This is confusing. I thought it was just a couple of friends and I that thought that cashless is a horrible idea. Seems like we at least have older people on our side.
> Yet Sweden is divided into two camps: the first says "we love the new technology", while the other just can’t be bothered, Skarec says.
Also, it is scary that people think like this. Everyone is in such a rush to digitize everything and implement new tech that we don't think about the consequences of our actions. E.g the scandal from last year where Transportstyrelsen (Swedish Transport Agency) outsourced work to a company in the Czech Republic and gave people without security clearance access to the database. That included access to details concerning military vehicles and two different police registers.
This is an uncanny coincidence. Just today I (being a Swede in the largest city) wanted to deposit some old bills, and found out my primary bank went completely cashless years ago, and my secondary bank never dealt in cash to begin with.
This sounded so weird to me so I had to google it while on the phone with the support rep. Turns out it's a big shift where at some point around ten years ago, the government released control and now almost every big private actor is moving away from cash, despite the fact that it goes against the recommendation of nearly every expert in the field.
It worries me hugely, and I am considering switching banks to the only big bank that is actively in favour of dealing in cash: Handelsbanken. I know this will come at some cost to me, but if the alternative is sticking with a bank that does not even offer one of the core services of banking---even society---that will have to be worth it.
> Yet Sweden is divided into two camps: the first says "we love the new technology", while the other just can’t be bothered, Skarec says.
Also, it is scary that people think like this. Everyone is in such a rush to digitize everything and implement new tech that we don't think about the consequences of our actions. E.g the scandal from last year where Transportstyrelsen (Swedish Transport Agency) outsourced work to a company in the Czech Republic and gave people without security clearance access to the database. That included access to details concerning military vehicles and two different police registers.