Some years ago, in the post-Internet but pre-smartphone era, I joined a group of acquaintances for dinner at a Washington, D.C. restaurant. At the end of the meal, the friend who had organized the gathering began collecting cash to cover the bill. In the midst of this then-familiar ritual, he remarked, “Doesn’t this give you present shock? Don’t you wonder why we are still doing it this way?”
Today, of course, these exchanges typically take place electronically. My friend anticipated this. He foresaw that we’d figure out a better way to settle up, but he didn’t (and couldn’t) know that, within a few years, instead of cash, we would all be carrying mini-supercomputers in our pockets that enabled the seamless exchange of money between friends. How could he? The term “app” was not part of our lexicon, let alone now-ubiquitous phrases like “just Venmo me.” The arc of these developments was perhaps inevitable, but the mechanisms enabling them were unknowable.
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