Enter Electronic Currency

In the early seventies, credit cards and ‘instant money’ were considered to be the holy grail that would form the cashless society – however, these cards themselves haven’t actually extinguished society’s reliance on cash money, which is obvious today, as cash still actually exists.

Magnetic stripes on a plastic card have been used since the early 1960′s. Invented by an IBM engineer named Forrest Parry, these cards were the next step towards a cashless society. They allowed for commerce to take place without the physical exchange of money. This was the cutting edge of technology in the early sixties and it still persists to the modern day.

After the magnetic stripes, there is now the relatively new ‘Tap & Go’ payment system. This technology is based on NFC (near field communication) and allows the purchaser to simply tap their credit/debit card on a POS (point of sale) device, allowing a transaction to occur. While an older magnetic stripe card requires the magnetic stripe to pass along the physical reader, the near field communication device only requires the chip to be within a specific range of it, as the transaction occurs in three dimensional space. NFC, which is actually RFID (radio frequency identification), is considered cutting edge technology. All modern day credit cards and passports bear an RFID microchip for NFC transactions with relevant readers.

But these aren’t considered technologies that make up a cashless transaction, are they? They still require something tangible for a transaction to take place. This raises the question that if electronic currency, in the form of a credit card or bank card, couldn’t ween the population off of a physical currency, what could?

State of the Art

If magnetic stripes were once the pinnacle of commerce, and RFID technology still relies on a similar sized piece of plastic, you could consider them the same. Technology today has radically evolved into a completely unknown beast. Check out the ‘Brain Computer Interface’ and come to the realization that the world is ‘moving forward’ quicker than you can imagine. It is a device that fuses the nervous system of a patient with electronics, by implanting a computer chip into the motor cortex of a patient’s brain, and allows signals sent from the brain to interface with a computer. A person can literally move a mouse cursor on the computer screen with thought alone. This is revolutionary for those suffering a condition known as ‘locked in’ syndrome, a debilitating condition which prevents a person from moving or communicating due to near total paralysis. However, the focus is on technology that simply allows for commerce to take place, in a cashless way.

Mobile phones are now being used as virtual wallets. Many of them are RFID enabled through NFC and current testing is taking place in Australia to allow them to be used in place of familiar plastic cards. Of course this technology is going to be accepted en mass, but will they lead the world to a cash free environment?

Cashless society. A world without cash. It makes sense, we are nearly there if you consider that Internet transactions are basically ‘cashless’. Yet we are still bound to carrying something physical aren’t we? Credit cards need wallets, Internet transactions need credit cards. In the late seventies, credit cards didn’t create the cashless society. If credit cards that utilize NFC instead of magnetic stripes don’t constitute a cashless society, and mobile phones are based on the exact same technology, then the only thing left would be something totally intangible.

Playing with Fire

Would Nazi Germany have been a cashless society? “Nazi Germany would have been a cashless society, because they were already using technical means to deprive people of their cash. It’s one thing to confiscate cash, its another thing to prohibit the transmission of cash or the transactions of cash or currency of value based upon electronic means.” Edwin continues.

“Now, you have heard of the credit society where people are enabled to get credit cards and buy shoes and things at the store based on a credit card, but if your credit goes bad you can’t use your credit card. But even if your credit goes bad, you can still take a five dollar bill, go into the grocery store and buy yourself some bread and some milk.

“Under the cashless society, with one click, you can be DE-listed from having a transaction. So while you can call it the cashless society, or corporate America or the global corporations can call it a cashless society.. so it’s convenient.. so we’re not burdened with dollar bills and things. There’s a dark side to that. This is Promethean. This is a great convenience and also a great avenue to individual destruction. A great avenue toward the confiscation, not of money, but of personal liberty.

“Imagine what would happen if the government in Syria, North Korea, China, Libya, certain parts of the United States and maybe northern Ireland, whatever society you wish to look at, decides that it can push a button a stop somebody from having a transaction. They can already push a button and stop your master card in a moment’s notice, but can they actually push a button and stop you from buying bread? That’s what the cashless society will do. “

“So once you can establish that modality, everything else flows from that. First we invent the gun, then we invent what will do with the gun. Do we defend? Do we hunt for food? Do we murder? Do we mass murder? Do we have target practice? Do we put food on the table?” he says.

You may have seen an advertisement on behalf of IBM being played on television (above). This ad, exhibiting IBM’s vision of the future market, displays a man walking through a modern day shopping complex slyly packing groceries under his jacket. This continues through the store as he eventually gets to the exit of the store. Throughout the duration of the man’s time in the store there is a security guard closely watching, and as he is exiting, he passes through what we can now refer to as an RFID portal. Once the man passes through this portal, a scanning action takes place, as you would expect an item to be passed over a bar code scanner. A receipt is then spat out detailing every item that the man has stuffed under his jacket, and accordingly whatever he has on him, has been charged to his account. Transaction complete. This is the future market.

What is specified technologically that could differentiate between the man having a NFC enabled smart phone or an implantable RFID microchip? Absolutely nothing! This is the future of e-Business according to IBM.

While supermarket chains like Woolworths offer a customer with the option of self-checkout, it could only be a matter of time until they offer the intangible commercial portal that would enable a consumer to walk through with a packed shopping trolley filled with RFID tagged products, for a truly ‘cash free’ experience.

Cashless Society. There are only two options before us, for a truly cashless society to exist. One involves our mobile phones incorporating every piece of data usually stored on plastic cards in our wallets – Medicare, licenses, credit and bank cards, etc. Or an implantable RFID microchip.

Identification is only Step One

What difference is there, technologically, to what is available today and what was available to the Nazi regime? “The speed is a major difference, what took Hitler repeat efforts with IBM cards, program after program, to register the Jews, to exclude them from society, to confiscate their assets, the fourth area was ghettoization, the fifth is deportation, the sixth is extermination” explains Edwin.

“That long process can now be done in a moments notice with a click of a button.”

“And further than that, in the case of the Nazi, people like my father were able to survive the Nazi onslaught because he had blond hair. Other people were not able to survive because they were required to wear a yellow star, or had an ID card. And anyone who didn’t have a yellow star or an ID card, who needed to have one, could be shot. Now what was the purpose of the yellow star? The yellow star was to warn people, theres a Jew there, or this man could not sit on that bench, or this man could not walk into that store, these are Jews.”

“Now imagine if nobody needs a yellow star, and nobody needs blond or brown hair. And everybody can be identified for their value, for their advocacy, for their enemy character, for their adversary nature. Based up some arbitrarily decided feature. Are they Jews? Are they young protesters in Iran? Are they Wiggers? Are they Tutsi’s? Are they Hutu’s? Are they the tribe of Gaddafa? Are they from the tribe of eastern Libya? Western Libya?”.

“Now with the cashless society can you not only turn of the switch of credit, not only can you turn off the Internet of communication, you can actually prohibit people from using the very means that civilization pioneered several thousand years ago that people used to rise above war,” Edwin continues, “That was cash”.

To hear the interview:
http://www.binarydissent.com/audio/playing_with_fire.mp3

Taken from an article — http://binarydissent.com/?p=2118