Apple has improved the wheel by packing the latest iPhone's Home button with a fingerprint reader, effectively taking the first major step in replacing passwords with biometric authentication. After all, cell phones are such ubiquitous and personal devices that they have become like defacto keys to our digital lives, so it's no great leap of the imagination to see them become keys to our physical lives as well.
As a technophile, I am not disappoint. However, what really stood out to me in the article I read was the part about how this fingerprint security scheme would clear hurdles consumers have with online purchases and drive more sales in not just the iTunes store, but any other service that will come to accept an iPhone as a standard payment method.
Now, I already have a VISA card with payWave. For over 90% of the things I buy (incuding a $1 cup of coffee), I just have to hold my card up to the merchant's terminal and listen for the beep that accompanies a successful purchase. Using cash has already become somewhat alien, and although payWave is very convenient I've become more of a spendthrift because of that very convenience.
Physical money was always somewhat cumbersome and a burden if lost. It wasn't like having a credit card where, if you were to leave it somewhere, you could just call up the company and be released from any obligation to pay for fraudulent purchases. In a lot of ways, physical money is an awful thing, but the one thing it had going for it was that sense of loss when you part with coins or bills. That sense of loss is what keeps people from overspending, because it's easy to open up your wallet and see how much money you have left and start thinking about how to ration it between what you need to buy and what you want to buy.
Nowadays we are beginning to see money differently. We see money as bits and bytes moreso than the physical. Many employers won't even bother handing you a cheque anymore, it's just a direct deposit into your bank account and then you're off to spend that cash without even directly touching the physical manifestation of that money. I can imagine that seeing money as just floating point numbers on a computer screen or printout is how accountants relate to it, but most of us are not accountants, and most of us certainly don't have as much disposable income as accountants do.
Despite the inherent risk of overspending, payWave is still relatively benign. When I go to the store to make a purchase, I am receiving physical goods and still have to reach for my wallet to confirm my willingness to pay for said goods. What scares me is that Apple's next step is going to do away with that implicit physical confirmation and, instead of physical goods, you will be delivered digital goods for which you pay by tapping a button on a device you're already used to spending far too much money on just for communication.
As the boundaries between physical and virtual reality begin to blur at an accelerated rate between microtransactions that automatically siphon money from our bank accounts, it feels like we are on the whole coming to exchange classical materialism for a newfangled digital consumerism. It's a jarring juxtaposition onto the physical reality which our senses interact with and our instincts react to, and our capacity to evolve to a new way of seeing the world around us will directly determine whether we go bankrupt playing the next iteration of Angry Birds, or prosper by being the merchants that make their fortune on microtransactions. As those two categories grow, the middle class is bound to shrink, and we may find ourselves in the future envisioned by H.G. Wells well before our bodies physically devolve into the shape of Morlocks and Eloi.
-link to article
As a technophile, I am not disappoint. However, what really stood out to me in the article I read was the part about how this fingerprint security scheme would clear hurdles consumers have with online purchases and drive more sales in not just the iTunes store, but any other service that will come to accept an iPhone as a standard payment method.
Now, I already have a VISA card with payWave. For over 90% of the things I buy (incuding a $1 cup of coffee), I just have to hold my card up to the merchant's terminal and listen for the beep that accompanies a successful purchase. Using cash has already become somewhat alien, and although payWave is very convenient I've become more of a spendthrift because of that very convenience.
Physical money was always somewhat cumbersome and a burden if lost. It wasn't like having a credit card where, if you were to leave it somewhere, you could just call up the company and be released from any obligation to pay for fraudulent purchases. In a lot of ways, physical money is an awful thing, but the one thing it had going for it was that sense of loss when you part with coins or bills. That sense of loss is what keeps people from overspending, because it's easy to open up your wallet and see how much money you have left and start thinking about how to ration it between what you need to buy and what you want to buy.
Nowadays we are beginning to see money differently. We see money as bits and bytes moreso than the physical. Many employers won't even bother handing you a cheque anymore, it's just a direct deposit into your bank account and then you're off to spend that cash without even directly touching the physical manifestation of that money. I can imagine that seeing money as just floating point numbers on a computer screen or printout is how accountants relate to it, but most of us are not accountants, and most of us certainly don't have as much disposable income as accountants do.
Despite the inherent risk of overspending, payWave is still relatively benign. When I go to the store to make a purchase, I am receiving physical goods and still have to reach for my wallet to confirm my willingness to pay for said goods. What scares me is that Apple's next step is going to do away with that implicit physical confirmation and, instead of physical goods, you will be delivered digital goods for which you pay by tapping a button on a device you're already used to spending far too much money on just for communication.
As the boundaries between physical and virtual reality begin to blur at an accelerated rate between microtransactions that automatically siphon money from our bank accounts, it feels like we are on the whole coming to exchange classical materialism for a newfangled digital consumerism. It's a jarring juxtaposition onto the physical reality which our senses interact with and our instincts react to, and our capacity to evolve to a new way of seeing the world around us will directly determine whether we go bankrupt playing the next iteration of Angry Birds, or prosper by being the merchants that make their fortune on microtransactions. As those two categories grow, the middle class is bound to shrink, and we may find ourselves in the future envisioned by H.G. Wells well before our bodies physically devolve into the shape of Morlocks and Eloi.
-link to article
