How the future shaped the past: The case of the cashless society

emained curiously popular, enjoying a new upsurge of ubiquity within the last few years. 3 We explore its emergence, early conflicts to define the concept when trying to apply it by commercial banks. To get a sense of the power and limitations of the shared vision as a guide to action we conclude with a brief examination of a failed effort by the VISA organization to deploy a comprehensive payments product in the early 1970s. To talk of “shared vision” might seem strange here, as in business the word “visionary” is often reserved for leaders who claim to see what others do not and so vision could be seen as something personal rather than collective. Likewise “vision” might also be understood to by some to imply specificity and precision, although religious visions are often dreamlike. The term that best captures our meaning is “imaginaire” (or “sociotechnical imaginaire”), increasingly used in science and technology studies. The imaginaire is imagined new social order understood as the natural result of adopting an emerging, unproven technology. The evolution of the technology and its mode of application are, in turn, reshaped by this collective sense of the future as it becomes ingrained, sometimes on a subconscious level, within a community. The most striking example, studied by Patrice Filchy, is that of The Internet Imaginaire. 4Filchy defines the imaginaire as a “collective vision” and ties the concept closely to utopian thought, arguing that over time a utopian fantasy is transformed though experimentation and the application of specific technologies into an ideology that directs change in the real world. In the remainder of this paper, and at the risk of being called pretentious, we therefore use the term imaginaire rather than vision. When particular technologies failed to perform as expected this could be characterized as a bump in the road to the imaginaire, rather than as a challenge to the inevitability of eventually arriving at the agreed destination. Once consensus on the future destination was reached a variety of specific systems or approaches could be presented as a step toward realizing this future goal, making the future a banner around which a heterogeneous alliance of interests could gather. This, of course, would further 3