Flip Phone Diary #6

On digital banking and our paper money being no good here

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about what it means that money’s gone digital. I rarely carry cash anymore and an increasing number of places don’t take it. At least once a month, I see a new hospitality establishment that’s gone “cashless,” meaning you need a debit card and bank account to go there. I also rarely have cash when panhandlers ask me for it.

After the panhandlers leave, I guiltily tell myself I should get some cash and invariably don’t. Digital banking made it inconvenient to give people money if they don’t have the authorized tech to receive it and it gave us easy excuses not to. The more I encounter that, the more I think it’s a problem.

Digitizing money feels like a convenient way to segregate spaces. It’s sold as a “safety” measure, but how many of us got robbed when we carried cash? Does that safety outweigh only being able to give money to government-authorized sources? Every time I see a cashless businesses metastasize, I wonder where my sex worker, drug dealer, and illegal immigrant friends are supposed to eat, drink, and pay rent. I specifically worry that the landlords who let them pay their rent in cash will take advantage of their vulnerabilities.

I also worry about how panhandlers are going to survive. How much of their income dried up when we stopped carrying money in a form we could easily share? How many of us are quietly relieved when we say “Sorry, I don’t have any cash on me,” because we don’t carry $20 bills to give anymore? Digital banking both enables our selfishness and lets tech barons dictate who we can and can’t give our money to. PayPal, founded by white supremacist Peter Thiel, banned people from giving money to Palestinians before and during the genocide.

Digital banking isn’t the first way governments have controlled who gets capital and the agency it provides. In Ousmane Sembène’s 1968 film Mandabi, colonial banking removes a man from history. Mandabi follows Ibrahima Dieng, a poor man in Dakar who lives in a ghetto where people pass the same 20 francs back and forth until they die. Dieng receives a money order from his Parisian nephew, Abdou, for 25,000 francs, which is more money than Dieng’s ever seen in his life. He tries to cash the money order and is told he can’t without an official government ID, a birth certificate, and three photos of himself. Dieng has none of these things and bankrupts himself trying to get them. At the end of the film, he has to sell his last remaining asset, his house, to pay off the debt that trying to cash the money order put him in.

The Senegalese government doesn’t allow Dieng to access 25,000 francs because people like him aren’t supposed to participate in the economy at the money order level. He doesn’t work, he doesn’t speak French, he doesn’t have ID, and he can’t read the orders he’s supposed to understand. In Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, he writes “The power to act independently is the guarantee to participate actively and consciously in history. To be colonized is to be removed from history, except in the most passive sense.” The French-Senegalese bureaucracy removed Dieng from history, like PayPal executives removed Palestinians, because they didn’t want poor Black Muslims to have enough money to overthrow the government oppressing them. Dieng is a mirror to the world’s colonized people and lumpenproletariat, who are increasingly technologically classed out of the ability to spend money with agency with each passing year.

After watching Mandabi, I thought of the 2021 Wall Street Bets short squeezes. Wall Street Bets was a Reddit forum of stock traders who discovered that by using trading apps like Robinhood, they could coordinate to act like a hedge fund. They short squeezed GameStop and AMC stock, drove it to untold heights, and forewent personal profit by being willing to lose money to punish bigger, entrenched hedge funds. Writer Daisy Alioto described Wall Street Bets as being like “a bunch of olive pits getting together to say ‘Ok, now choke.’” The U.S. government quickly stepped in, coordinated with the stock trading apps, and banned people from trading GameStop stocks. Their message was clear: regular people aren’t supposed to participate in the economy on the hedge fund level.

In both Mandabi and Wall Street Bets, the financial actors’ morality takes a backseat to their class position. Sembène portrays Dieng as a contradictory everyman who threatens to hit his wives, neglects his children, and freely gives his scarce food and money to those in need. The Wall Street Bets community is rife with sexism and racism. Neither of those things mattered when the ruling class decided who could and couldn’t exert financial agency. Both Ibrahima Dieng and Wall Street Bets members were siloed into their position by the circumstances of their birth rather than the content of their characters. They weren’t born the kind of people allowed to participate in the economy at the levels they wanted to, and the state quickly stepped in to stop them when they tried.

From now on, I’m going to commit to carrying at least four $5 bills a week to hand out when people ask me for money. I’m also going to pay for more things in cash because I don’t like the thought of my purchases being tracked. As western governments weaken and climate collapse gets closer, I think it’s worth considering what is and isn’t valuable. I want to learn to garden and fix my own toilet. I don’t want the taps to stop running and to discover the digital money I’d use to pay the plumber is as worthless as the paper type’s becoming.

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Tāmaki (Auckland) Events

• Last weekend, a blackshirt paramilitary group called Destiny Church stormed a drag queen story hour and forced 30 children and adults to barricade themselves inside. They then threateningly demonstrated at the Auckland Corporate Pride Parade the next day. People canceled multiple other gay pride events in fear.
  
  Our evangelical Christian and white supremacist prime minister, Christopher Luxon, made it clear he’s not going to punish Destiny Church. The group I’m secretary of, People Against Prisons Aotearoa, is holding a rally this Sunday at 2pm at Albert Park to push back. Please come to this. The police aren’t going to protect queer people and we need to build a mass organization to defend ourselves. There are more of us than there are of them. We need to wake up to our power and start acting like it.
  

• The Capitol Cinema Film Club, where I saw Mandabi, is playing Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation on Wednesday, February 26 at The Capitol Cinema at 8pm. Tickets are $15 and I strongly recommend going. They’ve never shown me a bad movie, and they often show me things that change the way I see the world.

Recommended Reading

• My friend and comrade Emmy Rākete’s essay about how Destiny Church was able to grow because the state retreated from caring for people under neoliberalism.
  

• My friend Alicia’s rant on how people who eat beef and ignore its impacts on the climate are being babies.
  

• Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Patreon, where you can read her world-class film and TV reviews.