Patrice Baubeau

Dematerialization and the Cashless Society: A Look Backward, a Look Sideward

The idea of a cashless society, as promoted for the last half-century or so, combines two key ideas, namely the disappearance of cash from Mr and Mrs Smith’s pockets and the role played in this change by a technologically-led move towards the dematerialization of money. Nevertheless, even though a kind of consensus is noticeable upon the progressive disappearance of cash and check payments, from a longer-term perspective the two key ideas of cash and dematerialization appear problematic at best. In fact, dematerialization goes hand in hand with materialization and depends a lot on how these terms are interpreted.