An acquaintance once said that he usually just goes to the one with the largest pompous granite façade, and so I took his advice and sought out the nearest most horrible and aesthetically ridiculous oversize columns and enough pseudo-greek statues to make the Vatican blush that I could find. No anonymously modern glass-fronting for me, oh no, this had to really chip the teeth and daunt (and damage) the soul.
It turned out, though, that at the time banks like that didn't really welcome slightly-dishevelled young people coming through their doors carrying cheques of "questionable denominations". Like any youth who grew up watching Die Hard too many times, I reckoned that if you weren't paying for everything with German Bearer Bonds you just weren't cool enough to get the hot chicks (that is what that film was about, isn't it? - it doesn't seem to have a deeper meaning about the Spirit of Christmas that I could see).
Anyway, eventually I convinced them to let me play in their sandbox and promising not to urinate in their swimming pool, they acquiesced and begrudged me an account. Not long after (well, 20 years go by) and those crazy Americans decide to ruin the world with their monetary blunders, so the bank that wasn't very friendly in the first place decided that I probably shouldn't have an account if I couldn't pay off an overdraft and credit cards that I never really wanted in the first place...
...yeah, yeah, turns out they weren't just numbers on a piece of paper.
Well, actually they were - so for the last 10 years I've lived (like most of the world's population) WITHOUT a bank account. And quite happily too. The West's myopic and naïve attitude towards these things is really rather odd - bullying, coercive, presumptuous and controlling - and yet they still somehow believe that this won't just inspire the necessity to undermine and subvert the emptiness of their brave new world. It has, indeed, become instead our obligation.
Living without a bank account isn't really that hard, cash is still king (despite what they say) and there's certainly no lack of gloriously characteristic (and endearingly caricatured) underhanded individuals and institutions willing to facilitate the double-dealing necessary to imitate everything the sad aspiring middle-classes have come to think of as "real" in their delusional little worlds.
As much as I'd like to rant on about such things, however, I do have a ridiculously long-winded and nowhere-near-finished story to tell.
For example, the local utilities have recently started to get rather heavy handed in their sick approach to cultural-homogeneity in little ways... if, were I so inclined, I wished to save %6 on my electric bills I could just sign up for direct debit and they'd promise me a quick and painless demise into mediocrity. Hilariously, in the interests of "going green" they have also graciously decided to surcharge an extra €5 if I don't choose to subscribe to paperless billing. Thankfully, it's reassuring to know the Marx Brothers are alive and well somewhere laughing their asses off when companies actually get to bill you... for sending you a bill. (Why has no one invented an emogee for "benign indifference"? It could just be a combination stern schoolmarm & pile-of-poo symbol. Those Egyptians and their hieroglyphs had it right.)
Which brings us to Fin-tech.
So last week I performed my economic ablutions for the month, and found that I had a personal net-worth of exactly €49. According to western ideals that's not much to show for 50+ years on this planet. Thankfully (in contrast to the endless propaganda the media purports) the real world doesn't actually live by or aspire to western ideals.Harry Potter Wiki wrote:A Horcrux was an object in which a Dark wizard or witch had hidden a detached fragment of his or her soul in order to become immortal. As long as the receptacle remained intact, so too did the soul fragment inside it, keeping the maker anchored to the world of the living, even if their body suffered fatal damage. The Horcrux was considered to be by far the most terrible of all Dark Magic.
So, what could I do with my €49 fortune? I could buy 3.4 packs of cigarettes, which doesn't seem very practical - or, and this is the fun part - upon thinking that 49 was easily divisible by 7 I could instead imitate Lord Voldemort's crowning achievement and create 7 horcruxes to reassure my flagging sense of mortality's impending doom. 
It turns out that banks these days have digressed from their ugly imposing edifices to become little more than the superficial and obedient wastrel tools of the financial-tech world. And if there's any more joyful way for modern humans to abuse themselves it's to lay themselves prostrate and presenting like the baboons we are to the almighty Fintech gods.
And it just so happens that our smart-phones are perfect for this particular brand of self-immolation. We have many online services flagging their wares, American banks, Lithuanian banks, Belgian banks, etc... the list is endless, and somewhat difficult to determine who, exactly, owns what, as most of them seem to resolve back the same corporate owners masquerading under one tax-haven or another. Santander or Afreximbank, anyone?
Anyway, I decided to take my electricity-supply-board up on their paperless offer to reduce my bills... so from the comfort of my mouldy old armchair, I signed up for a random current-account from a random online service. This was surprisingly easy (compared to 30 years ago) - just a few photos of id (counterfeited or not), a few "proofs of address" (again, counterfeited or not), and 24-hours later, hey presto a shiny new account in my name (counterfeited or not) was available to cater to all my direct debit needs, welcoming me into a drowning world of the SEPA Mandate (Single Euro Payments Area), and any number of other curiously named mandate-ories.
So hey, that's one €7 deposit down, 6 more to go. Why stop at just the one?
These online services have varying levels of "security" when applying for a new account... they all follow the same pattern (ID, Address, etc), but some are easier to spoof than others... for example, one of the better ones is the Lithuanian-owned Revolut subsidiary, for when scanning passports or National Euro-Identity cards with your phone what appears to be a simple photo is actually a short GIF-style video recording which contains the ancillary movement of the phone itself as you hold it over a document, which makes it slightly more difficult to submit digitally doctored items. It is, however, an amusing challenge to mess with it, and easier than you might think.
In the end I quit after accumulating 5 accounts under 3 identities (comprising 5 countries in 3 jurisdictions, with the help of a trusty VPN) because the experiment had lost its charm, and keeping the paperwork straight as to which virtual-cards belonged to which accounts and their suckling supply lines proved annoying)... besides I wanted to leave my remaining €14 in the PayPal for a rainy day. It's also harder than you'd think to spoof a simple tax-ordination - the "overseas" ones don't seem to have any kind of coordinated verification system to Europe, as long as you don't make the mistake of trying 2 banks with the same grandparent owner, where one ID is "legit" and the other perhaps less-so.
My one claim to fame though, and just to soothe my Jason Bourne aspirations, I did manage (after a few tries) to get an account at a Swiss Investment bank, which is not exactly the same thing as a real bank account, but it's close enough... for taking privacy seriously they are real sticklers for verifying every little detail, and have more than a few tax rules pertaining to non-Swiss citizenry which makes it doubly-difficult to qualify. Most interesting, in order to deposit money they actually issue a temporary mandate transfer-window which is only good for 12 hours before it expires thus halting all deposits (unlike all other banks which seem perpetual) - and when you want to withdraw money they again issue an individual 12-hour token mandate for the requesting destination. Crazy kids, those Swiss.
I also only chose to keep 2 of those accounts (a "real" one under my true identity funnelled through a Belgian-owned source with outlets in my locale for bills and such), and the other (our Lithuanian friends), because they have the best "app" and all sorts of nonsense to play with (single-use bitcoin-currency VISA cards, et al).
I mean, really? I don't think Voldemort ever had a single-use bitcoin-currency VISA card - any why is it VISA-only and not Mastercard? Curiouser and curiouser.
Unfortunately, I am now (after a happy 10-years off the grid), at least half-way back on it... but thankfully I have only poor subversive attitudes and intentions, and a compulsion to leave them in the lurch when I'm ready to depart their superficial and virtual worlds.
But for everyone else these things truly are just Horcruxes for Muggles; so remember kids, "The Horcrux was considered to be by far the most terrible of all Dark Magic."
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Addendum: I guess now the only question is, since my worldly fortune has been dispersed, diversified, divested and dwindled, what can I do with €14 to undermine Western Civilisation from within?
is about as close to indifference as I can see here, and is even aptly named "neutral" lol.
