cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/63440
The apathy of the majority will allow governments to easily take away our physical cash and replace it with CBDCs, ushering in a utopia (or dystopia) of financial surveillance.
To us people, CBDCs represent a full-frontal assault on our ability to have sovereignty over honest transactions between ourselves. To the government, it is the most perfect tool for modifying the behaviour of its subjects since we all decided to voluntarily upload our lives onto social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. To the banks, CBDCs represent an existential threat to their existence as going concerns.
Imagine you are the “other”. The others in any society are those who are economically exploited, either by virtue of their ethnicity, their immigration status, their religious beliefs, and/or their accent. Their exploitation is allowed to continue by the majority because the majority are led to believe the others deserve their lowly station due to their supposedly deficient qualities.
Now imagine that you and the rest of the others decide to try to change your circumstances by nonviolent means. You march, sing songs of protest, and generally engage in non-violent civil disobedience. You use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo to organise and galvanise. Your movement grows to be quite large, and you decide it is time for a march on the capital to show the country how unjust its discriminatory policies are.
Prior to the big march, the movement continues to gain viral levels of visibility by effectively generating and disseminating heart-wrenching images from other smaller protests around the country. The government gets nervous. The police try to fight back by using tried-and-true tactics like firehosing and sicking attack dogs on you and your fellow peaceful protestors. Images of children mangled at the hands of the supposed protectors of the people sway public opinion against the government. That, as history has warned us, the government cannot abide.
The police inherit a new tool, the CBDC. Instead of carrying out overt acts against the protestors to stop the upcoming march on the capital, the police decide to ask Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and other platforms to hand over all data on anyone their algorithms believe were involved in the movement or sympathetic to it. On the days leading up the march, these individuals are completely frozen out of the financial system.
At this stage of the CBDC-verse, all economic activity between citizens occurs using digital money, and no other former currency (like physical cash) is accepted or even exists. The protestors and those who support them are thus unable to fill their cars up with gas, unable to purchase a bus, train, or plane ticket, unable to dine at a restaurant, unable to purchase food and water at the grocery store, and ultimately unable to organise effectively– so the march on the capital never materialises. You can’t march if you are starving or can’t get to the march in the first place.