Responsible for the downfall of our culture

I don't watch much TV.

Less and less, actually. I prefer to think of the box in the living room as "the monitor" rather than as "the TV". And the monitor gets used to screen DVDs of movies and television series rather than watching them "realtime".

Part of the reason I increasingly disfavor TV is commercials. Why put up with strident, volume-jumped advertisements within shows, when I can wait a little while and watch the series on my own schedule and sans commercials?

But when I do watch "realtime" TV I always learn something about the zeitgeist, and how some advertisers somewhere representing their client's interests think I should be manipulated into feeling. And sometimes it is alarming, and I think that I should watch TV more often just to see what the enemy is up to.

For instance, the other day I found out that to use cash, actual money, in a transaction is tantamount to cultural sabotage. Witness the commercials where all commerce screeches to a halt when some anti-social Luddite hauls out cash rather than just using a touch-pay card.

Forget privacy and being able to conduct a transaction without a multinational corporation acting as middleman. Just whip out your card and the wheels of society will keep on turning.

The propagandist nature of this social engineering should be as alarming as anything in Orwell -- the commercials are humorous, but clearly carry the message that to use cash is to be unhip, uncool, and uncooperative. (I expect next a clever campaign depicting money, and those who handle it, as unhygienic.)

And this is all just getting started. Wait until the use of RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) on products really gets rolling.

The plan with RFID is that every item in a store will have a unique identifier attached, included, or implanted. The credit/debit card in your pocket will also have an RFID tag. Walk out of a store, and the archway you pass through will scan the contents of your cart, and the card in your wallet, and automatically deduct the items from your debit account or charge them to your "credit" account, and you are presented with a receipt by the time you reach the door.

Sounds like science fiction? Some wholesalers and retailers are already using RFID to track shipments, and some retail items already have RFID tags. And tags can come in many forms, including mixed into paper and ink, sewn in as fibers, or made into dust which can be blown into items.

The claims that businesses make about the use of RFID are correct: that they will aid in JIT (just-in-time) inventory management, that inventory tracking will be improved, that having fewer human workers in stores may mean savings can be passed on to customers.

But there are also some looming questions about privacy, and potential abuses of RFID technology. If every item you buy, including clothing, has an RFID tag (some of these tags inherent and non-removable), this will mean that every time you pass near an RFID "checkpoint" your passage will be read, recorded, studied... Remember the scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise goes into a mall store and the holographic popups greet him by name, inquire into his satisfaction with his prior purchases, and suggest new purchases? That scenario, as Max Headroom told us, is only 20 Minutes Into The Future. RFID will be one of the enabling technologies for such monitoring of our purchasing history.

And it may not be only retailers who monitor your behavior. RFID readers will be commonly available, and anyone who chooses to will be able to set up a checkpoint to monitor others' activities. Why they should want to is open to conjecture; the technology which will allow it is already here.

Some gadflies are trumpeting warnings about the approach and possible abuses of RFID. There is grass-roots experimentation on how to disable RFID tags where they are part of an item and not easily removed. Shielded wallets are already on the market (since the problem is not just that your products can be read, but that your RFID-enabled wallet cards can be read and suborned.)

But most people are blissfully unaware that this technology is slated to come into use over the next few years. The same people who laugh at the commercials featuring the poor schmoe who actually got out cash and delayed everyone else in line from getting their lattes.

Well, this poor schmoe doesn't have anything in particular to hide. But using cash is looking better and better. Money, cash, is itself symbolic of worth rather than having much actual value. But now cash is starting, in our increasingly-corporate world, to look more and more like a symbol of freedom.