Over the past five years, the art of protest has evolved. Authoritarian governments are increasing their ability to monitor crowds, but individuals are fighting back. Hong Kong gives us a glimpse of what protest could increasingly look like in the surveillance age. Rising up in the hundreds of thousands against a proposed law that would violate their freedoms and sovereignty, Hong Kongers are taking to the streets behind masks to confuse facial recognition systems. Protestors are deleting WeChat and Taobao to coordinate virally and quietly, shielded by Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
But for those who wish to optimally obscure their movements from the data-thirsty eyes of the surveillance state, masks and VPNs aren’t enough. Cash is still the privacy king. Hong Kongers purchase burner SIM cards with cash to join Telegram protest coordination groups without disclosing their everyday identities. Students top up public transport cards with cash, instead of using their normal ID-linked Octopus cards, to prevent the authorities from knowing that they’re exiting the metro at demonstration points. But how much longer will clever tactics like this be an option?
Cash is disappearing. Only an estimated 8 percent of all daily global financial transactions are done with paper or metal money, a number that can be expected to sink asymptotically to zero over the next decade. Governments often talk about national infrastructure agendas to meet by 2030, but, in a world running entirely on digital money, pro-democracy protestors will need to prioritize a different kind of goal: How to cover their tracks.
In urban environments — where mass protests are most likely and most effective — governments simply need to load everyone onto public transportation systems and then turn off the ability for them to use cash to pay for those
