Inside the war for cashless society, pushed by the likes of Visa and PayPal, which will leave many without bank accounts behind
Long — Banks, governments, credit card companies and fintech evangelists all want us to believe a cashless future is inevitable and good. Tweets: @backlon , @erocdrahs , @justincormack and @adamshostack Tweets: Dieter Bohn / @backlon : This is good: “Cashless society” is a euphemism for the “ask-your-banks-for-permission-to- pay society” http://thelongandshort.org/... @erocdrahs : “Visa must engineer that shame to teach you that what you want is the same as what they want.” http://thelongandshort.org/... Justin Cormack / @justincormack : “These are not, on the whole, real people. They are a weapon in the arsenal of marketing departments” http://thelongandshort.org/... by @Suitpossum Adam Shostack / @adamshostack : ‘Cashless society’ is a euphemism for the “ask-your-banks-for-permission-to- pay society” http://thelongandshort.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This long read is the argumentative capstone of a 2016 arc: two months earlier, The Atlantic mapped how a cashless economy routes every transaction through corporate choke points that enable surveillance and censorship, and a BuzzFeed reporter had just documented how living entirely on digital wallets felt burdensome and alienating in practice. What this piece adds is the demand side of that critique — naming Visa and PayPal as the active evangelists of inevitability.
The framing matters because it predates and predicts the evidence that followed: by late 2024, US researchers were documenting that cashless policies disadvantage low-income people, the homeless, and older adults — exactly the unbanked population this article warned would be left behind.
First-order effects
- As merchants adopt card-only policies under Visa and PayPal's push, consumers without bank accounts lose the ability to pay at all — access to commerce becomes conditional on holding an intermediary-approved account.
- The 'ask-your-banks-for-permission-to-pay' dynamic shifts day-to-day power over transactions from the payer to the network operator, with declined or frozen payments replacing cash as a private, friction-free fallback.
Second-order effects
- Fintech entrants selling near-instantaneous, zero-cost transfers (the disruption wave covered in the related coverage) position themselves as the cheaper rails inside the same permissioned structure — competing on fees while reinforcing the choke-point model rather than escaping it.
- Governments and banks gain a ready-made enforcement layer: once cash use shrinks, sanctions, freezes, and monitoring can be applied through the same corporate intermediaries the Atlantic analysis identified.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, payment infrastructure consolidates into a small set of private permission systems whose inclusion criteria determine economic participation — with the 2024 research suggesting the exclusionary effects are measurable and persistent, not transitional.
- The credibility gap between 'inevitability' narratives and documented harm creates space for alternatives — including cash-mandate regulation and non-permissioned settlement designs — to become policy questions rather than fringe debates.
The trend: The cashless transition is converting payment access from a default of physical currency into a privilege granted by a handful of network operators, with exclusionary effects now empirically documented.