Danish Digitalisation Must Stop!
My friend Margrethe has volunteered for almost half her life in her local church, basically helping make sure everything runs and functions as it should so that the parishioners can benefit from an optimal interface with the Almighty.
One of her jobs for the past 40 years or so has been to gather the coins and occasional notes donated during the daily services, count them up (500kr on a good week), and take them in a special bag to the local bank. (I like to think that Margrethe handcuffed the bag to her wrist, like in the films).
A while back, she made her weekly pilgrimage only to be told that the bank was ‘phasing out money’. Margrethe asked the bank teller to repeat what they had just said. She must have misheard: the bank is phasing out money? What is it going to be working with in the future? Haribo Sours?
From now on, the local church must use a go-between company to ‘launder’ - I can think of no other word - its cash donations. It transpired that this company would charge the equivalent of 25% for this service.
I make no claims to be Denmark’s Nostradamus here, but it appears we are on the verge of becoming a cashless society. This strikes me both as wrong (for the above-mentioned Margrethe-related reasons, as well as other reasons), but also a bit of a paradox.
Wrong because the digitalisation process has gone way too far. Paradoxical because, if you recall a few weeks ago during one of the crises through which Mette Frederiksen was bravely guiding us, we were officially told that we must have a few thousand kroner in cash hidden under our mattresses in case the Russians came, or something.
So on the one hand, we are being told that we must have cash, on the other hand people in supermarkets look at you as if you have just offered to pay with some beans and a cow if you offer try and pay for your pork chops with a 200kr note.
Actually, it’s worse than that. You can be made to feel like a criminal, not just if you occasionally need to use cash, but if your digital finances are even remotely anomalous from that of a Ford Fiesta-driving teacher who lives in Næstved with their partner, two children and small dog.
I left Danske Bank a few years ago after several lengthy interrogations by one of their employees about precisely how much cash I will use in the next year, and - impossible to answer for a self-employed freelance writer - exactly how much I was going to earn in the coming year, from whom and in which currencies.
If she could tell me how many books I would sell in South Korea, or how many speeches I would be booked for next October, I would certainly welcome the intel, I said. I may also have pointed out the irony that I was now being hassled and threatened with my accounts being frozen because I might be a potential money launderer by a bank that had been found guilty of enabling large scale international money-laundering. Actually, that was the reason I was being asked this stuff.
So I switched banks, and last week had to answer the same questions all over again.
The move to a cashless - or even bank cardless - society is no longer making things easier for ordinary people.
Literally every time I go to use the DSB app, as I am hurrying through the station to make a train, trying to eat a Lagkagerhus nut-encrusted salt caramel flødeboller with one hand, juggling my phone with the other, it insists I update the app first. The last time, after watching that little round symbol move at the speed of an hour hand, I also had to re-enter all my credit card details (the flødeboller had to balance on my head for that one).
Why did they have to get rid of the rejsekort?
As I write this, a few minutes ago, I noticed that my Novo Nordisk shares had gone up by 20%*. But I couldn’t log on to sell them, because Mit iD was ‘experiencing challenges’. Again. The shares crashed by 28% shortly thereafter. Perhaps by the time Mit id is working again, they might have gone up? I don’t imagine the company will compensate me for my loss either way.
MitID is like the parasitical monsters in Alien, its tentacles have infiltrated every aspect of our lives, to the extent that we would perish if it were removed. Or more like Facebook now I think of it.
I could fill several pages with the daily irritations I experience with my online interfaces with the state: navigating the ridiculous, multi-stage log-on hurdles, with all the passwords and the little oval number-generating machine, and sometimes also an SMS with yet another code, only to discover the important-looking message from the Kommune was about a minor alteration to a cycle path I never knew existed, or whatever. Sometimes they send me messages about messages which, once I finally log on, never even existed.
I understand there is an app which should make this easier, but I am app-phobic. With good reasons - and not merely just the obvious ones about the battery on my quite shitty phone dying, or phone theft.
It started with the parking app. I was once fined 1.200kr because it misregistered the location of my car. The company pointed me towards some small print which relieved them of any responsibility. But you have no choice: you have to continue using the app, otherwise you can’t park. The other day I had to park a hire car, so had to register the number plate on the app before I could pay. More time. More hassle. I also had to remember to remove the hire car from my app, because otherwise I would be paying every time the next driver entered one of those automatic car parks where they read the number plate as you enter. Which obviously I forgot to do.
Why did they have to get rid of pay stations in car parks that accepted cards and cash?
Everywhere one turns, one encounters this digital enshittification: Q Code-generated restaurant menus. Corporate chatbots which can never, ever answer your question (even if it is ‘Can I have a phone number to speak to a human please?’). I wasn’t stuck at the toll for Storebæltsbroen the other day when their system went down, but I could have been. And I tell you, I can’t promise I wouldn’t have gone full Denis Knudsen.
Why do politicians love digitalisation so much? For the same reason they love spending big on defence, or the green transition for that matter: the bragging rights at inter-governmental meetings or the keynote speech circuit once they are out of office.
“Hello, I am Lotte Lottesen, I am/was the Danish minister for Digitalisation/Greenery/Guns. Did you know Denmark is the world leader in my field? And the only nation in the world that insists on its own counterfeit version of the board game, Monopoly?”**
So here is my solution. We should all agree, as a society, as a nation, to let the politicians continue claiming that Denmark is the world leader in digitalisation. They can say that we have digitalised the very air that we breath for all we care. Or even the library system.
Just as long as we all take a collective step back from the digital brink, and let Margrethe pay the donation money into the church’s account, free of charge.
*Obviously the company wasn’t Novo Nordisk, but I am too embarrassed to admit it was crypto.
** I would always mention Matador if I was representing Denmark abroad.
END