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M AG P I E 0 2
TA K E O F F
The cashless society is – nearly – here. But what will life be like in 2318 when there is no physical money to handle? How will we remember notes and coins? Kim Nguyen speculates.
t’s 8:37 a.m. when Debbie Card is awakened by the gentle pulse of her bed’s integrated alarm. Showered and dressed by 8:44 a.m., she rushes out her front door and catches one of the hypercrafts that passes her house every 30 seconds. Hopping aboard, she places the index finger of her right hand on the LCD screen and waits for the beep. Once she’s scanned the Mollusc Chip inserted under her skin, deducting 50p, the craft speeds off on its three-mile journey to the office, which takes six minutes. As she approaches the National Archives, where she works as an archivist, she has just enough time to stop at the coffee machine, selecting a cappuccino and glancing at the retina scanner, which sets the machine whirring into action after deducting £1 from her Pupil Plus current account. She’s at her desk by 9.00 a.m., like “clockwork” – quaint, how that term lingers long after the technology it described has disappeared.
Debbie’s big project at work involves gathering evidence of how people in recent history paid for goods and services. She spends her day digitizing then filing images of people handling “notes”, thin rectangles of plastic and paper, and round metallic objects, which were known as “coins.” Hundreds of years ago, before retina scanners and finger-chips were invented, people found themselves burdened with the need to remember to bring these notes and coins with them wherever they went, so that they would be able to pay for the goods and services they needed. Because of the universal use of this primitive technology, Debbie has plenty of images showing people frantically searching their bags and pockets, wondering whether they’ve dropped their notes or coins, as well as handing these objects over shop counters in return for provisions.
