Switzerland – a country famous for its banks – is voting on one of the boldest monetary reforms ever devised. If passed, the Vollgeld Initiative will amend the Swiss Constitution to destroy fractional reserve banking, which may have significant implications for the world’s financial systems.
Most of us think that our checking account balances represent the money we own – the money we have "in the bank."
In thinking that, we are wrong.
We haven't been lied to, per se. Like with our social media, we just haven't read the fine print closely enough. We fail to understand the terms of service because it does not seem relevant: Using Facebook does not require that you understand what it does with your data. In the same way, you do not need to understand how banking works, or how it has come to work in the digital era, to do your banking. In both cases, it seems we have allowed ourselves to be duped.
Is this what it felt like for the illiterate peasants of medieval Europe, lorded over by the more highly educated? Indeed, "computer literacy" has become increasingly important for those wishing to affect, or even understand, the systems that shape the world and our lives. Carl Sagan once cautioned[1] that technological illiteracy "is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."
We would do well to be cognizant of the ways in which these technologies shape systems, so that we are not blindsided by the limitations, side effects, failures, and misdeeds of these systems and the actors who control them.
Thomas Jordan[2], chairman of the governing
