No-Paper Future

Every time someone says we're becoming a paperless society, I get ten more forms to fill out.

—Dr. Hobbes, Babylon 5

The future is full of data drives, backups, often made of Organic Technology or crystal, and holographic terminals. No paper though, even if we still have trees around. The danger of having no hard copies of information seems lost on folks. This vision of an entirely digital future hearkens back to the 70s and 80s, when the increasing popularity of the home computer and email led many to believe that soon paper would be made obsolete by the ability to transfer and access hundred-page documents instantly on portable computing devices. Ironically, as the years went on the growing use of fax machines and printers meant paper was in higher demand than ever before.

Another way to tell it's the future is to make money 'weird', if not get rid of it. This is a Justified Trope at this point, since now many some of us really do pay with cards for any sizable amount of money when possible (and preferable). For now it's still more practical to bring money for smaller transactions, to save the 20 or 30 seconds to sign a receipt or key PIN; yet even now, swipe-and-go smart cards that can be much faster than handling messy physical change are spreading.

This whole trope presumes the complete elimination of the Black Market or illegal transactions, as, obviously, drug dealers are not going to be interested in transactions that leave a paper data trail. Ditto for people arranging transactions to evade or avoid taxes or purchase something they'd rather not admit to; cash has no trail, electronic money does. But then the government decides how money is done, so who cares about the criminals? (Let's not dwell on the obvious answer to that question which is shown every time a newspaper presents news about political scandals involving large bribes...)

Examples of No-Paper Future include:

Anime

• Ghost in the Shell has a near absence of all books and papers in physical form, to the point where libraries are only maintained as historical archives. When paper is seen, the text is often barcodes.
• Mikuru the Time Traveller from Suzumiya Haruhi comes from a future where technology has gone very far beyond that of today. Accordingly, she has no concept of how to use 21st technology like laptops (it's not like most tropers would know how to use the ENIAC, after all). Most of the science fiction genre is even more alien to her, as it is Zeerust beyond recognition.
• Cowboy Bebop keeps the paper, but apparently mostly gets rid of paper money. Outside of a betting pool being run in the episode "Heavy Metal Queen", physical cash is never seen. Whenever the people pay, they use credit cards. One episode featured not only a set of criminals who had hacked their way into the paperless money system by planting a virus in the automated hyperspace gate toll system that robbed people blind as they passed, but also had an executive with the company annoyed that some of those defrauded sent in complaints on paper letters, something he considered "harassment, it's a waste of resources". Though they were on Mars...
• The sufficiently future setting of Sky Girls has normal computers and papers...that has a scrolling function much like flexible, ultrathin tablet PCs.

Comic Books

• The 30th century depicted in DC's Legion of Super-Heroes is generally paperless. In the Beach Episode issue Legionnaires #77, when the Legion visits a resort planet, one character remarks on the "old-fashioned paper money" she's received for her winnings in a casino.

Film

• Subtly parodied in Star Trek: Insurrection where we see Picard at a desk...piled high with PADDs.
  • More obviously stated in Star Trek IV the Voyage Home:

"Don't tell me you don't use money in the future!"
"But we don't!"

• • Although that one may be referring to the fact that the Federation does not use money at all (at least not how we do). On some occasions when money is actually exchanged it has physical form. Trading in latinum is one example.
• Totally inverted in Brazil, in which the semi-futuristic dystopian society uses nothing but paper. The world is full of giant printing presses and those pneumatic tubes that are in drive-thru banks (That's not what "information retrieval" means, though; it's a euphemism for torture). Most of the plot is brought about by a fly flying into an automatic typewriter, causing it to type one letter wrong and therefore sentence the wrong man to death.
  • Arrest and torture, anyway. The death was an accident (Mr. Buttle's heart condition was not noted in on Mr. Tuttle's file) which naturally led to even more paperwork.
• Star Wars, at least in the movies, as pointed out in this Darths and Droids strip. There is absolutely no paper in the Star Wars universe; even flat-panel displays are a rarity, mostly reserved for space ship cockpits. Instead most of the communication and information-storage is done with holograms.
  • One deleted scene from The Empire Strikes Back shows that the Rebels used a warning on paper stuck on a door that leads to a room in which they had trapped a Wampa. As the main characters escape the base, Threepio rips off the paper so the Stormtroopers will barge in there unaware. The scene was cut because of this trope.
  • The Expanded Universe sometimes uses paper-like materials and writing utensils for using them, but it's made of plastic and called flimsiplast.
  • The trope is played absolutely straight in the Star Wars Expanded Universe novel New Jedi Order: Refugee. Requesting access to a Chiss library to find a specific world, the characters are shown shelves of objects described in the most absolutely vague terms—shaped like a brick, etc. After puzzling over it for a moment, wondering if it's some kind of PADD or digital display, another character flips open the cover, showing the object to be a book. They are absolutely baffled—not at the concept of a book, but in storing information in a system that is so hard to search. Once informed of the benefits (a power outage will not cut off information access, just for example), they gradually adapt, though they still find it a mind-numbing task to search.
• In Back to The Future II, people interact with several objects using their thumbrint. We can see Biff paying the taxi fare by applying his thumb on some sort of portable paying machine. He gets a paper receipt. Interestingly, it appears that the receipt that Marty got for the Sports Almanac was made of plastic. On the other hand, future Marty got fired by fax machine.

Literature

• This trope aversion is Older Than Television: In H.P. Lovecraft's story, "The Shadow Out Of Time", the impossibly old Race Of Yith are explained to have stored information on the past, present and future of multiple civilizations throughout the universe in a massive library beneath their city of Pnakotus, in Australia's Great Sandy Desert. Said library is full of metalboud books made of some very durable material. At first, it seems impractical to store such vast amount of information on paper, but then you realize that the library was designed to survive more than 250 million years, without a single soul to care for it. The protagonist makes his way into the library and easily finds perfectly intact a volume that he had written mid-Pleistocene.
• In many end times novels based on Christian eschtalogy (especially Darbyist varieties), like Left Behind, it is always a given that the economy is being moved in this direction, so as to make the implementation of The Mark Of The Beast easier, due to a line in the The Bible about one needing to have a mark on the head or right hand present to buy or sell, thus obviating the need for paper money.
• Most of the paperlessness of J. D. Robb's In Death novels, set in the late 2050s and early 2060s, is fairly reasonable: paper is available but is not commonly used, having been replaced by the convenience of electronic media, and some characters still prefer paper books to electronic readers. However, paper money and coinage have been entirely replaced by credit... and since this includes small "credit chips" that apparently have the exact function and appearance of metal coins, one wonders why Robb bothered.
  • In addition, the chips are one single denomination, rather than the vast amount of denominations used by US cash.
  • Perhaps you can get machines which can tell you if the "credit chips" you feed them are counterfeit? Sort of like a coin sorting machine going "Not funny!" when you feed it washers?
• In the Animorphs books, Ax, an alien, is amazed that humans invented computers after books, which he finds much easier to use.
• Subverted in the Planet Pirates series, where all printed matter is on a paperish plastic that gets wiped and recycled after use.
• And subverted the opposite way in a story from the War World anthology series, where a starship captain has a personal "printbinder" in his quarters that prints in permanent, never-fading ink on material so much tougher than paper that it can survive an explosion, then puts it all together as a hardcover book.
• In Infinity's Shore, Gillian, the commander of the Streaker learns of the native Jijoan method of storing information; paper. Since everyone else uses the Great Library and compatible software, Gillian spends a few moments pondering the espionage opportunities.
• Averted in Robert Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil. While the use of paper money has declined to the point that many stores aren't set up to handle it, cash hasn't disappeared because it's hard for politicians to take bribes paid with credit cards.
• In Harry Turtledove's stand-alone novel "Noninterference", a character remarks something like "Cash isn't illegal, it's just that nobody does anything legal with it"
• In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Twenty Minutes Into the Future, paper still exists but paper money disappeared before the dystopia came into existence. It actually made things a lot easier when it was suddenly decided that women could not own property or have a job.
• In the Quadrail Series by Timothy Zahn, set in the late 21st century, paper money appears to have vanished - the stated means of exchange consist of credit transfers or the "cash stick", which appears to be a USB drive-type object that you can upload to and download from virtual sums of money.
• Subverted in Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie): the preface talks about how Earth history from roughly the late 20th-early 22nd century was all but lost by the destruction of all paper-based records ("papyralysis") due to something (it's unclear whether it's a microorganism or not) brought back from a Uranus mission—which also contributed to the downfall of world civilization of that era.
• The Doppleganger Gambit, a 1979 proto-Cyberpunk Police Procedural by Lee Killough, centers around someone finding a member of the underclass who resembled him, and hiring him to wear a fake thumbprint and spend a day with his credit card, making public, traceable transactions, to cover up a murder. The Unperson's payment wasn't in cash: it was getting to keep the items he purchased.
• Referenced in a Discworld novel: Ridcully is Archchancellor and supposedly an administrator, and "has always wanted a paperless office," but the Disc is just getting its Industrial Age underway and so paper is, of course, widely used. Ridcully gets rid of papers he doesn't feel like dealing with by locking them in a cabinet and throwing them out the window at night.
  • When he is briefly promoted to captain Fred Colon achieves a paperless City Watch by burning all the paperwork and refusing to accept any further forms or memos.
• In Return From the Stars paper books have been phased out; instead they are recorded on tiny crystals and can be read when the crystal is inserted into what resembles a modern-day e-book reader (note that the novel has been written in 1961). Paper books are only found in antique shops and mostly include children's literature.
• Averted in Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar still uses notes and coins, despite using "credit chits". Which are never described in detail, even physically, but serve at least the functions of credit/debit cards and certified bank checks. Also Barrayans will write notes on sheets of plastic called flimsy, serving the same function as paper.
• Discussed a little, but averted, in Star Trek: Vanguard, when Pennington reads a newspaper:

"Print is dead."
"Sure it is. They've been saying that for more than two centuries. Yet here it is in my hand, defying all predictions of its demise".

• In Memento Nora by Angie Smibert, which takes place Twenty Minutes Into the Future (it is never stated when the book takes place, but 9/11 is considered the not so distant past), people use TFC points, earned when one goes to the Therapeutic Forgetting Center to have their memories erased. Only poor people use paper money.
• In The Unidentified, this is averted. Paper exists but isn't made out of trees, it is made out of recycled stuff.

Live Action TV

• The season two premiere of Star Trek: Enterprise sees Daniels (and Archer) find themselves in a screwed-up version of Earth's 31st century. Daniels' greatest shock is reserved for the discovery that the (abandoned) library has physical books; in his version of the time period, it's all on computer. (Never mind that if it had been on computer, they wouldn't have gotten the information they needed, as the power was out.)
• Averted in the 2007 Battlestar Galactica Reimagined, which has paper printouts (from a dot matrix printer, no less) aboard the ship. This is to be expected, as the Galactica is a relatively primitive old workhorse, not one of the sleep new state-of-the-art line ships like Pegasus. As a token gesture to futureness or alienness, all sheets are octagonal. (The "cut corners" are a reference to the original Battlestar Galactica.)
  • Its spinoff, Caprica follows the Firefly example mentioned below: Ordinary paper is commonplace but people also frequently use devices called e-sheets. These super-thin PDA like devices feature touchscreens, can be folded like paper sheets, used to take notes, leave messages and send e-mails and are apparently quite cheap.
• Avoided by Babylon 5, where paper's still around in the 2200s. See the quote at the top. Cash also exists; while it's not clear whether the Earth Alliance credit has cash denominations (on one hand, they're never seen, and on the other, shady dealings do occur in terms of credits), the Centauri Ducat consists at least of coins, and is thus preferred for shady transactions.
• Played with in Firefly; in one scene in the pilot, the gangster Badger holds up a sheet of paper...to reveal that its actually an active computerized display of scrolling text. Of course, paper money itself is still used, and actual paper documents are used repeatedly, but the paper itself has become much more versatile.
• Subverted in the Doctor Who episode "Silence in the Library" - although the only paper we usually see is the Doctor's mysterious 'psychic paper', which is presumably technological in nature, this episode contains the biggest library in the universe: the size of an entire planet. And it's full of good old-fashioned paper books. It's explains to be the result of a fad; paper books are just the current one, and the entire library is stored digitally anyway. The Doctor lampshades it, musing that although technology keeps improving, nothing can replace "the smell of books".
  • In hindsight, perhaps it would have been better if the library had been paperless...
    • Well, they also kept all the books stored in a massive electronic library that apparently took the entire planet's core. Gigantism is the word for the future engineers, apparently.
• The Alternate Universe in Fringe is this way to the point that a ballpoint pen becomes the most exotic thing about a crime scene. It eventually leads the Fringe Division to a hospital where patients can't reliably use computers and therefore given pens and paper.
• In an episode of Journeyman, the protagonist ends up accidentally leaving his digital camera in the 70s, where it's found and reverse-engineered to jump-start another computer revolution. He goes back to his work at the newspaper. His boss hands him a sheet of paper that has a video playing on it. The protagonist's reaction is "what am I supposed to do with this?" Also, all computers have holographic screens. He likes this more advanced world but still ends up hitting the Reset Button because the same computer revolution resulted in his son never being born (he was about to do his wife, when he got a call about a malfunction of the new systems), replaced with a daughter.
• Interestingly averted in the original Star Trek: The Original Series pilot "The Cage", in which data readouts are printed out on paper.
• In the Stargate SG-1 episode "2010", which is set Twenty Minutes Into the Future (at the time of airing) after Earth has made an alliance with an advanced alien race, cash and cards have apparently been replaced with fingerprint scanners.

Newspaper Comics

• Dilbert had a strip dedicated to mildly deconstructing the "paperless office." Cue panels showing engineers with notes written up and down their arms and an ultimate panel where the topic of the meeting is "the bathroom problem."

Tabletop Games

• In Shadowrun, paper has mostly been replaced with credits in the form of the everpresent Matrix and commlinks. However, physical cash is still used occasionally, as are certified credsticks, which are like flashdrives that contain a certain amount of money.
  • It's actually somewhat bad in one sense. 'Print is all but dead' it says, when describing why language skill ratings for reading and writing are half that for talking—say, your English skill of 4 for talking in it drops to 2 for writing and reading it. But it still seems a lot of the data of the world is in the form of text ... which differs from print mainly due to all the electrons involved in the display. Plus, this is supposed to apply to specialized dialects, and one cited is legal-speak. So they're suggesting the field of LAW has cut down on writing?
• Zig-Zagged in Warhammer 40,000, a galaxy with plenty of Schizo-Tech. While dataslates are fairly prevalent, paper records, including books and scrolls are also quite common. Case in point: the Administratum, the monolithic bureaucracy managing the Imperium of Man, has entire planets devoted to keeping archives of files, staffed with countless scribes, servitors, and mono-task servo skulls constantly writing down everything on scrolls, and libraries (forbidden, of course; knowledge begets heresy) filled with rows upon rows of dusty ancient tomes, scrolls, and datatomes. And this takes place in the 41st millennium.
  • The Cain books show that they really use data-sheets and the paper parts are just for hard copies and show.
    • It was explicit that this was only the case for one man, and that he purposely faked ink stains on his robes and fingers to cover it up from other adepts and scribes.
• The Cyberpunk 3.0 RPG used this as the reason for the change in the setting from that in Cyberpunk 2020. All the world's records were held online, and a Computer Virus scrambled all the data. It got to the point where the game is set in the year "303x", because all the calendars were scrambled too.

Video Games

• Mass Effect states that both paper money and electronic money exist, but electronic money is generally preferred, due to aforementioned illegal activity that's done with paper money.
  • In the sequel, most information is carried around on datapads similar to Star Trek, but sheets of paper, books and binders are visible in many places if you look closely.
  • In Mass Effect 2, there will be paper books in Kasumi's room, which she seems rather embarrassed about.
    • It seems that she isn't really embarrassed about having paper books so much as she is by the fact that several of them are cheap romance novels.
• Xenosaga does have paper, though it's rare and stuff like books are antiquities.
• In Deus Ex, paper money has been supplanted by a global electronic currency, credits, which is mostly seen on physical chits. Otherwise, paper hasn't gone anywhere - there are a lot of newspapers and books in the game world, though notepads have gone the way of dinosaurs, entirely replaced with datapads.
• In Secret of Evermore, the Omnitopia biome uses "credits" as its currency instead of paper money, though the whole game technically doesn't use paper money since Talons, Jewels and Gold are not paper either.
• Mega Man Star Force has an odd semi-aversion of this: while money is all digital (zenny is a number on your transer), but a lot of data is on scannable cards, mostly battle weapons (replacing chips from Battle Network) and what are left of Net Navis.

Web Comics

• In the space arc of Arthur, King of Time and Space (at least in this strip) Arthur and Guenevere don't even know what paper is. Note, though, that the strip is inconsistent about this. A much earlier strip shows Arthur barely avoiding doing a hefty load of literal paperwork.
• Parodied/Lampshaded in this Freefall strip.

Western Animation

• Batman Beyond features a future mostly devoid of paperwork and money, with "cred cards" as the standard form of currency. The spinoff series, The Zeta Project, has the titular robot equipped with a card that can generate unlimited money, which often becomes a plot point.
  • There is, however, quite a bit of cash seen in the episode "Payback".
  • Most episodes handle the "cred cards" and "cred sticks" exactly as if they were cash, however, with thugs gloating over big bags of "creds", and larger quantities of physical "creds" being treating as a greater quantity of valuta. Issues of traceability, of crime victims canceling their cards, and so forth never seem to arise. It's possible that there's a brisk business in pre-paid debit cards, because, frankly, you don't have to be a criminal to have transactions you'd rather not have recorded.

Real Life

• This article on why the world should eliminate paper money in favor of a cashless society.
  • The US makes much heavier use of electronic currency payment via debit cards in stores than places like Japan and Hong Kong. The big exception is the "Octopus" card, a prepaid debit card that can be used in everything from the mass transit system (for which it was created) to restaurants and soda machines.
  • And then the whole artifice falls over when you suddenly get a power cut/communications failure.
    • Though it's already been argued that the US system as it stands now, even with it's paper money, is quite vulnerable to system failures, cyber warfare, and other electronic issues. We may have paper money, but enough of our funds exist only in electronic format that the economy would still take a major hit if anything happened to the systems regulating and tracking these virtual funds.
  • Australia, Canada, and Romania have already eliminated paper money... in favor of plastic or polymer banknotes.
    • It was never actually made of paper anyway: money is made of cloth - paper just tears too easily.
    • Hong Kong did this, but only with the $10 note (That white part is actually a clear plastic window on the real thing). It's less popular than the $10 coin, because most machines won't take it.
  • Israel has been using 20 NIS notes made of plastic for several years now. The change to all-plastic bills is rumoured to occur in 2012, though it's been delayed repeatedly several times so far.
• Sweden actually considers the bold move of ditching paper money.
• Actually Truth in Television-electronic paper has been around for a few years, but development costs (and multiple recessions) prevent it from becoming mainstream.
  • And e-paper is generally not disposable, erasable, or flexible. These things are changing, but not there yet.
  • On the other hand, more people are buying ebooks than paper books (at least at Amazon), so there's that.
• Many colleges store value on the students' ID cards, for purchasing meals and other things in campus facilities. Additionally, many professors accept assignments via electronic submission, but there's a bit of a pushback against this by some.