Ironic to say before this article but this Substack now has a paid option. Just a little way to help out a freelance writer. No pressure. All the same posts will be available to both paid and free subscribers. Also, you probably noticed the name change. Kaylee Likes Things is now called Enjoyer because it’s a better name.
It happens all the time. You go out to eat with some friends, someone puts their card down for the bill and says “Venmo me.” To someone even ten years ago, this would be nonsense, but now it is a phrase used in day to day life for a large chunk of the population. Just about anything can be a Venmo transaction — from splitting groceries with a roommate, to paying rent, to buying illegal drugs.
More and more, it seems that we can't exist within modern society without leaving a trail of some kind, especially on the internet - most often a monetary one.. At the intersection of money and social media lies Venmo.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of Venmo, it’s a platform to send money between friends. It is not the only platform that you can use to send money to friends, but it stands out from competitors like PayPal thanks to one key bit of differentiation — the platform is designed to be engaged with not only monetarily, but socially.
Venmo encourages its users to share every single transaction with their friends. It also defaults to adding every single one of a user's contacts as friends, and making all of their transactions publicly available. Many people may not even realize they are broadcasting every coffee shared or Uber split — but in many cases, they are. From one time colleagues to college floormates you haven’t talked to in years, Venmo assumes you want all of your contacts to see all your transactions (and that you have some interest in seeing theirs).
When spelled out like this, it's already more than a little unsettling. And that's without even mentioning the recently-scrapped "global public feed": a constant rolling board of every transaction made around the world on Venmo. On the global public feed, like the rest of Venmo, everyone can see your transactions by default. It is not only sharing with people you haven’t talked to in years but also people you would never even be within 50 feet of your whole life under any normal circumstances. But hey, now they know you paid rent to your “Cool Landlord” who doesn’t mind using Venmo.
But why would we want to share this? Let me share a quote from Baudrillard’s 1988 book, America that might provide somewhat of an answer:
This is a society that is endlessly concerned to vindicate itself, perpetually seeking to justify its own existence. Everything has to be made public: what you are worth, what you earn, how you live - there is no place here for interplay of a subtler nature.” - Jean Baudrillard, America
Perhaps Venmo’s assumption of publicity is a declaration, some sort of proof to ourselves and others that we truly exist. If so, it is the only form of declaration we know how to make within our capital-focused society, like Baudrillard says. Worth has become tied up with identity.
It also brings up the difference between having money and being seen as having money. For many people, the allure of money is as much about the perception boost that comes with having it as it is about the actual material benefits of having it. Being seen spending and flaunting your wealth is essential to the modern American mindset. For years, we have suffered from the effects of this shared delusion. Now, with platforms like Venmo, people are starting to directly, explicitly profit from it.
Although PayPal doesn’t operate socially like Venmo, allowing you to make transactions in at least some shroud of privacy, Venmo is owned by PayPal. During the pandemic, both platforms profited immensely from the increase of contact-free payment and online shopping. As corporate America and everyday Americans alike embrace a "return to normal," PayPal is introducing more real-life applications of their service outside of the internet sphere to keep this momentum going, including a partnership with CVS stores to now accept touch-free payments through PayPal and Venmo.
None of this is to even mention the Venmo Credit Card — a hip-looking credit card with the ability to turn your cashback straight into crypto.
Which brings me to Venmo’s new feature that lets you buy and trade cryptocurrency. For a currency used by many in the interest of privacy (but what privacy comes with crypto if every single piece is uniquely forged? Not to mention the obvious environment-destroying effects that leave few positives to the booming currency) it is strange to see it in a place built on being devoid of privacy.
I am not making any new observations, mankind has always had the tendencies to flaunt wealth, new ways are just being invented to do it. The concept of a social media showing where your money goes sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel but here we are and I use it multiple times a week. In this new world, who are we now if we do not spend money? And who are your friends if they don’t show up in your transaction history?
"If something does not happen on social media, it does not happen." This sentiment largely originated as a meme targeted at the extremely-online by skeptical older generations, but these days there's a worrying grain of truth to it. From parties to friends to significant others, if they aren’t posted there, it feels closer to non-existence than to existence in a world so heavily reliant on the digital sphere to keep in touch. People who are not on social media are seen as less existent.
While it's easy to dismiss this as a wildly superficial value judgement, there is a degree of inarguable coherence to it: when you're not surrounded by someone else's constant updates, it's easier for them to fall through the cracks of your social life. It's easier to keep in touch with someone when social media does all the work for you. You don’t have to say “I wonder what so-and-so from college is doing?” You already know that they are playing with their cat, listening to this song on Spotify, and just baked this recipe they saw on their feed. Transactions are just the next level of that. It’s a record of what we did, when we did it, and how much it cost to do it.
Corporations directly benefit from this attitude, not to mention the way that they insert themselves into these feeds, disguised as these types of posts. You might run into an ad that you don’t realize is one until you see the tiny text that says “Sponsored." Paying creators to create sly ads that are simply everyday photos that include the product somehow versus making huge sleek animation based ads has become the norm of the advertising industry. Anything to be more relatable to their potential client base. We all see the embarrassing ways companies attempt to connect through social media but unfortunately it works. The fact that we even see it being spread as “cringe” means it worked. ”
Corporations are directly benefiting off of our social media performativity whether you like it or not. Maybe next time you Venmo someone, you’ll think more about making that transaction private.