Cashless-society talk goes mainstream in a hurry, and should be trusted about as far as the NSA

“We’re about to abandon the traditional system of money and accounting and introduce a new one.” The speaker was Pippa Malmgren, economist and former presidential adviser, on stage at the World Government Summit in Dubai in March 2022, in a session the organisers had titled, without irony, “Are we ready for a new world order?” The new accounting, she said, was blockchain, which meant digital, which meant “an almost perfect record of every single transaction”. Nobody on the panel disagreed. A year earlier, saying that bankers, economists and governments were planning a state-controlled digital currency would have been called a conspiracy theory and might have got the account that said it suspended. By the autumn of 2022 it was table talk, and the people planning it were the ones talking.

This page keeps the moment and the argument made about it here at the time.

From horizon to timetable

Central bank digital currencies had moved in a few years from a research topic to a schedule. China’s e-CNY was in public trials in a dozen cities. The European Central Bank was in a two-year investigation phase for a digital euro. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York had, the week before this was written, begun a pilot with nine banks, described on the previous page. The forums where such things are announced had stopped hedging.

Malmgren herself had written, in a piece this site carried earlier in the year, about the dangers of programmable money: the ability to see every transaction, to set conditions on spending, and to switch an account off. On the Dubai stage she said those dangers could be resolved with a “digital constitution of human rights”. That is the claim worth examining, because everything depends on whether such a constitution would hold.

The precedent

There is a record to consult. When the Patriot Act passed in 2001, the collection of telephone and internet data on Americans was to be governed by warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a safeguard presented as adequate. The National Security Agency then built a data centre in Utah of a size that made sense only if everything was being kept. In 2013 Edward Snowden showed that it was. In 2019 the Justice Department’s inspector general found seventeen significant errors and omissions in the FISA applications used to surveil a presidential campaign adviser in 2016, and the court itself rebuked the FBI. The safeguard existed on paper throughout. What it did not do was stop anything.

The argument made here was simple. If a warrant system with judges and a statute could not protect a man about to become president from the abuse of his own government’s surveillance powers, a “digital constitution” written by the same class of institutions would not protect an ordinary account holder from having his money watched, conditioned or frozen. And a central bank digital currency would make freezing easier than it had been in February 2022, when Canada invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts of protesting truckers and their donors: with a state-run ledger there would be no bank to instruct, only a setting to change.

Why the timing mattered

The pilots were arriving as private cryptocurrency, the thing digital currency was supposedly emulating, went through its own collapse. FTX had failed the week before. The suspicion recorded here was that a crisis in the unregulated version would be used to sell the regulated one, as the safe alternative to a fraud. Whether or not that was anyone’s intention, it is how the argument was made in the months that followed.

A clip circulating that week from a banking panel described a digital currency in which every transaction could be approved or denied against a set of rules, including a rule about carbon use. Whether that was a plan or a hypothetical, the point is that it was said aloud, on a stage, by people in a position to build it. The people who would be governed by it were not asked. That is what “mainstream” meant.

Later note. The European Central Bank moved its digital euro to a “preparation phase” in November 2023. China’s e-CNY remained in pilot with low voluntary take-up. The United States, as the previous page records, moved the other way, and in 2025 prohibited its agencies from establishing a retail digital dollar. Programmable money, in the sense feared here, exists in 2026 in pilots and in nobody’s wallet, which is not the same as saying the argument was wrong. It is saying the argument was heard.