Text messages and phone banking – what’s next?

A couple of months ago, I said to someone that banking on your phone just isn’t right.  The ease and convenience did not fit the seriousness of the activity.  Paying a bill, transferring money between accounts, and other banking transactions are just too important and shouldn’t be done so casually or quickly.  Among other risks, the risk of error on that tiny “keyboard” is way too high.

Instead, banking should be done in person or on your computer, using a man-sized keyboard.  Banking by phone, I said, was just another symptom of the underlying problems that plague us today, such as laziness and a lack of seriousness.  It’s just like sending an important message by “text” instead of letter or email—and then having that "text" filled with errors and a lack of punctuation, to boot. 

But then I saw this WSJ article on FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, the once glorified king of crypto, effective altruist, and mega-donor to the Left.  This guy didn’t just send texts or conduct banking activities from his phone.  Instead:

At FTX Group, expenses and invoices were submitted on Slack and were approved by emoji. These informal, ephemeral messaging systems were used to approve transfers in the tens of millions of dollars, leaving only informal records of such transfers, or no records at all.

Now, I don’t know, or want to know, what “Slack” is, but I suspect it’s appropriately named.  However, I do know that approving expenses and invoices “by emoji” is just another symptom, albeit a more serious symptom, of the underlying problems discussed above: laziness and a lack of seriousness.  Emoji transaction approval is beyond sending important messages by “text.”  It’s beyond even banking from your phone.  It’s the next step in our downward spiral, our degeneration.  That lack of rigor, if taken too far, leads to disaster. 

Unfortunately, I think it’s too late to reverse course.  It’s a good thing the machines aren’t yet ready to take us over.