Posted on December 31, 2013 | By cgarling@sfchronicle.com (Caleb Garling)
A few weeks ago a friend, Mark, as we will call him for the sake of argument, hosted an evening of spirits and food. Everyone had a great time and the dinner party concluded with warm farewells. As I walked out to Valencia Street, I heard my phone ding, checked the text message and saw that Mark had just sent me a bill for $9.24.
“…what?”
He’d done it over Venmo, an app that lets you charge or pay a friend. PayPal and others are trying to get in on this peer-to-peer payment market, as it’s known, to keep our finances as fluid as possible. You get a text or notification saying a friend wants x-dollars and with a few clicks (taps), you pay him.
Like e-mail, texts, and most things digital, niche payment apps are shedding more of the human aspect in our day-to-day. Basic financial transactions are stripped down to on-paper qualities, devoid of smiles and scowls. So it follows that these things will start to alter manners.
Dinner parties are supposed to be one of the bastions of goodwill among friends. You host; I host. The finances come out in a wash. We’ve operated under that goodwill for decades, centuries. The Emily Post Institute, one of the chief arbiters of manners, doesn’t even note the possibility of this situation on its page about hosting.
Mark is lucky enough to have a steady job — what’s the deal?
Or, the other way to think about it: why shouldn’t Mark get his money, even if it’s just a buck or two? Before, such a process would have been awkward. The guests and I would have fumbled through our wallets, tried to make change, maybe cut a check, and generally tarnished the evening. Etiquette, historically a tool to maintain social order, dictated that such an exchange would be rude and weird. By asking the question, Mark would have seemed jerkish.
Are things better when social pressures make Mark feel awkward for asking? Now, I reply to a text and he’s paid. Smartphones have exacted a lot of harm on various forms of etiquette — did you just check your phone while someone was talking to you? — but this seems like an instance where it’s killing one bit only to replace it with another one. Because there was someone who apparently didn’t have quite as much fun that evening: Mark. He’s no millionaire and he had just fed half a dozen people. Now, thanks to the payment app, money wasn’t a thing — we all just had a nice time.
OK, yes, quite a fancy little conundrum here.
Let’s shift gears with what HandUp is doing. The little company makes cards with contact info for folks in need to hand out to potential donors — whether they be passers-by on the street or large organizations. Donors punch that info into HandUp’s site, find the person’s profile and help out. For instance, Stanley’s profile notes that $5 buys him a sandwich. Wham! There you go, Stanley. (Seriously, I donated before publishing this. Here are other people.) Recently, the service raised $800 for a family in debt.
But look at what social interaction we are cutting out of the picture: (gesturing toward pockets and jacket) “Oh, ah, sorry, don’t have any money right now.” With HandUp you’re handed a card and the opportunity to give much more than spare change later. And the common worry of funding a trip to the liquor store (or worse) are mitigated by fulfillment partners like Project Homeless Connect, which manage the gifts.
Now, some critics would argue this actually hurts things. Perhaps being able to say “I’ll get you later” actually creates fewer aggregate donations; folks toss the card once they turn the corner, where they might have otherwise taken out a dollar. This is a fair point. Research has shown we tend to be more generous when our donations are public.
Ride-sharing outfits like Lyft, Sidecar and Uber actually have a unique take on the concept of generosity, too. When you’ve finished your ride you can donate what you’d like, depending on the ride’s quality. Yet that donation happens completely removed from the social pressure of the driver watching you. Sure it’s easier to pay them, but it’s also easy to not pay more than you’re asked — or what we’ve typically called tipping.
When cash is transferred with eye contact, handshakes and all the rest, social pressures govern much of the transaction, just like eye contact and body language govern a conversation. When that’s stripped away, we’re just transferring bits, everything from information about dinner plans to the money that pays for them. In fact, bitcoiners may say both of those things are really the same anyway.
