Cashless Society. We’ve been sold this expression since we were children. I can remember hearing way back in primary school and thinking ‘its the future’! Back then it was a little hard to fathom, I have been a computer nerd my entire life, and even something like a ‘cashless society’ was straight out of star trek. Now, years on, technology has evolved into a completely unknown beast. What was once unimagined is expected for 10 dollars or less. Technology that was considered radical is now being distributed on McDonald’s happy meal toys. Hell, check out the Brain Computer Interface and come to the realization that the world is ‘moving forward’ quicker than you can imagine.

Cashless Society. A world without cash. It makes sense, we are nearly there if you consider that credit cards and internet transactions are basically ‘cashless’. Yet we are still bound to carrying something physical aren’t we. Credit cards need wallets, internet transactions need credit cards. Not exactly the free range monetary chicken coop we were led to believe when we hear the trigger words ‘cashless society’. Onto the stage and into the lime light steps the Verichip, the worlds first and only FDA approved implantable microchip for humans. Don’t worry folks – we want it, we just don’t know it yet!

Verichip - It's there when you need it. Also when you don't.

See, its not that terrifying after all is it? When you look closely at it, its size is comparable to a single grain of rice. It sounds a bit rough, never fear people are working tirelessly to ensure that you wont notice them. Hitachi currently has one developed the size of a speck of powder. You really have to see the image to believe it. Assuming you haven’t read about microchips or RFID I will do you the liberty of explaining what it is all about. Currently, PositiveID is ‘helping’ the medical industry with these amazing devices. If you have a pet dog or cat, you will have connected the dots already. Basically you get implanted with this RFID chip, and forever can be ‘read’ with a handheld device or an RFID portal. Mobile phones are RFID enabled through NFC.

Upon the ‘scanning’, the RFID chip broadcasts a unique identifier key that allows the ‘reader’ to match your unique chip with the relevant database record. Here watch a video:

Neat-o right? Well I guess if you didn’t exactly catch on to the example I used above. Still blank? You are not an animal. That basic comparison is the tip of the iceberg. Privacy advocates all around the world are bashing their heads against anything they can to prevent humans from being micro chipped. I’ll touch upon a few points as to why, as if you couldn’t already guess. Verichip have been busy implanting these devices inside of Alzheimer’s patients, which sounds innocent enough or good heartedly motivated. But think about it, if a patient can’t logically make a decision regarding the implantation, how can they give permission with a ‘sound mind’? When does it become ‘forced’ implantation? That point gets made in the in-your-face honest documentary titled ‘One Mainframe to Rule them All‘, featuring the author of the book ‘IBM & the Holocaust‘, Edwin Black

Cashless Society. There is only two options before us, for a truly cashless society to exist. One involves our mobile phones incorporating every piece of data usually stored on plastic cards in our wallets – Medicare, licenses, credit and bank cards etc and integrating a new form of Point of Sale device at the counter of businesses, allowing a transaction to occur with the simple swipe of your mobile phone. Or we all get micro chipped and the same thing happens. Option one is going to be the way to integrate option two, as seen this ad:

The man simply walks through a scanner at the exit of the shopping center. There is nothing to say that he has an implantable microchip, or a device acting as his ‘phone’. This is what is known as subliminal conditioning. We are being conditioned through gradualism to accept this cashless society and we do not even know it. Thats why the very term ‘Cahselss Stoceiy’ causes a whirlpool of endocrines stirring in your brains. These trigger words have been embedded into our memory to recall every single futuristic movie we have ever seen, all the ‘good’ ones. Every time we hear ‘Cashless Society’ we relive how amazing it would be in the future, where we didn’t need to carry anything tangible to function.

Keyless entry to our house, remote starting the car, hands free shopping, secure Star Trek doors – the list is endless. All these possibilities do actually sound pretty enticing, but what kind of negatives are we looking at? For starters everyone has used Google Earth. Pretty cool application, freaky for the first five minutes using it. Now imagine every single person in the world had a microchip, cold shivers. Now imagine that every single microchip was represented as a bright orange dot on Google Earth! Boom! Now you are getting it! Ok heres another one, lets just say you got into an argument with the bank. Mean words are exchanged and the boss takes it personally. He turns your account off. All of a sudden, in a cashless world, you have no money! You have no means to purchase any food or pay the bills – the entire world operates on ‘digital credits’. What then?

This isn’t a ‘Conspiracy Theory‘, its a hypothetical situation that can occur tomorrow, as the technology is already being used throughout the world. VISA has already promised a cashless experience for everyone at the 2012 Olympics. ‘Conspiracy Theory‘ is a trigger word, a very powerful one. Even the most intelligent of people fall victim to the power this expression wields both in its use as a weapon to prevent an epic dialectic, or experience its devastating destructive powers as it is aimed in your direction.

Verichip teamed up with a company named Receptors LLC. What this merging has bought to the table is the combination of an implantable microchip, and a sensor that is a “virus triage detection system for the H1N1 virus”. So basically you can be ‘scanned‘ and it can determine if you are infected with H1N1 or any other pathogens they develop the capability of detecting. Imagine the potential to be able to halt a potentially epidemic virus and isolate it at the exact moment and place it entered a foreign country? What if it had caught it exiting to begin with?

Verichip teamed up with a company named Steel Vault. “Within its ID Security segment, PositiveID offers its Health Link web-based personal health record, and identity theft protection and related services including credit monitoring and reporting through its NationalCreditReport.com website.” PositiveID was born into the world of commerce. This sounds an aweful lot like the new database that has been formed under the Australian people’s noses. Databases aren’t a new concept to society. They were made infamous amongst the NAZI ranks in Germany in the early 1930′s. Here is an excerpt of Willy Heidinger (speaking about the Hollerith machine) from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

We are recording the individual characteristics of every single member of the nation onto a little card….We are proud that we can contribute to such a task, a task that provides the physician of our German body politic with the material [he needs] for his examination, so that our physician can determine whether, from the standpoint of the nation’s health, the data thus arrived at correlate in a harmonious, that is, healthy, relationship — or whether diseased conditions must be cured by corrective interventions….We have firm confidence in our physician and will follow his orders blindly, for we know that he will lead our nation toward a great future. Heil to our German people and their leader!

Not quite the ‘Cashless Society‘ everyone thought it was.

How much time do we have before this chip is enforced en mass for the ‘betterment’ of society? Who will benefit from them the most? You? Me? Governments? Bankers? How long before generation Z starts requesting demanding it as an accessory for their iPhone? ‘Cashless Society‘. This isnt paranoid thinking. We have been embedded with subconscious desires for this microchip, and the companies that are developing these technologies aren’t famous for their humanitarian efforts. Is it time to create awareness that this isn’t science fiction anymore? When you come across a company like SoMark Innovations and you see for yourself the merging of RFID technology and tattoos, it’s way too surreal to be ignored.

In five years what will tomorrow look like? Is it a world that you would want to live in? Or is it time to put a flag in the ground and say this is where humanity draws the line before we cross one that can’t be uncrossed?