A cashless society promises a world of limitation, control, and surveillance - all of which the poorest Americans already have in abundance, of course. For the most vulnerable, the cashless society offers nothing substantively new; it only extends the reach of the existing paternal bureaucratic state.

Sarah Jeong

Categorized in : New Promises World Society

In the early days, I loved Facebook. I loved being able to keep tabs on hundreds of college classmates all at once, of being able to tag all my dorm mates in the photos we took on our garbage 7 megapixel cameras, of creeping on crushes, of keeping up with every person I met at a party or in a classroom without doing very much work.

Sarah Jeong

loved classmates college work

Artificial intelligence is just a new tool, one that can be used for good and for bad purposes and one that comes with new dangers and downsides as well. We know already that although machine learning has huge potential, data sets with ingrained biases will produce biased results - garbage in, garbage out.

Sarah Jeong

bad good intelligence learning

In a cashless society, the cash has been converted into numbers, into signals, into electronic currents. In short: Information replaces cash.

Sarah Jeong

short information society numbers

Facebook lets me be lazy the way a man in a stereotypical 1950s office can be lazy. Facebook is the digital equivalent of my secretary, or perhaps my wife, yelling at me not to forget to wish someone a happy birthday or to inform me I have a social engagement this evening.

Sarah Jeong

me man wife birthday

Information is lightning-quick. It crosses cities, states, and national borders in the twinkle of an eye. It passes through many kinds of devices, flowing from phone to phone and computer to computer, rather than being sealed away in those silent marble temples we used to call banks.

Sarah Jeong

phone silent information eye

In America, surveillance has always played an outsized role in the relationship between creditors and debtors.

Sarah Jeong

role always relationship america

The belief that the law will never 'catch up' to technology is borne in part of tech exceptionalism, a libertarian elitism that derides any kind of legal or regulatory impediment as Luddism.

Sarah Jeong

legal never technology law

You can't copyright a urinal. But you could probably copyright a sculpture of a urinal. And like Duchamp's famous work, code is both, at the same time.

Sarah Jeong

like you work time

Oracle v. Google is a vast, sprawling piece of litigation over the Android platform, one where the billions of dollars at stake were the least-significant possible consequence of the lawsuit.

Sarah Jeong

possible over where google

When it comes to music, movies, literature, paintings, and even Bikram yoga, it's pretty easy to have an opinion about whether something has been copied. Software, on the other hand, was an awkward late addition to the original Copyright Act of 1976, shoehorned into section 102(a) as a 'literary work.'

Sarah Jeong

movies opinion music work

Because the American credit reporting system relies on both good and bad reports of creditworthiness, a consumer must have some kind of credit - not just the absence of bad credit.

Sarah Jeong

bad good credit good-and-bad

People don't object to spying on the grounds that the secret dossier about them might be full of errors. They object to spying because it's spying.

Sarah Jeong

about because secret people

The effect of letting someone sue without showing harm is obvious: It makes it really easy to sue.

Sarah Jeong

without someone obvious easy

Not everyone can afford to plunk down hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars on a laptop.

Sarah Jeong

afford laptop everyone down

Mechanisms that prevent Keurig machines from using off-label coffee pods are annoying but relatively harmless.

Sarah Jeong

prevent machines annoying coffee

In the quest for perfect protection of Sony's intellectual property, the company threw the privacy and security of their customers under the bus.

Sarah Jeong

bus security privacy perfect

Surveillance has long been theorized as a way to control the surveilled - namely, by getting them to police themselves out of fear of being watched.

Sarah Jeong

police fear long way

Wherever information gathers and flows, two predators follow closely behind it: censorship and surveillance. The case of digital money is no exception. Where money becomes a series of signals, it can be censored; where money becomes information, it will inform on you.

Sarah Jeong

will you information money

I was a kid when the Tamagotchi craze hit, and I was always envious of my friends and cousins who got to hand-rear their little digital babies.

Sarah Jeong

kid always friends digital

A Tamagotchi is a beep encased in a plastic shell. It exists to haunt you with ghostly notifications that signify nothing.

Sarah Jeong

shell nothing you plastic