As is usual with people romanticizing cash over digital money, they completely neglect to mention the severe downsides that come with handling cash. Cash makes stores a target for violent robberies, that every-day, normal store employees have to deal with. Expensive security equipment, special training, the stress of dealing with cash at the end of the workday - it's a real nightmare. You're putting people, often late teens working the registers, at immense risk, all because you erroneously believe cash is "private" (it is not, you can be and are tracked by much simpler ways than "digital payments", especially in highly advanced societies like Sweden).
It's selfish. You place your own paranoia over the safety of others.
Of course, that doesn't mean people should be excluded from society. The focus here should not be on maintaining the expensive and ridiculously dangerous cash infrastructure, but on making sure everyone can get the bank account/ID they need.
@thomholwerda The big problem with that idea is that digital banking infrastructure is fundamentally centralized in its control; it creates a 'center of power' that is trivial to subvert by whoever gets into power to exclude people of choice from society.
While cash is *nominally* centrally controlled, its fundamentally decentralized and peer-to-peer nature makes it much more difficult to effectively enforce such mechanisms, and that is a significant protection from authoritarianism.
And yes, with that lack of central control come societal risks. As is basically always true for anything that resists authoritarianism by decentralizing power. You could have the exact same discussion about camera surveillance, for example.
@thomholwerda (Also, perhaps a better question to ask here is *why* it's predominantly inexperienced teens handling such a high-risk job, and what politics make it so)