The report published on 10 March 2025 by Riksbank, the Swedish central bank, warns of the risks of a cashless society. But intangible currency is not the only problem caused by forced digitalisation by Andrea Monti – Originally published in Italian on Italian Tech-LaRepubblica
The total elimination of cash is a desirable goal, but geopolitical risks and those associated with the weakness of digital infrastructure suggest that we should pause before the total disappearance of physical money, which should, in fact, be safeguarded. This, in summary, is the recommendation provided by the Payment Report 2025 recently published by the Swedish central bank.
‘Pursuing security, efficiency and accessibility in the payments market,’ the document reads, ’is a choice that can sometimes go hand in hand, but these objectives can also conflict. For many years, the priority has been efficiency; today, security and accessibility are at least as important.’
The Riksbank’s conclusions echo those contained in the brochure published in late 2024 by Swedish institutions, whose title — ‘In case of crisis of war’ — needs no translation, and clearly reflect the uncertainties in international relations that have multiplied in the wake of the US elections.
In this regard, the positions expressed by the Riksbank are based, in particular, on two considerations. The first is that in the event of war, communication infrastructure and the payment platforms that use it may not be accessible, either due to direct attacks or (as highlighted by Russia’s strategy of attacking Ukrainian energy supplies) due to a lack of electricity.
The second is that even in times of peace, or rather, undeclared conflict, actions (criminal, state-sponsored or — we would add — the result of negligence on the part of system and equipment manufacturers) that damage payment infrastructure can compromise individuals’ ability to use dematerialised payment instruments. Ergo, it is necessary that, on the one hand, people maintain and are able to maintain the availability of cash and, on the other, that sellers continue to accept payments in hard currency because intangible currency could suddenly become evanescent, disappear or no longer be available.
Why the digital ecosystem is vulnerable
The causes of the growing and unstoppable weakness of the digital ecosystem have ancient roots: it all began with the downward spread of computers and the simultaneous availability of the first telephone connections to online services. It seems like centuries ago, but less than forty years have passed. For a long time, security for the masses was not a concern that troubled the sleep of businesses and users (with the exception of a small group of technology enthusiasts, or ‘nerds’ or ‘geeks’ according to the usual misinformed).
And so it was that, operating system after operating system, programme after programme and platform after platform, insecurity became layered in ever deeper levels over time. Each technological update did not correspond to the elimination of what came before, thus creating over time a forced coexistence between objects from different and distant geological eras (in computer terms).
The industry’s sudden discovery that security could be a market sector did not improve things too much.
Of course, over time, approaches and methods for secure software programming and management have taken shape, and a wide variety of services are widely available to protect individual computers and entire infrastructures. However, thanks in part to the hyper-bureaucratisation of cybersecurity regulations, the reality is still the same as it was thirty-five years ago: not only have we built a technological giant with feet of clay, but we continue to make it bigger and more fragile.
The implicit limits of the race to digitalisation
To understand the significance of the alarm raised by Sweden, although it is essentially a national issue and linked to the specific history of that country, we must first ask ourselves whether it reflects a real assessment of the risk or whether it is a tool to guide public opinion and legitimise political decisions consistent with the current geopolitical scenario. It is true that the impossibility of verifying the existence of geopolitical risks does not imply that they do not exist or are unfounded. However, the absence of publicly available information makes it extremely difficult to build a truly informed consensus.
Therefore, little or nothing can be said about the likelihood of a pan-European conflict breaking out in the near future, because information on this subject is clearly and understandably not in the public domain. Consequently, indirect and continuous allusion to the existence of an unproven risk of war could reinforce the perception of such a risk by exploiting individuals’ mechanisms of uninformed self-conviction, but could also have the opposite effect, i.e. underestimating the danger.
Conversely, the seriousness of criminal phenomena and the damage caused by negligence in the construction, management and use of software platforms and related cybersecurity services is an issue that is as immediately urgent as it is concretely underestimated.
Suffice it to compare the data on the thousands of attacks documented in the ENISA 2024 Report with the number of people investigated and convicted for committing cyber fraud, damage, ransomware extortion and various other technological crimes. There does not seem to be any reliable data, but the Eurojust 2023 Report suggests that we are talking about extremely low numbers compared to the scale of the phenomenon. From the above, it is reasonable to assume that such numbers point to a systemic inability to effectively counter hybrid threats, both preventively and repressively.
It is difficult to believe that EU leaders are unaware of this state of affairs, yet we are faced with a paradoxical situation: the ‘full steam ahead’ course towards total digitalisation is clearly not up for debate, but excessive confidence in the effect of regulations, directives and measures on cybersecurity is proving unable to steer the ship.
Returning to the past is not an option
Returning to the past is not a realistic or viable option. Despite everything, the advantages of a dematerialised society are very substantial and cannot be sacrificed, but building it would require, taking inspiration from the Swedish experience, reflection on the advisability of completely eliminating the society based on the physicality of human relationships and transactions.