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BELGRADE
Saying there might be a problem with humanitarian cash transfers is like saying that you don’t think Baby Yoda is that cute; but somebody has to risk becoming a pariah in the aid community, and it might as well be me, since I’m already a pariah in the Star Wars community.
The problem is not with cash transfers per se, but with the financial technology we rely on to implement those transfers, and which makes possible and monetises surveillance on a scale never seen before.
One argument for cash transfers is that they cut out intermediaries – the UN agencies and NGOs who are currently pretending not to scuffle over market share in the cash space – but as the financial activist Brett Scott points out, the cashless society places a new set of intermediaries between individuals seeking to transact: payment service providers.