In 2016, Dutch futurist and World Economic Forum (WEF) “Young Global Leader” Ida Auken wrote of her vision for life in 2030: “I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”

While her premise was that technology had made everything free to use, it also alluded to a place where “all the people who do not live in our city [with] all this technology … live different kinds of lives outside of the city.” She added: “Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th-century villages.”

That latter group is probably the one that will still be using cash.

“Cash is king,” we used to say, but we’re creating a society that’s beginning to turn up its nose at those paper bills that once filled our wallets. As one example, and thanks in part to the pandemic, many of us now go to events at venues where cash is banned. The local minor league ballpark did away with cash purchases in 2021. Since then, fans reload a team-provided gift card during each home stand to purchase overpriced concessions.

We were talking about this in our shop way back in 2011, when one of our analysts pointed out the major financial institutions that claimed eliminating cash could “maximize the economic potential of ‘society’s poorest members.’” But he also noted that bankers couldn’t charge interest on cash, adding: “For the elitist class, hard-to-find money is a bug in the system because it gives people a measure of anonymity and privacy. Sentient human beings understand that cash might be the last bastion of resistance to the elimination of that privacy — along with the liberty such privacy ultimately engenders.”

In our particular case, we don’t like having a mere dollar left on our gift card because it’s not enough to purchase anything — and that doesn’t exactly maximize our economic potential.

Since all this wisdom came out, though, our culture has not only gone even further toward being cash free but has heavily invested in cryptocurrency, a form of exchange that our Mark Alexander has dubbed “nothing but air,” though he adds: “If speculators want to formulate a value for a cubic foot of air and trade it back and forth, that is fine. Kinda reminds me of the so-called ‘carbon credit’ scams to offset ‘climate change.’”

Alexander also dismisses crypto as the “intersectional currency of Scientology and astrology,” and recent news reports, particularly on the rise and fall of “crypto zero” Sam Bankman-Fried, point out the volatility and risk inherent in that vast world. In the proverbial blink of an eye, SBF went from a net worth of $32 billion to zero.

Another riches-to-rags story: Mehul Desai, the Group Chief Technology Officer of Finablr, a payment processing firm, wrote for the WEF in January 2020: “This is my vision of a true cashless society. There is an exchange of value in its entirety — just like cash. And it requires a national government — rather than banks or the like — to act as the payment provider, effectively becoming a state-backed utility. The savings from avoiding the processing costs could then be used to benefit those in need, such as by being transferred to a fund to rejuvenate economically depressed areas, as one example.”

By the end of 2020, Finablr was sold to an investment group for the princely sum of $1.

But Desai’s idea of a national government acting as the payment provider also brings up the specter of a Chinese-style social credit score, among other freedom-tramplers. Yet young adults who’ve become accustomed to having wallets chock-full of payment cards are now the parents of kids who earn virtual cash to purchase virtual items. Quite often, that virtual cash requires real cash (handed to them by the parents, of course) to purchase.

A recent Wall Street Journal article detailed the families who have allowed their kids to spend virtual money at the Roblox website popular with tweens. For “the equivalent of $5 in Robux,” one family’s 12-year-old girl “bought a virtual Louis Vuitton handbag, while her 10-year-old sister … got a virtual Gucci jacket.” In other words, actual money on the parents’ bank or credit card bought each of these girls a pixelated online accessory item for their online characters. Is this a great country or what?

The Journal article also notes: “Some children’s advocacy groups, politicians and online-commerce researchers have raised concerns about games that sell virtual goods to adolescents, particularly when the goods are sold in blind packs like baseball cards.” What a great analogy: As the 12-year-old kid who bought dozens of packs of baseball cards in hopes of finding that rare Mark “The Bird” Fidrych card but instead got a stack of cardboard-like bubble gum and a bunch of Major League has-beens and never-weres, we can relate.

This isn’t to say that the modern-day convenience of direct deposit, online banking, and ordering food from one’s phone are bad things. Like any other tool, they have their usefulness. But they also assume that people have online access to their funds, and they introduce us to the risk of hackers stealing our hard-earned funds.

Those of us raised with parents or grandparents who lived through the Great Depression learned the value of paper money and living within limited means. Auken’s dystopian vision of a world where everything is free and nothing is owned may be closer than we think.

It’s been said here many times before: With online marketing, you are the product. Big Tech and multinational financial corporations are taking your privacy and trading to you the meager wages of convenience, all as part of the effort to wean you off cash and the sense of ownership it represents.

At least to us, old-fashioned greenbacks are now more appealing than ever.