@KateRaworth
,
@AndrewSimms_uk
and
@MazzucatoM
. See here
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Hi everyone, I started a new Youtube channel. I'll be covering cash, monetary systems, global finance, alternative currency projects, economic activism, tech politics and crypto. Subscribe here🙏
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Understanding of modern money is jammed by a noun-verb confusion. Here's why:
In English, the verb 'deposit' typically creates a noun of the same name: "the flood deposited sand in the river and now there's a sand deposit in the river"
Never apply this to money! (1/9)
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8) The key difference with motorbikes or lipstick, however, is that we have intuitive ways of working out if their price is reasonable or not, by comparison to the prices of other goods. Given the Bitcoin is a featureless object, it escapes this same scrutiny
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When a bank creates money it doesn't issue the money to itself. It issues it as an asset to *somebody else*, and experiences that as a *liability*. When a Bitcoin miner creates new tokens, by contrast, they issue those *to themselves* as an asset. There's no liability side
1/7
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Every object in the world was once in the form of forests, soil, rocks, gas & creatures. Economic production & growth - in general - is the process of humans converting the natural world we emerged within into a pile of processed artifacts, many sitting unused in basements
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Call me old-fashioned, but I think it sucks that in a cashless society Visa & Mastercard execs will extract fees from homeless people asking for donations, kids selling lemonade and buskers who bring good vibes to our streets
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Credit is essentially free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can't. This is how debt amplifies & entrenches inequality
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I watched the Berlin premiere of Finding the Money and it was EPIC. It follows
@StephanieKelton
as she battles conventional wisdom
I actually felt kinda sorry for the mainstream economists who appear in it. Jeez, they really humiliate themselves
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Fixating on day-to-day political and economic news is like fixating on reports of tremors and earthquakes without understanding the underlying dynamics of plate tectonics. You can spend an entire life like this, distracted by surface drama
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There is no such thing as 'market failure'. There's just markets doing what they actually do. The entire concept of the 'failure' is predicated on the unrealistic assumption that the market was *supposed* to acheive something different
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Earthworms are infinitely more vital to our life on earth than hedge funds. They get paid nothing, and hedge fund managers get paid everything. There is no correlation between income and usefulness
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Cash is the last publicly-provided money we have. The push for Cashless Society is a push for complete money privitisation
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The exhilirating dynamism of late stage capitalism, in which the system sends bold entrepreneurs out to solve the problems created by previous entrepreneurs in order to bring forth newly profitable problems for future entrepreneurs to solve. Bravo!
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Being 'privileged' doesn't mean you don't face struggles, don't work hard, or that you have everything handed to you. What it means is that you face relatively fewer struggles than someone else & thus have a greater *chance* of your hard work actually translating into success
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Crypto & blockchain has fallen victim to many standard afflictions of the modern world - fraud, hype, speculation etc - but by far the most troubling is that it has fallen victim to a relentless attack of banal corporate stock photography
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If you want to study the economy, consider studying anthropology, sociology, geography, law, politics, psychology, and even biology and physics
If you want to study a very narrow method for analysing very narrow aspects of the economy, consider studying economics, maths & stats
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Finally, bear in mind that the industry that promotes Bitcoin has to find every possible marketing strategy to push up its price. This means they engage in inflation fearmongering to create buying pressure for BTC, but without offering you advice on other options. Pls be careful.
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Economist: markets created money
Anthropologist: money created markets
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There's no 'sharing economy' in an Uber interaction. You pay a corporation to send a driver to you. They then pay the driver a variable wage
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Last night in Berlin we gathered to test out the new version of Commonspoly, a version of Monopoly in which you have to collaborate. Check it out here
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Finally, experiment with cryptocurrency by all means, but stop relying on shallow straw-man critiques of the global financial system given by people who don't actually care about changing it. Go beyond BTC & help build something that actually is more than a speculative object
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Have you ever heard people claim that barter led to money systems? If so, would you like to understand why this is a super dodgy story?
To help you out I wrote a handy guide to understanding this 'myth of barter'. Check it out!
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It's often said that we need to teach people 'financial literacy'. But most financial literacy initiatives aim to teach people to read the surface-level rules of the existing system, rather than to write the deep rules of a different one
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Anyone who still believes in that idea of the 'state versus the market' needs to look themselves in the mirror, and ask 'Do powerful global megacorporations come from weak states?'
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Editor: "Please add a description of Bitcoin to your article"
Me: "A system for arduously writing out numbers & then reassigning them between people who brand them as 'coins' whilst buying & selling them for money"
Editor: "Um, how about 'a new digital money system'?"
Me: "No"
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Every year I remind myself that Wikipedia could have turned itself into a standard tech Evilcorp, but didn't, despite being one of the world's most visited sites. That takes character, and that's why I donate. Please do so too
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For those who believe that being pro-cash is a fringe position, note that after a cashless society debate yesterday, 73% of the hundreds of policymakers, economists and officials at the Brussels Economic Forum ended up voting against the idea that it's beneficial
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"We're building an infrastructure of surveillance authoritarianism merely to get people to click on adds"
@Zeynep
on the personalised persuasion architecture being built by digital corporations
#machinelearning
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Much like the four-day week is better described as the three-day weekend, the Degrowth movement should focus on what it is positively offering, and call itself the Re-Leisure Movement
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I've been shortlisted for the Ethics & Trust in Finance Prize (formerly Robin Cosgrove Prize) for my paper on Hardcoding Ethics into Fintech. See all shortlisted candidates here
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The class dynamics of cashless society in a single image
Cafe Nero bosses: "We only work with Big Fintech, and you should too"
Cafe Nero workers: "We appreciate your small change"
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