The Cashless Frontier : Moneys, morality and (mis)trust

This thesis explores how Sweden’s rapid shift toward digital payments reshapes everyday life, social inclusion, and feelings of security. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Stockholm and online, I follow payments across flea markets, shops, Facebook groups, a pro-cash campaign, and parliamentary seminars to examine what I call a “cashless frontier”: a landscape where finance and technology converge, cash infrastructures wither, and digital payments are framed as both inevitable and desirable. Building on economic anthropology and scholarship on trust, risk, and ontological insecurity, I show that cashlessness is not a completed state but an uneven and contested process. At flea markets, Swish, a mobile payment app, and cash circulate side by side, accompanied by improvised practices I call “trust mechanisms.” These practices reveal that even digitally mediated and highly automated payments remain both sensory and relational. Across everyday settings, cash can appear as both cumbersome and valued: as budgeting tool, pedagogical resource, and marker of dignity and belonging. I then turn to the pro-cash movement, treating it as a prism for anxieties about autonomy, surveillance, and exclusion. Supporters range from policy-oriented campaigners to conspiratorial Facebook users. Their stories and practices articulate a diffuse ontological insecurity: a sense—and lived reality—that essential functions, from participation in everyday spaces to identification practices that safeguard goods and services, have become dependent on imperceptible and untrusted systems. Cash, by contrast, is imbued with qualities of tangibility, continuity, and preparedness, even as its practical use becomes harder to sustain. I argue that Sweden’s “post-cash” trajectory illuminates how the reconfiguration of money generates new forms of mistrust, resistance, and legislative debate. Rather than disappearing, cash persists as a material and symbolic resource through which people negotiate what money is and what it should be.