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This idea that surveillance and centralization[0] are mainly dangerous in a dictatorship is quite harmful, and I've heard shallow dismissals based on this, along the lines of "we would have bigger problems then". To be fair, these arguments were originally from well-meaning advocacy, and these tendencies would make a classic coup d'etat easier, when you want to take full control of key places and paralyze any opposition.

But the main consequences of central control are universal to any political system. Law enforcement and organizations in general are corrupt everywhere to varying degrees. You're probably more likely to be harassed because some random employee doesn't like you (or "likes" you too much), for a random reason, and not because of some large political intrigue. Consider this in a system with no recourse and accountability, and where you cannot know that you are targeted or why (see getting explanations for bans from banks or internet corporations).

For example, currently payment processors seem to have a reputation for being pro-consumer. I'd be interested in how this persists long term in a truly cashless society.

[0] I came to avoid the word 'privacy' for basic rights discussions, because it also seems to facilitate trivialization.

And the next time there's a major network outage, whether because of incompetence (like the recent national outage in Canada), natural disaster, sabotage, or even war, access to all of those conveniences will be frozen solid. One won't be able to purchase so much as a stick of gum.

James Burke, in the series Connections, warns of the "technology trap", where our dependence on various high-tech systems becomes so heavily ingrained that any significant outage leaves the workings of society lethally nonfunctional. Certainly something to consider...

newsflash: point of sales transactions can usually be processed offline, and settled at a later point in time.

Merchant A might be unable to process while offline, while Merchant B next door will have no such issue.

A quick check suggests that offline credit card payments can "expire" if the network doesn't come back online within 24-72 hours, leaving the merchant with a loss. Not terribly reassuring.

Merchant B won't be able to serve the unexpected surplus of new customers due to supply chain constraints and JIT delivery/lack of storage.

How does that help during a power outage?

Maybe where you are? But EFTPOS in Canada is done online. It is designed to. The bank interrogates the cryptographic processor in the chip and pin card over the network with each purchase.

I was unable to purchase anything with my bank card for more than a day during the outage mentioned above.

In a cashless society there is a lot of information about people in few hands and you never know how this information will be used now or in the future. It can be a democracy or a dictatorship. The corruption is everywhere, the threshold is different.

That's probably true in practice but it doesn't have to be. In Japan they have train passes which effectively give you cashless money. They don't require you to register them. To add money you can put them in a machine and add cash. They can be used to buy many things. Most convenience stores accept them for example.

That said, most people do register them or use their phones in 2022 so in that case, yes you can be tracked.

They can also be tracked by their history if you have othe data sources. Let’s say you have cell phone data of someone. You can then correlate that with place (let’s say home and work) and time of a few purchases. This then de-anonymizes the card and the other purchases, even if they had their cellphone turned of in the delicate purchases.

That's not a problem in Australia. The LOT OF INFORMATION is really in the hands of a pile of people. Breaches in security (even medical systems) are almost weekly, so everyone really has access to all the info.

The police use bus passes to track criminals, and even the use of COVID check-ins are fair game.

That is completely incorrect. In cashless payment systems like GNU Taler customers are anonymous while only merchants e.g. recipients of payments are not anonymous to comply with anti money laundering and income transparency for the purpose of taxes.

Ah yes, the widespread and highly used GNU Taler

Australia is not cashless. New notes and coins are minted regularly. I still pay using cash, and increasingly so. Never once, ever, has there been a problem paying with cash, nor do I expect there to be.

For those online services that only accept cards, you can buy a gift card from the local post office or a few other locations & use that.

What you describe is my dystopian nightmare.

Can you please tell me why it is your dystopian nightmare? I had the opposite feeling.

> why

You are living somewhere where your actions are logged and made available to parties, and where people around you do not notice.

Australia is not cashless, it's just that cash is infrequently used.

You can easily get cash out at ATMs, to buy some weed from a dealer or for buying second hand goods from other people on Facebook Marketplace. You can pay your groceries with cash, or any bill at a post office.

You'd be surprised at the number of people buying drugs using PayID.

But you can have almost all of that while still having cash! I can see the benefit of security for some people (eg train lady) and that could be one of exceptions but I believe most places should be mandated to take cash payments as privacy and redundancy should prioritised more than ever.

We know from experience that government, whether totalitarian or not, can abuse any power they have. That’s why we have checks and balances everywhere in our society like judicial reviews or ombudsman. Cash is one of those checks and balances.

You never worked in a store that got robbed?

I saw a video once of a bus driver who got a shotgun shoved into his face. Those things no longer happen now.

Fortunately no but I’ve been personally robbed though when they took the cash in my wallet. I still carry around cash.

> I saw a video of a bus driver who got a shotgun shoved into his face

I too have seen videos of violence. Welcome to the internet.

EDIT: note that I don’t disagree with some exceptions and going mainly cashless. Most people will be cashless as it’s convenient. But I’m arguing for that having 5% to 10% cash usage in our society is better than 100% cashless.

I love the sentiment of avoiding the totalitarian dictatorship but you don’t exactly have any control there. Technology is leverage and it can be used for evil, just as with IBM tabulating machines in nazi Germany

So what do you propose instead? Destroy all modern tabulating machines a.k.a. computers just in case they'll get misused by the government?

Then feel free to throw away that supercomputer in your pocket with advanced tracking capabilities into the nearest toilet and flush.

Keeping a healthy democracy and our leaders accountable is far better for everyone than going back to the stone age just in case someone might misuse tech.

And since you brought up Nazis using tabulating machines to abuse Jews, remember that the Nazis were also defeated thanks to computers to break their codes.

The tech arms race is still a thing whether you like it or not and there's no going back. If your government isn't developing advanced snooping, they'll have no issues buying said tools from a country who does (US, Israel, Italy, Sweden, etc.)

I rarely carry cash (or even a wallet) around anymore and I agree it's convenient. But one thing that bothers me is that we've allowed something like one percent of our entire retail economy to go directly towards supporting a rent-seeking American duopoly (Mastercard and Visa).

The crazy thing is that we've got a payment system that is free (Osko) but we can't be bothered moving to it.

> Australia has phone based drivers licenses

This is news to me, out here on the West coast. Might have to look into that!

Travelling to the West coast i asked a fellow passenger "how far back should i wind my watch?".

"About 20 years" came the reply. :D

Hah!

I do believe it's a different pace of life out here :)

NSW.. I've got a physical license. Where is it digital. What if you switch to a flip phone?

Whole you're looking, check out the digital identity act which completely contravenes the referendum we had (in the ?80's) which voted against having a national identity card.

Whilst I am not super keen to have a national identity card, the Australian government has effectively linked all this info together already, with agencies cooperating.

Also, I'm not sure that a referendum held 35 years ago really means very much. In that time the population has grown from 16 million to 26 million, and many of the people who voted in the referendum would no longer be alive.

They had a trial in Queensland. The plan is to allow both for the foreseeable future.

Even the cash based society under a totalitarian dictatorship idea tends to forget that the cash in question is issued by said dictatorship, and the currency is a public monopoly. The dictatorship sets what tax is settled in.

The veneration of this type of cash forgets what it is in a modern world - a receipt for banking liabilities at either the central bank or the government Treasury. It's those that make the tokens worth something.

So basically you are saying that all citizens are required to accept the terms of service and privacy policy of their pick of Apple or Google to participate in commerce, travel, etc.

As someone that typically leaves home with no electronics, only uses open source privacy respecting software, has no cell phone, and uses no google/apple products, it seems I would be unwelcome in your country.

It sounds a lot like your country has ceded to a US surveillance capitalism duopoly

Given Australia took the extraordinary step of violating UN Human Rights codes it agreed to when preventing citizens and in some cases foreign residents from leaving the country during the pandemic I'd say they're already on the way.

After all, the action was unprecedented, contravened human rights and aligned their response with North Korea and China, the only other countries who have ever had such restrictions.

This action had the result of a number of despicable outcomes, such as denying people from visiting dying loved ones, separating families including parents from children and worse.

After massive sacrifice, the country is now topping the charts in COVID deaths -- despite >90% vaccination. Human rights trampled for nothing, apparently.

Australia is also at the forefront of invasive pernicious surveillance, with a previous PM claiming Australian law 'trumps math' (in trying to ban encryption) and huge amounts of spying. The current government's party vehemently voted in favor of mass surveillance on all ISP connections, as well as supported content filtering (censorship) -- including for political content.

The relevant metric here is cumulative excess mortality, not current infection rate.

I always love these strong opinions about Australasian responses to Covid, and how they tend to significantly differ from the opinions of the people who live in that country.

Something about it really riled some segments overseas up, to the point they were frothing at the month claiming Australia had concentration camps, and NZ was a socialist hellhole.

You're right about the Australian government's obsession with surveillance though. But then, as a Kiwi, I've always felt that started when John Howard wanted to be best buds with George W Bush, and Australia started mimicking the US.

So your response is a strawman argument? Where did I mention concentration camps?

I'm referring to UN Human Rights charters, of which Australia is a signatory.

No you didn't, that's my bad, as I intended, but forgot to, give you kudos for not doing so.

> After massive sacrifice, the country is now topping the charts in COVID deaths

You sound so out of touch with what the Australian experience has been.

Australia has had 14k deaths from COVID, vs over 1 million for the US. Percapita that is about 1/5 the deaths of the US. We've also had about 1.5 times the reported cases per capita than the US.

The strategy was to lock down until the population was vaccinated. Once that had happened, it was time to open back up again. Of course we were going to see more deaths.

Yes, the lockdowns were frustrated, yes unfortunate situationsboccurred. But going by the US stats, the response of the Australian government probably saved about 180 thousand lives.

I explained how Australia trampled on UN Human Rights charters, including by essentially imprisoning foreign residents. What does that have to do with lockdown policies?

There's a pretty big leap between mask mandates (a pretty common response) and preventing foreigners from leaving, a UN Human Rights violation that almost no other country engaged in other than dictatorships like North Korea and China.

> essentially imprisoning foreign residents

This sounds hyperbolic. Can you provide a link to a reputable source that shows foreign nationals being imprisoned?