Cash and a Return to Human Experience

A response to the rise of artificial intelligence and digitisation proposed by The Atlantic’s executive editor Adrienne LaFrance is ‘a cultural and philosophical movement’ promoting a return to human experience. The physical nature of cash, along with its familiarity and ease of use, make it the ideal driver for reshaping our relationship with money.

In The Coming Humanist Renaissance, LaFrance suggests ‘too many people have allowed [recent] technologies to simply wash over them’ without actively questioning the advantages and disadvantages offered. Writing a response for City Journal, Fred Bauer links this line of thought to digital payments and ‘concerns about a cashless society, in which no alternative exists to digital payment.’

The immediate benefits of continuing to use and support cash are obvious. It offers anonymity—an increasingly rare commodity—and protects personal data. It can also be used offline, at times when networks fail, or internet and electricity connections go down.

Beyond this, though, the physical nature of cash is significant. It can simplify budgeting and increase awareness of expenditure by giving a person’s outgoings a tangible dimension (often referred to as ‘the pain of paying’), which helps to reduce frivolous spending. People worldwide—especially younger generations—are taking control of their finances with ‘cash stuffing’: a hot new trend with a decades-old background that uses physical money to manage expenses.

There is also an immediacy and certainty to cash payments that singles them out from other options. While it is possible to fake a payment confirmation screen, cash in hand is a certain sign that value has been exchanged. The face-to-face nature of cash transactions is also a social experience, contributing to the maintenance of social connections that LaFrance argues are valuable to human relationships.

Cash sits well alongside trends that increasingly value analogue experiences—with one example being 17 straight years of growth in vinyl album sales—and also offers some unique benefits not replicated by its digital counterparts, indicating it has an ongoing role to play in cultures and payments, however the future unfolds.