You may have seen the Visa commercial “Lunch” featuring a highly efficient delicatessen, food literally flying off the grill, and everyone checking out at the register with a Visa check card without even breaking stride – all to the tune Powerhouse.

The whole operation breaks down, the commercial shows us, when some inconsiderate prick uses cash. The music comes to a calamitous halt, food crashes to the floor, people run into one another, and everyone stares at the man like he’s a herpe while the register clerk makes his change.

This is the first ad I’ve seen where cash is made out to be the bad guy, and I yell at the television every time it comes on. See, I love cash. I use it whenever possible and, despite Visa’s depiction to the contrary, my experience is that cash is still superior to electronic debit for retail transactions.

A few properties of cash that I enjoy are:

1. It is accepted nearly everywhere.
2. It spends even when the power is out and communications are down.
3. My experience is that I get through most retail transactions faster than my debit card-wielding counterparts.
4. The benefits of anonymity extend beyond privacy. Because cash transactions do not couple any of my accounts with my purchases, fewer records exist that are prone to compromise via dumpster diving, dishonest clerks or hacking.
5. Cash is easily transferable. I can hand my wife a hundred dollars in cash without any intermediary.
6. Cash can get things done that electronic debit cannot, e.g., slipping the maitre’d a Jackson for better/faster seating. If this is not an issue for you, I suggest that you aren’t living life to its fullest.
7. Cash is a better deal both for retailers and customers. Retailers pay no fee (typically a flat 7.5 to 10 cents for debit, and up to a usurious 2% for credit), and customers are not at risk of discovering increasingly common point-of-sale fees on their monthly bank statements.

Cash isn’t ideal for everything. I pay all of my bills online, for example, because the benefits of eliminating all that paper (invoices, envelopes, checks) outweigh the costs (persistent records, transaction fees). Privacy doesn’t enter into it because my identity is already coupled to the accounts that I settle electronically.

In addition, cash does not scale well – paying for a car or house in cash is inconvenient and likely to invite scrutiny by our dedicated public servants at the Internal Revenue Service, Drug Enforcement Agency and Department of Homeland Security. And earlier this year, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that “..possession of a large amount of cash…is strong evidence that the cash is connected with the drug trade,” and the cash can legally be seized.

With their irritating commercial, Visa is attempting to create a perception that simply doesn’t live up to its claims. I will continue using cash whenever I can, for as long as it’s around, and I recommend anyone consider doing the same. The world will be a slightly cooler place for it.

David Brin opens The Transparent Society by describing two cities of the near future. In City Number One:

Tiny cameras panning left and right, survey traffic and pedestrians, observing everything in open view…In this place, all the myriad cameras report their urban scenes straight to Police Central, where security officers use sophisticated image processors to scan for infractions against public order – or perhaps against an established way of thought. Citizens walk the streets aware that any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau.

Over in City Number Two, there are just as many cameras. However:

These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can use his or her wristwatch television to call up images from any camera in town.

Here a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.

Over there a tardy young man dials to see if his dinner date still waits for him by a city fountain.

A block away, an anxious parent scans the area to find which way her child wandered off.

Over by the mall, a teenage shoplifter is taken into custody gingerly, with minute attention to ritual and rights, because the arresting officer knows that the entire process is being scrutinized by untold numbers who watch intently, lest her neutral professionalism lapse.

Brin closes the thought experiment by asking his readers, given a choice between living in one or the other city, is there any doubt which one we would choose?

I see strong evidence that we are heading for a hybrid of the two.

Both of Brin’s cities resemble practical implementations of the Panopticon. Since a citizen can never be certain that hus actions are not being monitored, hu must assume that they are. Going the way of City Number One, the UK currently sports a ratio of one CCTV camera to every fourteen people. The propagation of CCTV cameras in the United States is far less dense, but is growing in reaction to the July 7, 2005 London bombings.

City Number Two answers Juvenal’s question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Who watches the watchmen? We all do. And camera phones and YouTube are making it possible.

Over the past few months we have seen powerful examples of the potential for Sousveillance. Camera phones captured three separate incidents of excessive force on the part of Los Angeles police. A camera phone made Michael Richards’ hate-filled tantrum available for all the world to see. George Allen’s career in politics is probably over because of a single word, and the video camera that recorded it.

In a short while, only the lowest-end mobile phones will come without the capability of recording video, and Jupiter Research estimates that there are 195 million American mobile phone users today.

That’s a lot of eyes and ears.

I am not wild about the prospect (I’d rather we all just let each other the hell alone), but if we’re going to live in a society where the government and the private sector insist on training cameras on us, I prefer for them to know that we’re Shooting Back.