Credit cards

Sometimes it is hard not to believe that there is someone up there with a bad sense of humour watching you.  Some years ago I was burgled the day before I was due to fly off to America, and more recently my wallet of credit cards was stolen again, the day before leaving the country. Although less traumatic, the latter proved more problematic.

Without credit cards I could obviously not pay by plastic.  I was also unable to write cheques, since nobody trusts you to do this without some kind of supporting card, and I had lost all of them together, along with a number of other cards - those for membership of libraries, clubs and professional associations.

After I had cancelled the credit cards I started thinking about the non-financial ones.  I began to realise that their loss, although superficially trivial, was in fact just as serious.  Each of those cards, in its own small way, defined who I was for part of my life.  When I went to the library or down to my sports club, I only existed for them as a card: they did not believe in me, only the piece of plastic and what it told them.  For many of my more general social interactions I was defined by the intersection of all those cards.

 
Had I lost any one of them I could easily have used the others to prove who I was and so obtain a replacement,  Losing them all was to collapse into a non-existence which seemed to admit of no reprieve because there was no link back to my place in the outside world.  Fortunately, as it happened, I still had my passport. With this, I was able to break the chain of nothingness, obtaining a credit card which in turn allowed me to demonstrate my public persona and hence to replace the other cards.  To have lost my passport as well does not bear thinking about. 

The importance of these little cards is such that they are required to carry a heavier burden as time goes on.  Some come with a barcode which speeds the process of recognition, and many - pre-eminently the cards from banks - come with magnetic strips.  On the latter about 400 characters can be stored - around 65 words. Usually this represents some kind of potted biography of you relevant to the card and its use.

Already the next generation of such cards are in use, notably in France.  The so-called 'smartcards' use not a magnetic strip but a tiny embedded silicon chip to store data.  Each can hold about 5000 words - a fairly detailed short story about you.  But even this pales into insignificance beside the very latest technology. Soon optical memory cards, in effect updatable miniature CDs, will permit 200,000 words to be stored, along with pictures and even sounds.  It would be relatively easy to put all of your current pieces of plastic - bank cards, membership cards - additional information such as health records - complete with X-rays - plus driving licence and passport on one such card, updated every time you use it for any of these activities.  Given to you at birth, it would represent an almost complete records of your life.  Supremely useful, and supremely dangerous, it would virtually define who you were as a human being - the ultimate identity card without which you would have no credit anywhere.

(14.3.92)

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