History can be a useful guide to the future, especially when trying to predict the impact of disruptive changes on human organizations and cultures. I was reminded of this dictum when recently attending a very interesting workshop at the University of California, Irvine - Payment Technologies: Past Present and Future.
The workshop was sponsored by the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing and hosted by the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI). IMTFI was established in 2008 “to support research on money and technology among the world's poorest people. . . [and] to create a community of practice and inquiry into the everyday uses and meanings of money, as well as the technological infrastructures being developed as carriers of mainstream and alternative currencies worldwide.” It is part of UC Irvine’s School of Social Sciences.
The workshop brought together a mix of people from different disciplines, including anthropology, history, economics, business and technology. The agenda covered a wide variety of subjects, ranging from the methods used to keep track of transactions in ancient Mesopotamia and the pre-Columbian Inca Empire, to the advent of credit cards in the mid-20th century and the future of digital payments in the 21st century.
It was organized by IMTFI director Bill Maurer and USC Annenberg School doctoral candidate Lana Swartz, who distributed a short paper laying out the workshop’s objectives:
“The end of cash is on the agenda, seemingly everywhere. Constituencies rarely aligned - multinational payments companies, economic development and aid practitioners, nonprofit volunteers and venture capitalists - are coming together around the prospect of the supposedly imminent disappearance of physical currency objects. . .”
“Reaching further back in time, however, we also recognize that the era of cash - of tangible, physical objects of paper or metal serving as money - is, relatively speaking, a historical anomaly, especially seen from the point of view of 10,000 years of recorded human civilization. Archaeologists and historians of the ancient Near East have shown that money of account, recorded in transactional records, long pre-dated the minting of coin or other tangible objects used as a universal equivalent for exchange. In the beginning was not the coin, but the receipt. Is cashlessness a return, then, to a world of institutionalized, transactional record-keeping? If so, what questions ought scholars and practitioners be asking, now, about those past and possible future worlds?”