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  • Published: 19 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529193596
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $30.00

Cloudmoney

Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets




Cloudmoney take us to the frontlines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom: it is a captivating tour of the world of money that also asks the most important questions about our future.

The reach of corporations into our lives via cards and apps has never been greater; many of us rarely use cash these days. But what we're told is a natural and inevitable move is the work of powerful interests. And the great battle of our time is the battle for ownership of the digital footprints that make up our lives.

In Cloudmoney, Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of big finance and tech requires 'cloudmoney' - digital money underpinned by the banking sector - to replace physical cash. He dives beneath the surface of the global financial system to uncover a long-established lobbying infrastructure: an alliance of partners waging a covert war on cash. He explains the technical, political, and cultural differences between our different forms of money, and shows how the cash system has been under attack for decades, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress.

Cloudmoney takes us to the frontlines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom. From marketing strategies against cash, to the weaponization of Covid-19 to push fintech platforms, and the rise of the cryptocurrency rebels and fringe groups pushing back. It asks the most pressing questions:

Who benefits from a cashless society and who gets left behind? Is the end of cash the end of true privacy? And is our cloudmoney future closer than we think it is?

  • Published: 19 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529193596
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $30.00

About the author

Brett Scott

Brett Scott is a campaigner, monetary anthropologist and former broker. He is the author of The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money, and has appeared in a wide range of TV shows, radio broadcasts and documentaries, including BBC World News and Sky News.

He has written extensively on financial reform, digital finance, alternative currency, blockchain technology and the cashless society for publications like the Guardian, New Scientist, Huffington Post, Wired Magazine and CNN.com, and also publishes the Altered States of Monetary Consciousness newsletter.


His Twitter is @suitpossum

Praise for Cloudmoney

The rush to a cashless society isn't about convenience. It is about power. Brett Scott cuts through the hype with this brilliant critique of digital money and the rise of fintech empires, while offering a compelling alternative vision. Don't miss this book

Jason Hickel, author of Less Is More

Your head has been deliberately filled with falsehoods and confusion about money. This brilliant book helps you understand how that happened, who profits from our collective financial ignorance, and how we might best fight back. Filled with dazzling insight and admirable clarity, this is a book you'll soon be recommending far and wide

Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved

With this wonderful, lucid and urgently important book, Brett Scott is hunting big game. Get a copy - and make sure you pay with cash

Nicholas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands

If people could see clearly how their money is created, they would rebel - especially now that it is digitised. Brett Scott's highly readable and topical Cloudmoney is, in this sense, a wonderfully revolutionary text

Yanis Varoufakis

Cloudmoney is a brilliant, fascinating and utterly accessible book - a pioneering and political guide to the fast-evolving web of global finance... If you want to understand what money is - and what it is in danger of becoming - start right here

Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics

An important reflection on the new world of finance. Brett Scott writes with gusto about blockchain, crypto and the power nexus between Big Tech and the banks in a cashless society

Lionel Barber, author of The Powerful and The Damned

A fascinating and readable guide to the future, and how we can reclaim that future from the clutches of Big Finance and Big Tech

Grace Blakeley

Arise all data donors from your slumber - and read this book. You - we - have been sucked into the "tech-finance vortex" that is the new, dangerous alliance of Big Finance and Big Tech. Addicted to our apps, we are trapped in a dizzying whirlpool of surveillance, allowing the FinTech vortex to exercise power over, and profit from, every transaction undertaken. Scott, steeped in the sector, guides us through it, and helps readers understand what is happening. He invites us to revolt and jam the Big Fusion. His book is an urgent must-read

Ann Pettifor

Quietly radical and unexpectedly beautiful, this is so much more than a book about money. Brett Scott propels the reader to a new understanding of today's capitalism through humour, first-hand reportage, patient explanation, deep political analysis and a lot of heart. Let him change the way you see the world - he has for me

Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won't Love You Back

In a book that is simultaneously irreverent, hard-hitting and entertaining, Brett Scott blows apart conventional myths about cash, digital money, and crypto, and brilliantly shows us what's at stake in the coming battles for the soul of money

Stephanie Kelton, Author of The Deficit Myth

Cloudmoney does well to map out how the switch away from cash is being spun as natural progress... Scott has struck an important vein, that is vital in a digital age

Financial Times

A groundbreaking book

Morning Star