by David Wolman
Profound change to the monetary system is part of that deception. Even though the U.S. dollar is one of the most valued currencies in the world, its apparent worthlessness, combined with our ever-more-digitized financial lives, is only paving the way for the end of days. “After there is no more cash, it will be very clear that we are on our way,” Guest says, meaning on our way to Armageddon.
The Guidestone instruction that most speaks to the puzzle of money, he continues, is this one: “Balance personal rights with social duties.” The “closed economic system” will mean a socialized economy—there will be no personal rights to balance. “Like I said, there are advantages to electronic money, no doubt. But it will be used by the Beast for total control.”
“If you trust in the Lord, there is no need to be afraid. If you aren’t going to believe,” he says, staring up at the capstone, “as it says in the Gospel of Luke, ‘Men’s hearts will fail them for fear.’”
“Jeee-zus,” I mutter, because this is just a thing I sometimes say—almost like an automatic exhale—when I hear a disturbing idea. This time I’m regretting it before the second syllable has escaped my lips. Guest doesn’t hear me, though, or politely pretends not to.
A few minutes later, we hop back in the car to drive back to Bowman.
So many people think the end of cash is a foregone conclusion. Yet if you suggest that maybe we should hurry up and get on with it, that it might even be a good thing, you will be accused of kowtowing to Bank of America, lacking patriotism, trampling on some kind of sacrosanct institution, and rolling out the red carpet for Satan. Why?
Perhaps it starts with the misperception that cash is holier than thou.
CHAPTER 2
The Messenger
Money, so diabolically simple.
—FRANK HERBERT, THE WHITE PLAGUE
An hour into my flight to London for the annual Digital Money Forum, the flight attendants wheel their carts full of duty-free items down the aisles. The Saudi Arabian man sitting next to me uses his American Express card to buy his wife a silver necklace with a heart-shaped pendent. Should anyone else wish to make a purchase, they too will need plastic.
The cashless cabin policy emerged after reports that flight attendants were skimming off the top—“leakage,” the industry reps called it. But the practice also took effect around the same time swine flu mania was sweeping the globe. Residents of Asia donned face shields, while everyone in Europe and North America practiced sneezing into their elbows and scowling at anyone in public who let loose an unguarded cough.
Yet even before H1N1 became part of the vernacular, cash transactions on planes caused me considerable dismay. It wasn’t that the flight crew had to keep multilinear equations in their heads to track who in which row was owed what. No, what bugged me about cash in the cabin was its proximity to my food and drink. I would watch flight attendants’ hands extend over seats to take a few bucks, sort them, and then add them to the wad of bills in their apron pockets. With those same green-backed fingers, they would hold cups by the rim, deposit lemon slices, and relay coffee stirrers. Then it was back to the cash again, this time received from the grubby hands of a passenger, like the guy on my flight in 24B who’s wearing a tank-top and sitting with his arms folded behind his head for maximum armpit exposure.
Cash is filthy. Money may be a marvelous technology enabling life as we know it, but no amount of grandiose talk will change its microbe-infested reality. Aside from handshakes, commonly breathed air, and mutually held handrails on busses and subways, transacting in cash is one of the top ways in which we go about touching one another, or touching one another’s more communicable goodies.
In the science-fiction novel The White Plague by Dune author Frank Herbert, a molecular biologist decides to exact revenge for his family’s murder by poisoning paper money and distributing it in countries where the bad guys in the story live. The contamination spreads out of control and becomes a global plague. At one point, the U.S. president declares: “We’ve decontaminated and replaced the money to the point where we can start lifting the quarantine on the banks.” Unfortunately, the plan falters.1
Banknotes and coins harbor all kinds of bugs.2 Traces of the bacteria staphylococcus have been detected on 94 percent of all U.S. dollar bills.3 In 2003, hysteria in China that banknotes could spread the SARS virus proved to be unfounded, but the Bank of China still decided that any bills it received would be held for twenty-four hours—the estimated lifespan of the virus—before being released back into the ocean of circulation. And Swiss researchers have found that moderate concentrations of flu virus could survive on banknotes for up to three days. When they tested the same bugs “in the presence of respiratory mucus,” which sounds like a really fun experiment, they determined that the virus lived for up to seventeen days. “The unexpected stability of influenza virus in this nonbiological environment,” wrote the scientists, “suggests that unusual environmental contamination should be considered in the setting of pandemic preparedness.”4 Could circulating banknotes help spread a future plague?
When I forwarded that study to a friend at the Centers for Disease Control, she was unimpressed. “Are the researchers sucking on banknotes or inserting them in their noses?” she asked. Without a perfect storm of transmission conditions—someone sneezes on a banknote, doesn’t allow it to dry, stores it someplace dark and humid, doesn’t rub it on other material like a leather wallet or pants pocket—maybe, and only maybe, enough viral particles could survive to infect the next person handling those bills. Unless people start using greenbacks as handkerchiefs, she told me, whatever germs do reside on cash or coins should die a quick death.b5 That was reassuring, yet a friend who recently returned from Africa was kind enough to inform me that people in some of the more dangerous parts of the continent store cash in their underwear. As smart as my contact at the CDC might be, I suspect that when assuring me of cash’s harmlessness, not even she was thinking of banknotes stored in skivvies.
Germs aren’t the only stowaways on your cash. A chemical study from a couple of years ago found that most banknotes sampled from eighteen different U.S. cities tested positive for cocaine residue. Is cash so turbo liquid in its movement within the economy that most of it eventually makes it into the nostrils of cokeheads? No. When a bill-counting machine at a bank or casino gets contaminated by even a single note, that cocaine residue can then show up on a huge number of bills subsequently run through the same machine.6 (Interestingly, the most coke-ified bills in the country were found in Washington, D.C., while the fewest were found in Salt Lake City.) Another recent study found that 99 percent of England’s paper money was contaminated with cocaine, an indicator to the good people of Britain that the Bank of England must have bought its bill counters from none other than the late Pablo Escobar.
My distaste for cash has intensified of late because of my efforts to avoid it. I’ve been clean for almost four months now, with few noticeable hassles. Cash has already been bumped so far to the periphery of our daily lives that it wasn’t proving difficult to steer clear of cash-only restaurants and parking meters. At the donut shop near my house, where the owners have instituted a $2.50 minimum for credit card transactions, I have to perform a kind of price gouging in reverse, insisting on a $2.50 charge for a $0.80 glazed donut.
The one breakdown came when I had to board a New Jersey Transit train bound for the financial capital of the world. I didn’t have enough lead time to buy a ticket online or plan ahead for some other mode of transportation. Suddenly I found myself facing an impatient conductor armed with a machine that could dispense tickets, but that clearly couldn’t process plastic. Luckily, I had some bills still sitting untouched in my wallet. After buying the ticket, I briefly examined the handful of coins that the conductor placed in my open palm, and proceeded to deposit them on the open seat in front of me.
A few stops later, a bald man shuffled into that seat and promptly pocketed the change. Or tried to pocket it: an errant quarter
fell to the floor and landed next to my shoe. The guy had headphones on, though, so he didn’t hear the telltale clinking of fallen change. When the train finally arrived at Penn Station and we stood to make our way to the exit, I tapped the man on the elbow and informed him that he had dropped a quarter. He said thanks, but looked confused. Despite the coin’s proximity to my shoe, it became apparent to the bald man that I wasn’t going to pick it up for him. Instead, I stepped passed him and hurried out onto the platform. It was awkward.
Cash has also lately been drawing me into a kind of values house of mirrors, thanks in part to Lawrence Weschler’s biography of the artist J.S.G. Boggs. In the late 1980s, Boggs became famous for drawing exquisite copies of banknotes—dollars, pounds, Swiss francs, and others. They weren’t counterfeits, although he was accused and later acquitted of counterfeiting by the Bank of England, and harassed for years by authorities in the United States.
Boggs would finish a meal at a fancy restaurant, or approach the checkout desk at a hotel, and offer to pay the tab with his artwork—a drawing, say, of a $100 bill for a $71 dinner. He would deliver a jovial disquisition about money, and the value of his drawings, based on the hours of work that went into them, and the value the waiter or hotel staffer may or may not choose to assign them. (As further evidence of his disinterest in passing forgeries, Boggs would also offer to pay with real banknotes.) What captivated Boggs was value—how people determine and exchange it.7
By eschewing cash, I was hoping to conduct a similar kind of experiment in monetary contemplation. But what I didn’t anticipate when I resolved not to handle any U.S. Mint issued coins or Federal Reserve Notes was that my refusal to touch banknotes and coins would mutate into a genuine aversion. In the first month or two, friends would try to hand me a few bucks, I would flick them away like mosquitoes, we would chuckle—“Wolman’s on the cash wagon!”—and then the conversation would move on. After a few months, though, the repulsion became real, as if I was the only person in the world looking at cash with the help of those special purple lights from CSI—the ones that illuminate fingerprints and other traces of human activity. To this day, every time I see someone pull money from a wallet or pocket and place it on the countertop at a café, I can’t help but imagine the stepped on, sweat-drenched, and hyper-handled life cycle of that cash. After depositing the banknotes in the register, the barista reaches for a cup to make my drink, and I have to bite my tongue so as not to yell Hey! Ever heard of antibacterial gel?
If we look beyond the cash in our wallets to physical money as an industry, the picture gets even dirtier. A 2010 British government report entitled “The UK’s Payment Revolution” put it this way: “With around a billion bank notes created, distributed, collected and destroyed every year, the production and secure transportation of notes is an expensive and environmentally costly business paid for by the tax payer. A progressive move away from cash could hold many benefits.”8 In the United States, between 2008 and 2010, the coining process alone used up more than 32,397 tons of zinc, 41,245 tons of copper, and 4,185 tons of nickel. And cash’s carbon footprint doesn’t stop there.
Metals like zinc, nickel, and copper have many other, arguably more important, uses, like in the wiring of homes or in electric-car batteries. According to the multinational mining giant BHP Billiton, world consumption of copper over the next twenty-five years will exceed that of all copper ever mined to date.9 Pollution? Nickel smelters belch sulfur dioxide, which is the main cause of acid rain. One heavy nickel-producing area in Siberia provides a fifth of the world’s supply and emits more sulfur dioxide in a year than all of France.10 Think of that the next time you’re feeling annoyed by an unwieldy jarful of coins on the kitchen counter, or the small-change compartment of a wallet that has become so overloaded that it won’t snap shut.
Even banknotes, made from cotton and linen or, more recently, plastic, aren’t innocent. It takes close to half a gallon of water to grow the cotton used in a $100 bill (and 100 gallons to make a T-shirt). That cotton and water consumption may not spell doom for the planet, but you would be hard pressed to make the case that the manufacturing process, complete with the chemical dyes and printing equipment to be disposed of in some unlucky Maryland and Texas landfills, is environmentally benign.c
From there, the eco-costs of cash grow like compound interest: fuel for transport, electricity to run manufacturing plants and cash depots, and the armada of trucks and vans ferrying cash between banks, stores, and warehouses in what amounts to a worldwide logistical morass and emissions orgy hiding in plain sight.
IN THE VICTORIAN BALLROOM of the Charing Cross Hotel in London, the thirteenth annual Digital Money Forum is wrapping up with a session of free beer and wine. Beneath brass chandeliers, people from the worlds of banking, telecom, academia, and international development have absorbed an entire weekend’s worth of talk about money in the form of bits and bytes, and tomorrow’s technologies for handling it.
I came here with high hopes, thinking it would open up a world of dazzling ideas and Star Trek–like technologies that are poised to usurp cash. But the forum proved to be just too conferencey, with its drip, drip, drip of PowerPoint presentations, impenetrable corporate jargon, and technical speak. There were a few high points, but by the tea-and-cakes break on the first afternoon, I was already feeling fidgety and uneasy. I’d lost sight of why I was here—whether it even matters, really, what form of money we use.
To get back on the cashless society track, the next morning in nearby Covent Gardens I meet technologist, ubiquitous future-of-money commentator, and self-described “anti-cash maniac” Dave Birch. Birch is the spiritual guru, organizer, and emcee of the forum. I had invited him to accompany me to the Bank of England so that I could hear him make the case against cash on its home turf.
With a gray beard and round glasses, the fifty-year-old Birch looks more like a theology professor than an electronic money and digital security expert. As we walk to the Tube station, we pass a street performer with a guitar singing Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel.” Birch slows to deliver a £1 coin into the man’s guitar case. “We are going to have to figure out how to do that in the digital money future,” he says.
A huge portion of the workforce, especially in the United States, depends on tips. They are real people with real jobs, often the kind that require long hours on your feet and the ability to provide service with a smile to customers undeserving of one. They are waiters, doormen, baristas, cab drivers, bartenders, strippers, and more, and it goes without saying that shunning cash for a year would be severely costly, if not impossible, for many of them.
Yet as straightforward a transaction as tipping appears—it’s just a reward for good service, right?—think about the confusion that sometimes arises when trying to figure out how much you should leave when all you had was a beer, while your friend had the ribs-and-pork combo platter. Then there’s the condition you might call Non-natives’ Tipping Anxiety. I’ve seen many friends visiting from overseas fret about whether or how much to tip, where, and when. There are even disagreements among those of us who grew up with this custom. Leave a tip for the hotel staff that tidies your room? Some say only upon checkout, others say not at all. My sister says absolutely yes, every morning of your stay. And, of course, there is the mystifying calculus for determining just how much to leave. As Benjamin Franklin is believed to have said while living in Paris: “To overtip is to appear an ass: to undertip is to appear an even greater ass.”11
The countries of Europe where wealthy Americans originally picked up the custom of tipping have long since replaced it with a more equitable and economical service tax. Should you be tempted to think that we simply must keep cash around because the generous act of tipping would become endangered without it, consider the fact that people tip more, on average, when paying with plastic. As for the street performers of the future, Birch says this is in fact a nominal obstacle, technologically speaking, on the road to cashlessness. Soon en
ough, we’ll be able to give someone a few dollars or pounds simply by aiming an electronic device—if not our iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries, then something similar—and pressing a few keys. “The barriers to going with digital money across the board are coming down,” he says.
We step into a coffee shop, but the queue is a dozen people deep. Birch U-turns for the exit, catching the swinging door. “I wouldn’t be a real capitalist actor if I stayed to wait,” he says, heading for another café just a block away.
The second stop is a window facing out onto the street. No line this time. Birch orders a latte to go. While fishing change from his pants pocket, he spills a handful of coins onto the curb. He pauses, staring down at the shrapnel. “There. Now you have another reason to do away with cash,” he says, before stooping his portly frame to retrieve scattered 1-pound, 50-pence, and 25-pence pieces. His expression is reminiscent of a homeowner removing someone else’s dog’s crap from the front lawn. (The metaphor has precedent: Freud ventured that there is a psychological connection between money and feces.)
“Today something like one out of every twenty £1 coins is counterfeit,” Birch says as we continue our walk through the drizzle. Those forged coins are presumably manufactured in grungy machine shops in countries like Romania and Bulgaria—someplace so poor that the economics of counterfeiting £1 coins makes sense. In the United States, we don’t have counterfeit coins. Let me rephrase that: the government’s tacit assumption is that coin-counterfeiting operations don’t exist, or don’t exist on a scale sufficient to justify the expense of looking for fakes. “Not that people even want coins,” says Birch. “Something like 40 percent of all the pennies ever issued in the UK are unaccounted for. Did you know that?” Pennies are unaccounted for because people don’t use them. The ones we get stuck with at the checkout counter usually end up lost for years in desk and bureau drawers.12
