Cloud money by brett scott9/23/2023 ![]() ![]() Without the earth and nature, there would be no economy. Yet for all the technological infrastructure that makes up the backbone of global finance, Scott reminds us that all of this is derived from the land. If corridors of server racks and backup generators comprise its flesh, miles of CAT6 Ethernet and fiber-optic cable make up the veins and capillaries of the global payments network. Take for instance the Visa card network, which is housed in a data center encircled by a moat and 24/7 armed guard in an undisclosed location in Fairfax County, Virginia. The payment networks and high-frequency trading algorithms that ferry money around the world all live somewhere. “Every element of these buildings,” Scott says of the towers of capital, “is designed to exude a sense of impenetrable power.” “The architecture echoes our relationship with high finance most people stand beneath these monoliths, on the outside looking up.” The book opens on the built environment: skyscrapers that house trading firms and fintech accelerators, multi-billion dollar data center complexes, and the fiber-optic cable networks that form the system’s global connective tissue. ![]() I often see those structures as having a logic that transcends the individual good intentions of those who find themselves employed by them, or even of those running them.”Ĭloudmoney ’s greatest strength is how it brings the abstractions of finance and technology down to earth. “All of us have to survive in this world, and for the majority that means having to work within its existing structures. With the on-the-ground lens of an anthropologist, Scott deconstructs the complex abstractions of finance and technology into scenes that play out in front of us from on our phone screens to ayahuasca tourism in Peru and the chama women’s cooperatives of the Kenyan informal market. The inherent friction of cash, Scott argues, serves as a bulwark against the automation and corporate capture of a monetary system increasingly ensconced within the cloud. ![]() From marketing strategies against cash, to the weaponization of Covid-19 to push fintech platforms, and the rise of the cryptocurrency rebels and fringe groups pushing back.Cloudmoney by Brett Scott is a love letter to cash. He explains the technical, political, and cultural differences between our different forms of money, and shows how the cash system has been under attack for decades, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress.Ĭloudmoney takes us to the frontlines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom. He dives beneath the surface of the global financial system to uncover a long-established lobbying infrastructure: an alliance of partners waging a covert war on cash. In Cloudmoney, Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of big finance and tech requires 'cloudmoney' - digital money underpinned by the banking sector - to replace physical cash. And the great battle of our time is the battle for ownership of the digital footprints that make up our lives. But what we're told is a natural and inevitable move is the work of powerful interests. The reach of corporations into our lives via cards and apps has never been greater many of us rarely use cash these days.
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