The dark side of the digital imperative: Field-based insights from nearly cashless Sweden

This article examines Sweden's transition towards a highly digitalised and near-cashless payment system and analyses how this transformation affects individuals who remain dependent on cash. While Sweden is frequently portrayed as a global frontrunner in digitalisation, the shift towards digital payments has not been driven by explicit political decisions or coordinated social planning. Instead, the article argues that this development is best understood through the concept of the digital imperative: a taken for-granted logic that frames digitalisation as inevitable, desirable, and inherently progressive, while obscuring its social and justice-related costs. Drawing on field-based qualitative research conducted in Malmö, Sweden, the study foregrounds the experiences of people living in poverty and social precarity who are excluded from digital payment infrastructures. The empirical material consists of 35 semi-structured interviews with cash-dependent individuals and with workers and volunteers in civil society organisations supporting people in economic hardship. The analysis demonstrates how digitalisation produces a form of structural injustice that renders certain groups incapable of participating in everyday social and economic life. This condition is conceptualised as constructed incompetence, whereby individuals are positioned as deficient not due to personal failure, but because institutional and infrastructural systems presuppose universal digital competence. The article concludes by calling for a redefinition of what constitutes successful digital transformation, one that prioritises social sustainability, democratic access, and justice alongside technological innovation.