For someone like me this kind of catchphrase is tempting indeed as a general metaphor for change, and why not. The vulnerability of movement of this kind of information has worked well not only against not only extremist religious and political movements, as we've been able to wield it as well against drug lords, traditional organized crime, and various other economic law breakers of all sorts.
There is another side to this coin however. Just as these socially destructive groups are vulnerable so is the rest of society, and perhaps a great deal more so. And this is so for at least two reasons.
First, of course, is that there is so much more systematic structure for the bad guys to go after as it involves financial interaction for the rest of us; within which exists a whole range of critical exchange nodes. And lets be clear, in this it is not only the information flow itself that is vulnerable, from business to business, and bank to bank, but everything related to communication infrastructure; of which power generation itself is no small aspect. And we've already seen how vulnerable to hacking into them is.
That's bad enough certainly but let us also consider ancillary effects
To be able to go after the bad guys transactions, and have actionable intelligence to work with, the various authorities need to be able to monitor things very closely, which is why they not only don't want encryption so effective, but want every aspect of every purchase everybody makes available to the new techniques of "Big Data" analysis. And if they could, that would also mean the elimination of physical currency altogether; where no cash means no transaction goes unrecorded.
What we have to understand here is that this is perfectly logical in terms of "security" as a priority. That it might also impact other priorities is just collateral damage. So you can see now that "blowing up the money" is a lot more complicated than you might think at first glance.
For my part, however, it simply indicates how contradictory our current economic operating system is. It needs the flow of information, and certainly can't survive without it, but at the same time it also needs to limit, and control that flow because of the inherent proprietary nature that information can have, as well as the fact that net gain itself can't happen if there wasn't a strongly enforced proprietary element. When you are a wage dependent citizen, however, this can lead to a lot of problems; especially if you were brought up to believe that the citizenry were supposed to have certain unalienable rights, as we well as a major voice in determining, implementing, and maintaining those rights.
I still think that blowing up the money is a good idea, just as long as we realize that it can't be done without also getting rid of the operating system that depends on it. The fact of the matter is that we simply don't need it any more. There is a way to organize ourselves so that we are an integrated community of managers, producers and maintainers, and that by participating in that community we all get an equity share of what it generates. In doing that we eliminate the need for not only money, but for the whole terrible business that is marketing, selling, and livelihoods based entirely on consumption. In that environment you own what you make and use, not the information that gave you that opportunity to exorcise that freedom. In that context the free flow of information is a good that is absolutely essential.
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