Vine predicted the current relentless push towards a completely cashless society and more importantly, nine years ago Vine warned about the dangers surrounding giving up access to your cash, that many others are now warning about.
"Before you know it, you will be relinquishing all of your rights to your own money and will be powerless to stop corporations and governments
controlling your finances." - Vine 2015
Using credit instead of cash seems easier and more convenient, but there is also no doubt that as retail outlets and banks provide less opportunity to use cash, people simply HAVE to use less cash.
Banks Now Charging to Use Cash
The recent Commonwealth Bank announcement of a $3 charge to withdraw cash has exposed other major Australian banks' charges for handling cash.
As Vine predicted, we are slowly but surely being forced to go completely cashless.
Some of the Problems Vine Warned of with a Cashless Society
Lack of financial protection and oversight - No control over increased fees and the possibility of negative interest rates.
Privacy is at risk - In a cashless world, all of your spending can be tracked and even cut off for whatever reason they may come up with. Or an insurance company could increase your premiums based on the quality of the food you buy or alcohol you've purchased.
The corresponding push for compulsory Digital ID - The push for compulsory Digital ID goes hand in hand with the cashless society.
Anyone who refuses to provide intimate personal digital ID information - finger prints, photos of themselves taken with their smart phone (if they have one), voice prints - can be locked out of their own finances.
And all the personal information required for criminals to steal your identity will be stored in one central hackable honeypot. A one-stop-shop for identity theft and extortion.
BEWARE OF THE SPIN...
Billionaire elites buy political influence wholesale from media outlets and politicians who then use those same media outlets to sell their invasive and controlling ideologies to an unsuspecting public.
These methods are now being used to push false narratives about the need for a cashless society and what is stopping it:
False Narrative: Financial Crime:
They have tried to convince us we must remove cash because criminals use cash.
We are supposed to believe that because cash has been used extensively in financial crimes (money laundering etc.), removing cash would remove financial crime.
This argument is nonsensical.
As the use of cash diminishes across the world, criminals have already found other methods for illegal financial activities. They are already using sophisticated online techniques to launder money through digital channels.
"It is naïve in the extreme to expect that a business, industry or country ceasing to use physical currency will do anything other than displace financial crime away from that particular methodology and onto another." - Cashless is King for the Banks, Not Financial Crime Control
False Narrative: Older People are Slow to Adapt and May be Left Behind:
It is true that many older, abused and low income unbanked people still depend on cash and are disadvantaged by retailers that are already refusing to accept cash.
However, the spin that all older people are slow to adapt because they are not tech-savvy, is fake news being pitched at people not old enough to have experience of doing things any other way.
Far from being slow to adapt, many older Australians have had up to 30 years of adapting to each new digital technology thrown at them since the 1990s.
It is older people with experience of both systems (cash and digital), who have been able to realise the inherent dangers of a cashless society.
In many cases, that's why they're resisting, and that's why they're being attacked with condescending, patronising and ageist propaganda about being too slow to grasp digital technologies.
It's been almost 10 years since Vine first warned:
"It is now up to us to see the dangers and act before this gets completely out of our control" - Vine 2015
