I hate the injection of personality into technological instances or common hiccups in modern Internet culture. My heart monitor watch shows me a smiley face while booting up, Github buttons spam "Buy me a coffee!", Reddit says shit like, "Don't panic" when a webpage doesn't load. Shut the fuck up and leave me alone. I am so tired of being surrounded by these pale imitations of reality, like I need to be pacified with pseudo-emotions or meme culture every step of my day.
Venmo, it fucking commodities friendship. Steve, do you really need me to pay you exactly $4.63 for your hamburger? We're going to hang out again, but "just get me back" is completely lost outside the closest friends. It makes me feel weird when I pay for somebody else and they want to get me back right then, like our friendship was a transaction.
One day I'm gonna write a David Graeber-esque rant about the history of money and how it alienates us further, Venmo being the highest form it.
Oh yeah that is something I've found weird too. The weird part is how they turned it into this like mini social media where it reads like a facebook timeline if you read through your "friends" venmo histories, which was just pulled off facebook. Some people spend a lot of money on eating out and idk I just feel like it's almost a boasting thing people will do, to let everyone know how active they are? Probably really cynical of me, but people will write like a paragraph damn near about just sending someone $25 for dinner, and it's just something I could never consider doing. It's just weird to mix money and friendship in the way that it does it.
Honestly no, that's a great take. Every single app has been Facebook-ized. JoesFrackinJack will be properly credited in my manifesto and your name will echo through the halls of history.
Venmo is useful for several things, but the social media feed and tendency to add a transactional layer to relationships are pretty gross.
All my transactions are private and if it's a friend they get an emoji description. A business transaction gets a curt description of services rendered.
There's an anthropological term for this, generalized reciprocity (the chill kind) vs balanced or symmetrical reciprocity (the George Costanza kind). My old roommates and I would always be like "generalized reciprocity" with a hand wave when there was any unequal exchange, was nice.
My two best friendships have consisted of buying each other food, cooking for each other, buying the other one tickets to a concert to not go alone, buying each other video games to share the experience etc.
Another consisted of a dude (I thought was a good friend at the time) crashing at my place 2-3 nights a week and sharing food with me, only to give me a fucking bill when he was moving away. Like, fucking what? And I was such an insecure lonely at the time that I paid it to continue the friendship, which ended there anyway.
That last one's messed up, wtf. Like, giving a friend the exact amount of money you owe them is weird enough, but billing them??
fuck yeah
Its funny I feel the opposite. I hate owing people money(in part because my memory is really bad) and money apps made it really easy and convenient to pay people back. Now whether the transaction needs to be exact or something isn't necessary, we usually approximate it but its still nice so I don't have to carry cash all the time.
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