Episode 205 – RP Live with Brett Scott

**Happy New Year from Real Progressives and Macro N Cheese. If you would like to help us continue to bring you great content, please consider becoming a monthly sponsor at patreon.com/realprogressives. Your contributions help pay for the tech platforms and equipment that keep this podcast alive.** 

This week’s episode is the recording of a recent RP Live webinar with Brett Scott, author of Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets.  

In terms of its politics, the digital money movement is largely only discussed by the mainstream media, ever ready to promote the interests of big finance and big tech. Brett makes the case that leftists and MMTers need to get involved. Those of us with knowledge of the monetary system are particularly well-situated to recognize potential minefields and see through lies that are being passed off as fact. For example, there is the notion of inevitability. Once the automobile was invented, it was only a matter of time before the horse cart would disappear. We’re also led to believe that the move to replace cash with digital comes from the bottom up—from ordinary people. We need only consider who is pushing this so-called cashless society. And who profits from it. Crypto itself is simply another commodity to be bought and sold with… money.  

Brett presents interesting ways of considering the war against cash and the future of money. In the second half of the episode, he takes questions from attendees. If you haven’t heard his interviews on Macro N Cheese, now would be a good time to do so. 

Brett Scott is an author, journalist, and activist, who explores the intersections between money systems, finance, and digital technology. He’s the author of The Heretics Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money. His latest book is Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets. Find more of his work on brettscott.substack.com 

@suitpossum on Twitter 

Macro N Cheese – Episode 205
RP Live with Brett Scott
December 31, 2022

[00:00:04.530] – Brett Scott [intro/music]

Many people don’t make a distinction between different players in the monetary system. Many people think that a dollar is a single currency, whereas the dollar system is actually multiple different currencies issued by different players that have the same name. And this is very, very poorly understood by many people.

[00:00:31.130] – Brett Scott [intro/music]

The term cashless society itself is so vague and meaningless. It’s very much like referring to whiskey as beerless alcohol.

[00:01:35.150] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.130] – Steve Grumbine

All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. This week we’re bringing you something that’s a little unusual. In November. Real Progressives have Brett Scott as the guest speaker for RP Live, our informal webinar series. I’ve interviewed Brett a number of times on Macro n Cheese. RP Live is a different experience. Our volunteers had an opportunity to interact with him and ask him their own questions. So here’s the recording of the event RP live with Brett Scott, talking about his book, Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for Our Wallets. Here we go.

[00:02:20.430] – Andy Kennedy

Hi, everyone. Welcome. I’m sitting in for Luke Parcher today because Luke is under the weather. So, I’m going to keep my part brief here because you’re here to listen to the suit possum speak as opposed to me. Welcome to Real Progressives. This is RP Live. We are a 501C3 and a 501C4. They are Real Progressives and Real Progress In Action, and we do media.

If you haven’t seen us before, we have a number of different shows, including our podcast, Macro N Cheese. With our host and founder Steve Grumbine. Which our guest today, has been a guest on our podcast a couple of times, where he talks about his new book as well. So that would be a good follow up to listen to if you enjoy today’s webinar.

We also have a presentation by Steve called The Rogue Scholar. It is a video presentation that is live at noon, usually on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If you would like to donate to Real Progressives, we would happily take your donation because we are funded in that way. Our Patreon page is called Patreon.Com/realprogressives.

You can also donate to us on our main website, which is Realprogressives.org/donate our website, which is a beautiful thing that was created by lovely Julie who is also on the PMO of Real Progressives. It is a great place to get MMT educated. And all of our current media is there. Lots of wonderful articles written by people that write for us it’s a great place to go and check out if you haven’t seen it. Anyways, let’s get started. Our guest for RP Live today is Mr. Brett Scott. Brett, you’re currently in the UK.

[00:04:33.670] – Brett Scott

I’m in Berlin.

[00:04:35.280] – Andy

Oh, you’re in Germany. Okay. So Brett is an author, a journalist, an activist who explores the intersections between money systems, finance and digital technology. He’s the author of The Heretics Guide to Global Finance hacking the Future of Money. And his latest book, Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets is not only the name of his new book, it’s also the reason he’s here today.

And he is going to talk about an aspect, this part of finance that I don’t think it’s talked about even in our side of the political spectrum. So I’m really looking forward to this as well. One other thing. I want to mention that Brett has a substack that has some great content on it – brettscott.substack.com. And with that, Mr. Scott, welcome. And if you’d like, take it away, please.

[00:05:37.290] – Brett

All right? Yeah, great. Thanks for having me here. Good to be here. I’ve been doing like loads and loads of talks about this book, and there’s many different aspects that I could speak about. I can’t really get through everything in one presentation, but I’ll try one version of the book. The book is now actually out in about six or seven languages, probably coming out to nine languages or so altogether.

So it’s definitely getting around and getting into sort of different parts of the world. And one of the biggest things, I guess the book is one of its calling cards or its most distinctive features, is that it’s arguing for the protection of the physical cash system and doing so from quite a left-wing perspective, which I think is something that’s very needed right now because we can go into this.

But in the politics of this, actually, right now, some of the most proactive players in the protection of cash are coming from the right wing, coming from actually, a lot of these conspiracy theorist type far right players are often doing a lot of stuff around doing pro-cash work. And I think there’s a very strong left wing case for the protection of cash.

And I think it’s important that people on the political left get involved in this such that the political right doesn’t claim this issue or become the voice for this particular issue. So this is something that’s sort of going on in the background and I think people in the MMT community in the US, you’ll be well versed in progressive campaigning around monetary systems.

So I feel like the MMT community is quite receptive to this kind of stuff. In the UK, where I was based for quite a while, the MMT movement isn’t as strong and you’ll find people on the political left are actually quite apolitical about money. Anyway, this book is intended to be drawing out the politics of cash versus digital money, basically.

And one of the big mental arguments I’m making in the book is that if you look at the last couple of decades, the big story that’s been happening in the global economy is the rise of not only big finance, but big tech. Ten years ago, the highest market capitalizations for companies in the stock market were oil companies and finance companies. Now it’s all big tech companies.

So one of the biggest things we’ve been seeing is the rise of big tech platforms, but also them fusing with finance platforms because a lot of these big tech players can’t operate at global scale unless they’re fused into transnational digital finance infrastructure. So this is a big, like, meta story going on. But one of the structural things that’s happening is that this is putting a huge amount of pressure on the physical cash system, all right?

So as the economy moves towards evermore dependence upon these kind of tech players, physical forms of money, like physical cash issued by the state, is coming under a lot of attack. And the way that it’s normally presented is people will often say, oh, well, it’s ordinary people are the ones who are moving naturally away from cash. So that’s kind of presented as this bottom up phenomenon.

And what I’m doing a lot in the book is to say, actually, this process has been driven as much from the top down by very large players who are all pulling us towards dependence and digital money systems. So in the end, actually one of the biggest things this book is calling for is to maintain a balance of power in the monetary system. It’s worth repeating that like a balance of power in the monetary system.

Right now, in the monetary system, there’s different players involved, different issuers, and the state being one of them, but the commercial banking sector being another massive player. And what’s going on really is a transfer of power to the commercial banking sector who runs the digital money systems. So this book is calling for keeping a balance of power in the monetary system, which means protecting the cash system.

That’s one of the big things that’s going on in this book. I’m also going into the crypto world as well, though, which really very much came out of 1990s Internet activist movements who were concerned about a cashless society. They were looking forward in time and saying, hey, if we end up in a cashless society, there’s a whole bunch of real serious problems that are going to emerge in terms of centralization of power in the banking sector and in state players who can be able to watch everything.

So a lot of crypto stuff comes out, at least in the early days, out of some concern about a future cash in society and thinking that in that context, we got to build out some form of alternative digital cash that can access the counterpower. But in reality, what ended up happening to the crypto world is it actually become as I’m sure many of you realize, it hasn’t so much displaced the normal monetary system as it’s just become an object to be traded within the normal monetary system.

Of course, you’ve probably been aware there’s been like a gigantic crypto disaster this last week as one of the major exchanges being revealed to be bankrupt and fraudulent and of course, the huge destabilization in the crypto world. But really what’s been happening in the crypto world is that they’ve turned into these gigantic trading operations rather than monetary systems.

So the book goes into that as well. But I thought today I would maybe just sketch out some of the approaches because I have to guide a lot right now in front of many people who asking why should they care about cash, who are struggling to think clearly about it. And I’ve been working on various ways how to clearly convey this issue and quickly get to the point about why it’s important.

Maybe today I’m going to show you some of the metaphors that I use in order to quickly and effectively get home some of the points about why the cash system is important. So one of the big things I want to say is that no matter where I go in the world, no matter where you find yourself, there is an overarching ideology that covers the entire planet right now, no matter where you are.

Which is this idea that what progress in society means is to reach ever increasing levels of automation, scale, speed, complexity. There’s this idea projected that what the world has to become, what it’s like that the natural trajectory of the future is for everything to become interconnected, everything to become vast digital systems that are all automated.

Now, you’ll find this in literally every single country. If you speak to politicians, they’ll all talk about the fact that they have to do they call digital transformation. They all talk about this. It’s some kind of policy priority. We got to do digital transformation in order to keep up. Alibaba’s will be left behind. And so there’s this whole progress narrative.

Everybody has to constantly be moving towards this vast digital, automated world. Nobody really quite knows why, but it’s just taken for granted that this has to happen. Now, one of the big things that I would argue that this ideology has been put in place over many decades by essentially the corporate sector because corporates make a lot of money from being able to scale themselves and automate, especially big tech companies.

So this idea that it’s naturally good to automate everything and digitize everything is really kind of like an ideology that emerges from the tech sector. But it’s kind of like bled down to all common discourse in the political realm. Actually, also across political lines, you’ll find conservatives saying this, you’ll find Democrats and people on the left saying this as well. And this is kind of this overarching story.

Now, when it comes to the monetary system, the same story is playing out in a lot of narratives around money. So if you go onto Google Images and you type in digital money, it’s very fascinating what you’ll see. You’ll see all these pictures of physical cash that are dissolving into data or something that were flying through fiber optic cables. And the whole basic, very standard mentality is going on is this idea that cash is some sort of old form.

And what has to happen is there’s going to be a kind of seamless transition as its substance sort of morphs into the digital world. So in keeping with this overarching ideology that everything has to be automated and everything has to digitize, the idea when it comes to money is that all physical money will eventually have to become digital. And this is just some kind of like, natural progress.

And this story is playing in the background in many people’s heads, even if they don’t realize that most people don’t have a lot of time to sit and analyze the monetary system. And most people who you speak to will have a vague version of the story playing out in their heads, regardless of who they are. This is often some sort of background assumption that’s being made.

And my argument is this assumption has to be broken very strongly. So what we find right now, which is a huge, huge problem, is there’s a standard story which emerges from the situation I’ve been describing. And if I was to use a metaphor, the standard story right now is that cash is some kind of horse cart of payments, some old thing that would naturally have to give way to some new thing.

And if you think about the different bodies of critique you’ll find around the cash system, people who are anticash, they’ll tend to fall into three main categories. There’s categories which they say it’s old, so the critique is it’s old fashioned, it’s something a bit like redundant or a bit ancient about it, therefore that’s bad. There’s a second series of critiques which say it’s inefficient it’s inconvenient, it’s inefficient it’s all the sort of like economic efficiency argument.

And then there’s a third body of critique that says that it’s dangerous. So these people who say, oh, it’s used for crime, it’s tax evasion, it’s dirty, blah, blah, blah, blah. So these are the three sort of main bodies of fatigue people in the anti cash movement, which is why a lot of people have internalized these stories. They’ll often be using these three bodies of critique.

And very much there’s been this idea establishing people’s heads that, yeah, cash is this kind of like horse cart of payments. And digital is this the world of some kind of like the car, as it were. And because there’s a linear progress narrative between something like a horse cart and a car. The same sort of narrative is playing out people’s heads. Strangely enough, even among people who are pro-cash.

If you go and speak to people about cash and you say to them, do you like cash? Many of them will say, yeah, I do like cash. And then you ask them, do you think it will survive? And many of them say, I don’t think it will survive. So it’s almost like they’re a person who, if you look at this horse car thing, it’s like people who do actually like traveling on a horse cart, but sense come sort of feeling of futility, like eventually they’re going to be forced off the roads.

That’s what the main feeling is right now among many people. And it’s an ideology that’s been internalized from all the endless propaganda by the digital payments industry against the cash system. Even if you go to people who are supposedly trying to protect the cash system, for example, politicians who will be saying we need to protect the cash system, especially in the places like the UK right now, where the cash system has taken a big hit.

I just want to caveat the fact that a lot of my stuff has been based in the UK, where if you’re in London right now, it’s becoming very hard to pay in cash for many places. I know in the US. That hasn’t necessarily happened yet, but in many places in Europe that’s starting to happen. If you go to the UK right now, you’ll find all these politicians will say things like we must be careful of going too quickly to the cashless society because there are still some people who rely on cash.

It’s very much like this idea of imagine in the early nineteen hundreds, a person saying let’s not be too quick to move to decommissioning all the horse carts. Some people still rely on the horse guard, give them some time to upgrade. That’s very much the so-called pro-cash narrative right now. It’s framed like that.

And one of the other huge features of the debate right now is that the reason given for the decline of the cash system is very much that you and me, ordinary people are the ones who are naturally moving away from it. When I’m thinking about an economic system, I often imagine an economic system as a vast interdependent network of people and companies, an interdependent, intermeshed economy.

When you’re walking down the street in the city, there’s all these people walking past you, but you’re all connected in the sense that you’re all part of the same market system and you’re all at some level interacting with each other, even if you don’t know each other. So economies of these vast interdependent networks but one thing that economists are very good at doing, which is very, very problematic, is making out that the agency, the power in an economy resides with the little nodes, the small individual person.

So you’ll find lots of these stories that say things like consumers move towards digital payment, right? The implication being that the average person is the one that’s driving this change, rather than the big oligopoly industries that have far more to gain from the move towards digital payments than you or me do.

So there’s this whole way of spinning the move away from cash as being somehow driven by ordinary people rather than by industry or by power players, as it were. So that’s basically the standard story right now. And what I’ve been doing is trying to basically build out a bunch of alternative ways of thinking about it that break that story.

So I’m going to go through two metaphors to show you how I do it and then we can have a discussion about that, if that’s cool. So metaphor one that’s going to really like, mess with the standard story. One of the biggest problems you’re going to face when talking about monetary systems in the public domain and this is a legacy of many things, including the atrocious record, that the mainstream economics industry has in presenting money.

Many people don’t make a distinction between different players in the monetary system. Many people think that a dollar is a single currency, whereas the dollar system is actually multiple different currencies issued by different players that have the same name. And this is very poorly understood by many people and it’s quite hard to convey it to them.

So I’ve been building this metaphor around casino chips as a very quick and dirty way to show what’s going on. So metaphor one is that dollars and bank accounts are actually digital casino chips issued by the banking sector. So one of the things I get people to think about is to say, imagine going to a casino, you got $100 in cash with you. Then you walk up to the casino and you hand that $100 over to the cashier to transfer ownership to the cashier.

And what do they give you? They give you casino chips. Now, you can make a distinction between two classes of things here. There’s the cash that’s been given to the casino cashier and there’s the chips that have been given to you. Those chips are a second tier form of money privately issued by the casino that can be used within the casino.

The only reason though, that you actually believe in those chips is that you believe that they can be redeemed back for cash at the cashier. So they are tethered to that cash. They derive their own power from the fact that they are an IOU for that cash. If I take them back to the cashier, I can redeem them, but in the meantime, I can use them in the secondary form as a token within a casino.

So it’s a secondary form of money that’s tethered to a first tier form of money. Most people can understand this. This is pretty straightforward, but many people don’t realize that actually money that you see in your bank account is not actually that different to that. So if I’m looking at a balance in my bank accounts and I see $2,400, those are actually, in a sense, digital chips issued out by the banking sector.

To me, so many people have this idea that money that they see in their bank account is like cash that’s in the bank. That’s totally not true. What’s happened is you will hand over cash to the banking sector. They will take ownership of that and issue out these chips to you, which then you’ll see represented in your bank account. Those are digital chips. Now, we don’t have to go into all the details of the banking sector here.

One of the big mega powers that banks have, unlike casinos, is that banks are able to issue far more of these chips than they actually have in state money or reserves. This is sometimes called fractional reserve banking, probably more accurately referred to as credit creation of money. Banks can expand and issue out far more of these digital chips than they have in reserves, which is a big sort of topic in monetary politics.

But for our purposes, what’s important to note here is that digital money rarely are these second tier, privately issued digital casino chips issued by the banking sector. So when you’re moving to a so called cashless society, what you’re basically moving towards is a society where you’re totally dependent upon these second tier bank issued chips and sometimes corporate issued chips as well, because there’s also third tier players that can be built on top of that.

And obviously, there’s a huge industry around this. So on my newsletter, which is called “Altered states of monetary consciousness”, I sometimes draw these funny sketches of the monetary system. I’ve been experimenting with drawing pictures of the monetary system, trying new approaches. And one of the approaches that I use sometimes is to imagine society.

And you can think about the banking sector as almost like hovering above if you want. So when you’re doing a digital transaction, you’re sending a message to a bank data center requesting that they reassign or move digital chips to somebody else. And there’s a huge industry built around essentially this digital chip transfer, including these massive card companies like Visa and MasterCard, who make huge amounts of money between facilitating interbank chip transfers, as it were.

I’m kind of simplifying this a lot right now, but the intuition is basically that digital payments are these privately issued form of money. And one of the immediate reasons why we should be suspicious about these stories that say cashless society is a kind of natural progression is that there’s such a huge and important industry built around trying to get you dependent on digital payments.

And one of my big frustrations when I’m dealing with this issue is that the term cashless society itself is so vague and meaningless. It’s very much like referring to whiskey as beerless alcohol or AC DC as folk musicalist band rather than just saying 70s hard rock and whiskey. And this term “cashless society” is very much like this.

It kind of like draws attention to something that’s not present rather than something that is present. And what is present is big tech and big finance. That’s what cashless society here is de facto. It’s a series of very large banks and big tech firms like Apple pay with the card companies and that’s what the cashless society is.

One of the big things that I’ve been chasing, which is one of the big themes of the book, is going back to this interdependent economy, who has power in the situation? And actually when it comes to shifting economies, often these big oligopolies of players have far more power than the ordinary person does. When big corporate players all move in the same direction at once, they can kind of pull us along with them.

And this has been happening in the payment system for quite some time now, for at least 30 years. There’s been a lot of these top down attacks on the cash system that has slowly undermined it to make it ever more likely that people will slowly move towards digital system or internalize this idea that they have to. And I do a lot of tracing of this process.

So for example, in the UK, a lot of the banks close down their branches which makes it far harder for businesses to deposit cash, which makes it far more likely that businesses, quote unquote go cashless. It makes it much harder to access cash too. So in the UK, they start closing down all the ATMs too, which makes it much harder to find the cash.

So they engineer these kind of feedback loops, they engineer inconvenience, they make it harder to use the cash system which of course makes it ever more likely that you will switch to the digital system. So a lot of these players are trying to wean people off the cash system slowly but surely. In the US. This is also very blatantly happening with companies like Visa.

This is a story that came out in 2020 where Visa, for example, entered into a deal with the NFL to host all these cashless Super Bowls. Interestingly, this deal was signed in 2019. Basically Visa saying we’ll sponsor. If you agree to use the Super Bowl to promote cashless society, essentially you will refuse cash at the Super Bowls.

The deal was signed in 2019 but the first instantiation of this came out in 2020 and lo and behold, the stories they started using for this was to say it was because of the pandemic, despite the fact that this was a 2019 deal already set in play before the pandemic. And many of these players basically grappled or grasped the pandemic as an opportunity to push forward an automation program that they already wanted to do prior to the pandemic.

So a lot of them use the pandemic as a kind of convenient excuse to start refusing cash. Many, many normal corporates are doing it now as well. So, for example, Lufthansa, a lot of the big airline companies now are refusing cash. And this is particularly for me, like, quite important because I’m based in Germany. Germany is actually a very, very pro-cash society.

There’s still a large amount of cash usage here, and yet Lufthansa, which is the main flag carrier of Germany, is refusing it. Which basically means the Lufthansa executives, when they’re making decisions like this, they’re not surveying the German population and saying, oh, it seems like people want to have the option to use cash be removed from them.

Nobody wants that option removed from them. The Lufthansa executives are making a corporate decision, a top-down decision that they’re going to project onto society. They’re just going to say, we are going to refuse this from now on, and you have to conform. And this is what’s going on all the time. Psychologically, there’s been all these attacks on the cash system when a lot of these businesses now, especially if you go to the UK and places like that, they’re becoming emboldened.

They realize they can get away with refusing cash, they’re all just going with it because they want to automate. And of course, players like Visa are also very, very good at targeting the small business sector. So they’ve been convincing many, many of these small hipster bougie businesses to refuse cash as well, knowing that this has a huge cultural effect in society where you can basically start to shame people for using cash and you can start to associate this idea of progressiveness with big tech, essentially, and these digital systems.

And weirdly, it’s very sad that this has actually been very heavily internalized by actually a lot of progressive young people who have essentially bought into the idea that what progress means, and progress in sort of like both sides of the term progress in a more generic sense, but also kind of like progressive culture, left wing ideals.

A lot of the young liberal kind of people have actually totally internalized this idea that in a way like Apple Pay and things stand for what they stand for, which is a gigantic win by the big tech industry to associate this idea that they represent the young generation and progress. So that first metaphor which I was going on about was saying digital money is this kind of digital casino chips.

The point of that metaphor is to show people that actually these digital money systems are this second tier, privately issued form of money that’s actually connected back to the cash system. And actually, weirdly enough, confidence in the digital systems is at least in part predicated upon the idea that if push comes to shove, you can exit those systems from the ATM.

So that’s the first thing to destabilize this idea that somehow the digital systems are some kind of like natural upgrade to the physical cash system, when in reality they’re actually a kind of second tier system that’s pegged onto the cash system. But the second metaphor that I use is cash being the public bicycle system of payments rather than the horse car.

And this metaphor is very interesting to use because it really messes with the standard way that the issue is framed right now. And again, I use this metaphor in the context of promoting a balance of power in the payment system to say that with transport systems, we have multiple forms of transport that balance each other off. And the cash system is very much like that within the context of the monetary system.

It’s a non-corporate, non-digital form that balances off the corporate digital forms and is vital for maintaining a resilient, inclusive monetary system. So if you want to essentially mess with this current paradigm of thought, first, target this image of the horse cart and say, actually, cash is far more like the bicycle.

And secondly, there’s a second part to this reframing, which is to say, digital money is not like the car. Digital money is like the Uber. And there’s a meaningful difference between having your own car and being reliant upon Uber. Having my own car, I actually have a degree of autonomy. But if I’m relying upon Uber, I’m essentially relying upon a third-party institution.

I’m standing on the side of the road requesting for some corporate to take me somewhere. And this is the best transport metaphor framing. If you’re interested in the difference between cash and digital payments, a public bicycle that maintains a degree of autonomy versus a private automated taxi service that makes you dependent upon a third-party corporation.

And from this framing, you can derive all the basic pros and cons of the different systems. So, for example, if you had to imagine a society in which Uber was the only way you could get any kind of transport, you could immediately see all the problems that would emerge. You might superficially be able to say, okay, well, Uber is convenient, and so on and so on and so on.

But imagine it was the only way you could travel. You would have a massive problem of centralization of power in essentially a corporate oligopoly. You’d have a massive problem of surveillance of people’s traveling patterns, huge potentiality for censorship of a company being able to stop people traveling in certain ways. Massive problems of exclusion for people who can’t get access to the system.

Massive problems of resilience if the system goes down, your entire transport system goes down, and a generalized move away from decentralized systems towards centralized systems. Now, the only reason why things like Uber don’t have that power right now is that we have competing forms of transport that balance them off, such as the bicycle system.

Now, it’s very similar in the monetary system right now. If you speak to people about digital payments and the standard rhetoric, it’s very much like, oh well, it’s convenient, and so on. The convenience is irrelevant. Those systems, if they completely take over the monetary system, will become very much like the situation of Uber took over the whole transport system.

You would have huge surveillance, huge potentiality for censorship, massive resilience problems, huge exclusion problems, and this generalized move towards every single local transaction being dependent upon a distant centralized entity. And this is the main reason why the cash system is so important to provide the counterpower to that situation, an alternative to that situation.

And this has been a very successful way, in my experience, of showing somebody what’s immediately at stake. And it cuts straight through that digitizing everything kind of overarching ideology that we have in society. Because despite the fact that we have that ideology, many people realize in many of our systems we actually maintain these parallel options.

And I might end this talk here, having framed this issue around cash, but one of the things I’ll say is that a lot of the other issues around monetary politics right now, so for example, on CBDC, crypto, all these things are actually related to this fundamental issue around cash versus digital. A lot of the reason why those other things are being proposed is because of the breakdown in the cash system.

Because the balance of power in the monetary system is swinging so heavily towards the private players. Debates around, for example, CBDC are emerging. The crypto community is talking about their alternative to the corporate systems. So this issue around cash is far more important than people actually realize. Let me end it there and we can open it up for questions or comments.

[00:38:00.000] – Intermission

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin and Instagram.

[00:38:25.810] – Andy Kennedy

Excellent. Thank you very much, Brett, with your permission, we’ll start the Q and A portion of this presentation. I have a quick question of my own and it’s something that I’ve just had to deal with quite recently. Found it an interesting analogy and I just wanted you to weigh in on it. Recently at home, my wife’s mother, we’ve had to move her into a nursing home.

So of course she’s gone from an apartment to a much smaller place. So on some of the local marketplaces, we’ve been privately selling some of her things and somebody comes up to your house and they typically pay cash for it. But I’ve noticed that that marketplace has really increased and I’m wondering if that’s maybe because of the current cycle of inflation that we’re seeing and the price gouging that’s going on and the lack of availability of a lot of products.

My question in that vein is, do you believe that will help people come to an understanding of why it’s important to keep cash or anonymity in finance? Because there are so many people that are looking for better deals than buying new because the prices of things have gone up so high.

[00:40:00.670] – Brett

Yeah, that’s a complex one. I don’t have a strong enough sense of all the interconnections. There one thing I would say, though. There is a connection with the cash system and costs of living or inflation in the sense that historically, one of the main reasons that people use cash, especially in lower income groups, is that it’s a very valuable budgeting tool.

So when the digital payments companies are marketing themselves, one of the big things they market is the fact that people spend a lot more money with digital payments. I actually did a tweet thread a few weeks ago where I pointed to about eight different academic studies that show this, that show that people spend up to 40% more sometimes with digital systems rather than physical cash systems.

And there’s all these psychological reasons for this. People find digital money more abstract. They find it harder to sense leaving them. They spend a lot more because they don’t really realize they’re spending so much. Whereas with cash, you actually have this more physical experience. And as a physical being, it’s easier for you to understand that you’re letting go of something.

So this is one reason why, actually many people have historically use cash as a budgeting tool. And one of the big impulses in the capitalist system, if you want to get people to spend more and accelerate their spending as you get them onto these card systems, these digital systems, to accelerate spending. So at an economic level, there’s a big incentive for all these big players to be pushing people to digital systems.

And interestingly, I don’t know in the US. But in the UK where there’s this cost-of-living crisis that’s been going on, there’s been record amounts of cash being withdrawn from places like the post office, which is often used by lower income people who are using cash, taking cash out in this context as this kind of budgeting tool.

But, yeah, I’m sure there’s some connection with this marketplace that you’re talking about, but I’d need to think deeper into the kind of anthropology of that or the economic anthropology of what’s going on and how that would be related to inflation more generally. But bear in mind, inflation as a phenomenon would affect both digital money and cash, right? So they’re both equally affected by that. But there is psychological difference in spending patterns of cash and digital money.

[00:42:24.640] – Andy

Right. And I’ve actually seen that in fundraising for different entities that I’ve been involved with where the people that run them, they tell you to try to get donations in digital money. And I believe that you’ll raise 40% more if you get people to donate using their credit card as opposed to just giving you cash money.

[00:42:47.740] – Brett

Yeah, there’s lots of studies to show this. And Visa tries to convince these businesses to start refusing cash. And on its website, for example, it’s got the benefits of going cashless website, it cites this. It says people spend a lot more.

[00:43:02.730] – Andy

One other point when you were speaking that I wanted to make, and I’ll just do it quickly because I know we’ve got some questions. But two entities that I’ve noticed in Flying with WestJet, which is one of the two Canadian major carriers, and the other one was the Roger Center, which is where the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team plays their home games, both of those entities are now completely cashless.

On the other hand, there is a Chinese food place just around the corner from me that gives you a 5% discount if you pay in cash. So I found that very interesting that a huge corporation like the first two I mentioned no longer accept cash. But your little mom and pop store, they actually encourage it.

[00:43:51.200] – Brett

All big corporations want to automate, and they basically find it easier to work with other big corporations than to deal with ordinary people. So they want you to instruct Visa, to instruct your bank to make a transfer to their bank. They don’t want to have to deal with your little world. They’re big entities. They want to deal with other big entities.

But interestingly, with a small business community, you find a wide divergence in opinions on this. There’s different players who have different people in different businesses, have different opinions. There’s a quite a wide range of stuff. But, yeah, there’s a lot of small businesses that are actually quite pro-cash. Depends on the situation.

[00:44:28.710] – Andy

Right? Let’s get to some of the questions. I’ve got a question from Greg, and he’s asked me to read it. So his question is, I’d like your thoughts on Rohan Grey’s ECASH Act or similar ideas for bearer instrument hardware based currency akin to stored value cards, but with peer to peer function ledger lists like cash while in circulation, but digital.

[00:44:56.670] – Brett

Yeah, I like Rohan’s direction on the ECASH Act stuff. I think it’s very important. I think it’s very innovative. I haven’t kept up with what’s the specifics of it right now. You heard Rohan speaking about it a little while back when he was proposing it was putting together the proposal for the legislation. I don’t quite know what situation it is right now.

I haven’t spoken to him for a bit. But I like the generalized idea, which was right now, if we’re putting debates into a series of buckets, the original balance of power was the state entities would issue physical cash and then the banking sectors issuing digital money. So you’d have state physical and bank digital.

Now what’s being emerging into the public debate is this idea that central banks can start to issue their own digital currency. And the reason why the central bank digital currency has come out as a topic has been largely because the cash system is under attack and the central banks are saying people don’t have access to public money. This is a big problem, but the mainstream idea of CBDC is basically a kind of account based systems at the central bank.

What Rohan is doing is messing with that and saying we can have a public form of digital money, but it doesn’t have to be administered by the central bank, and it can be in this much more kind of like peer to peer bearer instrument style of digital. And I think that’s what’s very important. I don’t know yet the details, how they’re being worked out, or whether they actually will work in the current form, but I think it’s a very good direction to push on as an antidote to the mainstream version of the CBDC debate. That’s a very generic response, but I like the basic intuition behind the ECASH Act. Yes.

[00:46:41.250] – Andy

There’s a question here from Mark Fabian. He has asked if you could comment further on the FTX collapse.

[00:46:51.250] – Brett

It’s like a soap opera. What can I say about the FTX collapse? For those of you who don’t really know what’s happened, a very large crypto token exchange has gone bankrupt. It was revealed that it was essentially taking customer deposits, money people had entrusted to it, and it was actually lending it to a related entity, a hedge fund, essentially, that was trading.

There was a link to it. It was the same company, essentially, and it was using the customer deposits for trading. It would be a little bit like if you had a stock market account and the stock market operator was also running a hedge fund on the side and basically using the deposits to cover losses in their hedge fund, something like vaguely analogous to that.

And it’s getting more and more goes in because it turns out that the guy who was running it had made a big show of being interested in being regulated, having like a sort of nice face to crypto is a regulated sort of industry. And in reality, he’s been a total fraudster, and he’s been connected actually to the Democratic Party. He’s been funding Joe Biden and all sorts of stuff.

So there’s a lot of intriguing dynamics of the FTX thing, but in very, like generic terms, I mean, this is a big exchange has gone down. What you’ll find, though, in the crypto industry, if you hang out in the actual crypto world, you’ll find that there are many hardline crypto people who say that what FTX proves is that there shouldn’t be centralized human run organizations that deal with crypto.

They say, like what crypto was intended for was to have these huge systems that are essentially automated and decentralized and have no human components to them. They said FTX is an example of a human failure in a system. So the hardline crypto libertarians are using FTX as an example of why crypto should never be regulated or turned into these institutions.

Does that make sense? I could say more about it. In the end, it has no actual impact on the economy because nobody actually uses crypto tokens for real world stuff. So the crypto industry essentially operates much like the gambling industry does. So if a huge gambling exchange goes down or something, it impacts the people who lose the money, but it doesn’t really have a knock on effect beyond that, really.

The early days, the crypto, in early crypto there’s lots of people who essentially arbitrarily got into it and arbitrarily became rich. So there’s many of these little crypto billionaires who are basically just like ordinary people who just happens to be at the right place at the right time. And many of them are actually kind of incompetent.

They’re not like profound entrepreneurs or something. A lot of them have actually been quite bad at running the businesses. That’s why they often go bust. So in some ways, this is not that surprising that there’s a guy very badly runs in exchange and loses billions.

[00:50:01.410] – Andy

The United States used to have a president like that. Okay, so I believe that Jonathan Kadmon has a question.

[00:50:12.690] – Jonathan Kadmon

Well, firstly, I’d like to congratulate you on the presentation. You really did manage, in a concise manner, to talk about what I consider to be the most important takeaways from the book. I didn’t think you’d manage to get it in there that effectively, but you certainly did. I guess practice does make perfect. You did touch on the part that is near and dear to my heart.

And that’s the coercion by choice constraint that’s used by a lot of these big financial tech firms to essentially push people into this digital space, where not only can they grip a little off the top of every transaction, but also monitor and monetize the data and all that stuff. And maybe some of the ways in which they’re coercing people into that space in subtle and more heavy-handed ways. I was wondering if you expand a little bit on that particular aspect of it.

[00:51:09.190] – Brett

Yeah, I can make some comments on that general threat. One of the big problems we have in public discourse is that the economics discipline maybe it’s not just economics that’s to blame for this, but a lot of economists have popularized this idea that demand in a market is the same as desire. This is an implication. So they’ll say things like, well, let me give you an example.

If I turn up to that Lufthansa flight I showed earlier, or if you turn up to one of those stadiums that doesn’t accept cash and you suddenly find yourself in a situation where you’re basically being forced into something. That act of you using the digital system in that situation will be registered by economists as an increase in demand.

It’s like I did something is demand. But in reality, there’s many reasons why I might do something. I might do something because I’m constrained. I might do something through peer pressure. I might do something because I was forced to out of a lack of other options. I might do something because I had no idea what was going on.

There’s many reasons why people do stuff without it being driven by active desire. And a large part of what’s often rhetoric of choice is always used in many of our economic situations. So big tech companies also banks say, oh, people are choosing to do this. But in reality, what’s happening is the infrastructure is being slowly shut down, the cash system is being demonized and so on.

So it’s making people ever more likely that you’ll get sucked into these systems in various ways. So, for example, imagine you’re like a teenager right now, and you’re being born into a situation where big tech already totally dominates your world and all your friends have already internalized this idea. You basically don’t have a choice.

What’s happened is that these institutions have a kind of cultural hegemony. They’ve claimed the whole mind space of the society, which means you’re basically forced to use them in some sense. And so it’s very, very complex to show those processes to people, to say, hey, the mere fact that you can see people moving to a digital system doesn’t mean that they actively desire this situation.

What it means is that there is a particular recalibration or restructuring of the economy that’s going on, which is making it very hard to not do that, basically. And I’m kind of going around the question, but yeah, what’s basically occurring as a kind of capture? Because what happens is once you become totally dependent upon the technology, it ceases to be an option anymore.

It becomes mandatory, essentially. And that’s one of the big things that’s going on. There’s a very good theorist of technology who I really love called Ivan Illich. He’s quite like an old school theorist from the 1960s. He wrote quite these, like, popular books, and one of them was called Convivial Technology, where he’s trying to advance a different vision of technology.

But one of the points he’s making, one of the things he was very good at talking about was these processes whereby huge bureaucratic structures essentially start to feed upon themselves in a way. So, he was talking about, like, for example, like the medical industry, where at one point the medical industry existed to help people get well.

But once it gets big enough, the industry essentially starts to create structures whereby if you do not use it, it’ll start to become a kind of a grotesque parody of itself. So if you look at the medical industry right now. It’s just like vast, bloated corporate apparatus. And many of us, the tech industry is becoming like this.

There might be a certain situation when the tech industry actually helps us, but right now what it’s largely doing is it’s just engaged in this total takeover and many people have no idea why they’re continuing to buying into this. I’m going in a bit of incoherent direction there, but yeah, this is a huge, huge issue right now is the total capture of society by these institutions that are becoming infrastructure. I’m going to leave it there because I’m just waffling. That made some kind of basic sense.

[00:55:17.350] – Jonathan

You nailed it perfectly. I couldn’t have said it any better myself. It’s a huge, huge topic.

[00:55:21.920] – Brett

Thank you.

[00:55:22.790] – Andy

It’s too late for waffles. So we have a question from Kenny Sabres or Sabre. My apologies if I mispronounce your name. Kenny?

[00:55:34.590] – Kenny

Yeah. Hey, how are you? Thanks for doing the session just as a fun kind of thought experiment, but well, maybe not just for fun for what your kind of desire is for an actual policy. That would be, in the end, if you could wave a magic wand, what would your desired end state be for the mix of cash versus other payment forms and how those other payment forms behave?

[00:55:58.290] – Brett

My objective in the pro-cash work is very much around this balance of power thing. I’m not trying to claim that it leads to some utopian monetary situation. The objective of protecting cash is to prevent certain forms of dystopia from emerging rather than anything else. So that’s the way to see the real politics of this cash situation in terms of policies and stuff.

To protect the cash system, it will require a few different things, will require protecting access to cash, enforcing acceptance of cash. Those are the main ones. But actually, what is also going to require actually is an active push from issuers of cash. Because as mentioned, right now, the digital payments industry in many parts of the world, especially in place of the UK and so on, has gained a psychological domination.

So if you’re very old school theorist, Antonio Gramsci, you would talk about cultural hegemony, the situation in which a very small group of economic elites will project their interest in society and make out as if it’s a natural state of affairs. So right now, players like Apple and so on have essentially done that.

They’ve reached a level of cultural hegemony where many people have internalized the idea that protecting capital interests is protecting their own interests. So that needs to be broken somehow. And that would require an active cultural push to break that existing cultural hegemony. So what needs to happen in addition to the policy work is for political and cultural movements to come out and to say, hey, cash is the bicycle of payments.

We want to protect it. It’s good to protect it. You don’t have to be ashamed for using this. It is unacceptable that these big businesses are refusing it, et cetera, et cetera. So you need this cultural movement to occur as well, in addition to the policy staff. So that’s just to maintain the balance of power.

But then, of course, within all the many other issues around, I mean, you guys are often involved in the MMT stuff. MMT would be a kind of slightly different vector within this, talking about how do you make the best use of the public money system? I’ve often worked in alternative currency systems, too. Local currencies and some regional currencies and stuff.

And I think those are also things that are definitely worth exploring and working with and innovating on. My current book, Cloudmoney, doesn’t really address those so much because I’m interested in slightly different topic. But I think I would also want to see people experimenting around on a lot of these alternative currencies. I can elaborate on any specific part of this if you want me to.

[00:58:44.150] – Kenny

No, that was good. Thank you. Okay.

[00:58:47.980] – Andy

Awesome. Virginia Cotts has a question.

[00:58:52.410] – Virginia Cotts

Actually, I was thinking about how much I really love the convenience of being able to order things online and get my vitamins tomorrow. And I know I’m giving up my privacy, I know Amazon knows everything I do and everything I talk about, but I can’t imagine having Wheelbarrows of Cash, Brett. But my question is, how has your opinion changed over the years?

Because you’ve been looking into this for a long time, and I know that the ownership of the ideas from the early days of the Internet, how things have gone from this idea of democratizing to becoming corporatized, and has your take on it changed? And related to the last question, your magic wand, if you had waved it years ago, would it have been different from now?

[00:59:55.630] – Brett

I want to make a point on convenience first. And so this is one of the hardest things I always have faced, is this Faustian bargain. It’s called it that the Faustian bargain between the rise of the megascale corporates and the slumping of us into this dependence upon them because of convenience. So you got to think about it as being this trade off.

So you can say, well, fine, I get some sort of marginal benefit from becoming dependent upon them, short term benefits at the expense of losing longer term autonomy. And that’s the basic trade off going on. And in many places in the world, it takes quite a while for the corporates to achieve that state of affairs. It’s not actually obvious to lots of people that, for example, cash is inconvenient, or actually many things that are supposedly inconvenient.

People have to be trained to think of them as inconvenient. If you go right now, for example, to a middle-class part of Germany with quite sophisticated German elites, they don’t perceive cash as inconvenience. There’s no cultural sense that it’s inconvenient that has to be trained. You have to be told that many, many times before you start to perceive it and believe it.

Actually, I guarantee you actually, right now there are many things around us that a future marketer will call inconvenient, which right now we can’t perceive the inconvenience. We haven’t been taught yet that it’s inconvenience. There’s this whole slow cultural attrition that occurs where we’re trained to take a short term impulse to save marginal amounts of time and in the process give away huge amounts of autonomy to megaplayers.

And that’s what the grotesque thing about modern corporate capitalism is. And if you’re looking at the pro-cash movement, what’s having to happen is the people saying stuff like, I’m prepared and I’m going to try to go against that grain and try and reject that short term convenience in favor of longer term resilience. Very hard in a large scale capitalist system to do that. But that’s the basic idea.

But yeah, in terms of like, the overall internet that’s been what’s going on for a long time is that the original promise of these types of flat networks have turned into these gigantic power imbalances between these huge players and the small players. I don’t really know if I have much more to say about that other than I think we need a cultural movement to fight against it. I’m trying to think what your question was about, like ten years ago, what I would have said. Just remind me again.

[01:02:41.010] – Virginia

Well, Kenny asked, if you could wave a magic wand, how would you design the system? How would you have it? And I wanted to know whether that has changed for you over the years, whether you want ideal in the past and now you would design it differently.

[01:02:59.910] – Brett

The way I often analyze stuff is through contradictions and tradeoffs. Many people in left wing circles, historically not only left-wing circles, but especially for example, like I said, Marxist circles and stuff, would often have this idea of some sort of end state. You arrive at a utopian end state where suddenly society is stable. Do you have those workers take over and then it’s like somehow stays stable?

Of course, I don’t really see the world like that. I think what we need to do is build systems that somehow combat each other’s worst excesses. So like balance of power arguments to be much more realistic because there are no real end states in the world. Historically, I’ve had a slight problem with many of the kind of more utopian alternative money movements in the sense that they’re often imagining these types of situations where suddenly everyone’s using an alternative currency or so on.

But the reality is that that’s highly unlikely. And a lot of the way I’m thinking is often about how do you get a balance of different systems that work in a productive way. And one of the big metaphors I’m saying what I use was probably two bigger topics to go into right now. But in the book one of our primary monetary metaphors is to think about money as a nervous system.

Money is a nervous system plugged into the body of the earth, which is us and resources. And if you’re thinking about how do you have a healthy nervous system, one that’s not numb and disassociated from its body, you kind of want a balance of different connectors. You want it to be like grounded into communities. You want it to be able to feel what’s going on.

This is an abstract metaphor but when I’m thinking about monetary systems that’s what I’m thinking. I’m saying I understand we need some big players, I understand we need some central nervous system type elements to it but I also want to see a lot more activity go be decentralized outwards into more localized players.

[01:04:49.710] – Virginia

Let me go back to the convenience thing then because as an MMTer and as a socialist I’m very aware of the difference between state money very in favor of state issued money as opposed to private corporate money or privately issued money or even privately managed money. Like why can’t I have the ecash card and use that for everything so that I don’t have to trade away my soul? I can use basically state money, but I can still order on Amazon too.

[01:05:29.150] – Brett

The balance of power argument. Again. And bear in mind one of the hard things about my position, which people find very hard is I’m going against the automation impulse. Whereas say a person promoting digital state money isn’t doing that because again, remember the overarching ideology we have that goes across left and right and across the world is the idea that what progress means is ever more digitization and automation and scale and speed.

And that rarely is a kind of corporate capitalist ideology. That’s an ideology that emerges and people find themselves stuck in a system that’s accelerating. Most people don’t really know why they want stuff to increase in speed. They don’t really want stuff to increase in speed but they find that the stuff increases in speed regardless of what they think.

Because we’re living in a growth-based acceleration situation. The economy is accelerating. So if you don’t accelerate with it, you in relative terms feel disadvantaged where everyone feels this like constant need to catch up on some sort of imagined race. Now you can have left wings and right wing versions of that impulse.

You can say, okay fine, we’re going to go with a broad trajectory of automation and acceleration but we’re going to steer it towards state digital rather than corporate digital. And the hard thing about my position for many people is the fact that I’m going against the acceleration and automation impulse by saying we’re going to keep physical cash.

Believe it or not, many people find it easier to imagine a future world characterized by massively unstable digital crypto tokens than to imagine a world in which cash remains, because people’s minds are so heavily calibrated to this idea that automation has to happen. And I think that’s one of the unique points of what I’m arguing for.

The last thing I’m going to say about this is that I believe in the next ten years, the digital hype will die. I don’t think it’s going to last. I think people are going to get so burnt out, so saturated by digital systems, that they’re going to start to actually reject them. Our bodies are going to start rejecting it through like a sheer burnout.

We’re actually going to see a return to the analog movement emerging, like a slowing down movement. It would go against the internal trajectory of a capitalist system, but the capitalist system is going against what our bodies can handle. So I think there’s going to be a fight between the reality of our biological being and the reality of the economy. They’re going to start to clash.

[01:08:06.650] – Andy

Virginia, I know what the title of your first book is going to be. It’s going to be “I Sold My Soul for Free Shipping.” Okay, so there’s a question from an anonymous attendee that’s asking if you are saying that having post office bank accounts will help the war on cash.

[01:08:27.890] – Brett

I think that might. I’m not deeply involved in the post office banking scene, but it would be a related topic for sure. Postal banking is all about giving access to financial services to people who are normally screwed by the standard banking sector. I think it’s related, but I don’t have anything profound to say right now about its relationship to cash other than it would be a good way to keep access to cash.

A lot of what’s happening right now, for example, I don’t know about the US, but a lot of the commercial banks are basically saying, we’re not interested in maintaining access to cash. It’s a little bit like a casino saying you can use our chips, but we’re not going to let you redeem the chips. That’s what the situation when these banks close down access to when they shut down ATMs, they’re basically saying, we’re not going to let you exit our systems.

And what’s happening is they’re starting to point to the postal banks. In the UK, for example, they do this. They say, well, you can go to the post office if you need cash. So there’s a politics there. Bear in mind that the corporate sector sometimes uses these alternatives as an excuse for not doing any action itself. They’ll say, oh, why? Post office will deal there for you. Whereas we should also be pushing mainstream banks to be active players in the preservation of access to cash too.

[01:09:48.040] – Andy

Right, so it’s almost got a feel of this is a public utility that’s provided free of charge to people that it will allow people to continue to use cash because it’s not in a normal corporate race for profit.

[01:10:05.010] – Brett

One of the really insidious things the bank sector has been doing is making out that providing access to cash is a charitable act, some kind of like public service they’re sort of forced to run. But bear in mind that the digital money that we use, the confidence in it is predicated upon this belief that you can get access to state money, which is de facto obtained via the cash system.

So the stability in their own systems is dependent upon this access. And also legally, you can go to a bank and demand it back. So when they’re like shutting down access to the cash system, they’re basically saying, we’re reneging upon our promises. We’re preventing you from exiting. It’s not a charitable act, it’s an act of enclosure.

They have an obligation to do this. It’s not some public service. One of the real hard things about this thing is many people think that the pro-cash position involves romanticizing the cash system. I think it’s important to always stress this balance of power argument. I’m not saying everyone should always be using cash all the time and so on. And isn’t it a sort of nostalgic shame?

I think it’s important to maintain this line, which is to say, even if you like the digital system, it’s not in your interest to see the other system go down. And I do have a kind of an element of me that loves aesthetics of cash, and it’s an everyday experience of it, but my main political impulse is slightly different to say this is about keeping the balance.

[01:11:32.110] – Andy

Absolutely. So we basically come to the end of our time. And I like to thank Brett very much for being here. This has been extremely eye opening. Brett, quickly, are you still touring with this book? Are you doing anything stateside?

[01:11:51.090] – Brett

I’m actually definitely wanting to come across the States. I’m thinking maybe coming early December, actually. I’ve just been so busy with many things, but I’m definitely planning to come across and do some stuff over there for sure.

[01:12:05.190] – Andy

You’ll keep us informed.

[01:12:07.040] – Brett

Let’s do something with you guys.

[01:12:08.780] – Andy

Absolutely. Okay, well, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much, everyone, for tuning in.

[01:12:14.090] – Virginia

Brett, remind people where they can find your work.

[01:12:17.530] – Brett

Sure, yeah. Maybe the place is substack, which is BrettScott@substack.com, and that’s been on ice for a few months while I’ve been launching the book. But I’m going to start putting pieces out again on that soon. I’m going to do a lot of work on monetary metaphor and stuff, different ways of visualizing monetary systems on that substance.

You can also find me on Twitter. Although who knows what the future of Twitter is right now. But suit possible on Twitter. I must have a YouTube channel that I will be starting again. I kind of went offline for about two years. Probably next year I’m going to start doing more YouTube stuff, check out the substance and get the book if you feel inspired.

[01:13:02.090] – Andy

Absolutely. And I believe that Cloudmoney is already in our bookstore. Our online bookstore attached to the website.

[01:13:09.850] – Brett

Awesome.

[01:13:10.830] – Andy

Yeah. So thanks so much, Brett. It was a wonderful presentation. Quickly again. Real Progressives, Real Progress in Action. If you’d like to either volunteer or donate to us, please reach out to one of us or you can do so from the website. We’d love to hear from you. Again. That’s Patreon.com/realprogressives. Or donate and look for our weekly Macro N Cheese podcast. And three times a week, our founder Steve Grumbine does the Rogue Scholar. And again, I just like to thank everyone for being here and I hope you enjoyed today’s presentation.

[01:13:50.570] – Brett

Thank you so much for having me.

[01:13:52.040] – Andy

Enjoyed it.

[01:13:53.080] – Virginia

Thank you, Brett.

[01:14:18.020] – End credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.

Brett Scott

An author, journalist, and activist, who explores the intersections between money systems, finance, and digital technology. He’s the author of The Heretics Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money. His latest book is Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets. Find more of his work on brettscott.substack.com 

@suitpossum on Twitter 

CBDC – Central Bank Digital Currency 

Central bank digital currencies are digital tokens, similar to cryptocurrency, issued by a central bank. They are pegged to the value of that country’s fiat currency.

ECASH Act 

The Electronic Currency and Secure Hardware Act. The ECASH Act would establish a pilot program within the U.S. Treasury Department to test and develop an electronic U.S. dollar.

FTX Crash

Bankman-Fried, Political Money, and the Crash of FTX by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen

Special Report: Binance’s books are a black box, filings show, as it tries to rally confidence by Tom Wilson, Angus Berwick and Elizabeth Howcroft

Tools for Conviviality – Ivan Illich

Antonio Gramsci 

Antonio Francesco Gramsci (1891 – 1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, linguist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926 where he remained until his death in 1937. 

Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class use cultural institutions and ideology to maintain power. Cultural hegemony becomes accepted as status quo.

https://jacobin.com/2021/11/antonio-gramsci-selections-prison-notebooks-fiftieth-anniversary 

https://jacobin.com/2020/01/birthday-antonio-gramsci-fascism-italy-communism 

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