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Posted on 2024-08-23
When I moved to Germany, I started using social media again. A long while back I had deleted my presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the rest. However, feeling a need to stay connected to my peers and family while living abroad, I decided to lower the barrier to communication by setting up a new Meta™️ presence.
I've lived in Germany now for 3 years. Instagram appears to be ubiquitous here, with most people asking for your Instagram handle to stay in touch using Instagram's utterly butchered chat system. I've mostly just accepted it at this point. But since I hate everything about Instagram, I have decided to remove it from my phone and check it only periodically on my computer, where I have the ability to block many of its most irritating features.
In addition to the obsession with Instagram, I've noticed that many people in Berlin are unwilling to disclose IBANs when discussing payments. People will offer their PayPal or N26 Moneybeam details almost instantly, but asking people for their IBAN seems to set off a fight or flight response for some reason. N26's Moneybeam is basically just an intra-bank IBAN transfer, so I don't really get it. But this kind of platform-dependency - a lock-in by any other name - is surprisingly prevalent for a country that is (by all accounts) largely technophobic and suspicious of big tech platforms.
Of course, cash is still king in Berlin. Oftentimes the best way to transfer money is by just giving someone cash, since you will inevitably need cash day-to-day in a city whose businesses are either tech- or tax-shy. However, if there is any distance between the parties involved, an online transaction is required. The wonderful thing about banking in Europe is we have a common way of transferring money: SEPA. A SEPA transaction is freely available to anyone who has an IBAN, so it seems to me very strange to profer a locked-in method of transferring money first when we all have access to this much more convenient and platform-agnostic method.
So it goes with social media. I have an Instagram account, but I don't want to use it because Instagram frankly sucks. Facebook suffers the same problem (but somehow worse). I don't mind WhatsApp as much since it's pretty much used by everyone and has limited its scope to just offering chat and telephony, but I'd still rather not give out my phone number if I can avoid it. It's somehow too intimate for casual acquaintances.
The fact of the matter is this: everyone has an email address. You couldn't have Instagram without it. Okay, in theory you could have signed up with your phone number, but that's neither here nor there. You almost certainly have an email address just as you almost certainly have an IBAN if you live in Europe. Why do we not just use these platform-agnostic, ubiquitous, and simple mechanisms by default?
Germans, in my experience, are far less trusting when it comes to giving out personal information. I applaud them for this. British and American people I've known are all too happy to give out large swathes of information at a moment's notice. Germans, by contrast, are guarded and don't give anything away until you know them better. They are right to act like this. But this makes it all the stranger, then, that their first instinct is to use... Instagram.
Instagram is a famously information-hungry service that knows far more about you and your browsing habits than any service should. The idea that it is somehow acceptable to increase the size and scope of that data trove by moving social interactions over to its flakey and hard-to-follow chat system is frankly absurd. People will respond to this by telling me that they don't like giving out an email address because it's too personal. I don't buy it. For starters, email is as personal or as hands-off as you want it to be. If you don't want to give out your actual private email address, setting up an alias or creating a fake one is trivial. Meanwhile, creating a second Instagram account... requires you to set up a second Instagram account, usually with a second email address. Why not just create that email address and give people that?
Some people really hate email. Some feel that email is clunky and doesn't lend itself well to casual or intimate exchanges. They'd much rather use an instant messaging service because the flow feels more conversational. I can understand this, even if I disagree with the premise.
The fact of the matter is that email can absolutely be used as an instant messaging replacement, it just usually isn't. With the exception of platforms like Gmail, which add a delay to sending messages by default so you can "unsend" that message you messed up, email is almost always sent immediately in the same way that a WhatsApp message is. Its immediacy is its appeal, in fact. If email weren't immediate, it wouldn't have needed to exist since we already had a postal service for non-immediate discourse. So yes, if you wanted to do an immediate back-and-forth over email, you absolutely could. It would even be well-structured, self-contained, and searchable in a way that Instagram/WhatsApp utterly fail to be. But the nicest feature of email - for me - is that it doesn't demand immediacy.
Instant messaging really shifts the expectations of its users. When you send someone a WhatsApp message, you kind of expect them to respond as soon as they read it. If you see a person has read a message but they don't respond immediately, this is somehow offensive (the "left on read" phenomenon). If you receive a message and read it, but don't go back until much later, you even feel the need to apologize for your tardiness. This is lunacy.
Email takes away this urgency. When someone sends an email, they don't expect anything back immediately. If they get an immediate response, great! But they don't expect it, and you don't feel pressured to give it. An email allows you to mull over its content, take the time to formulate a proper reply, and send it at your leisure with no guilt.
It really doesn't matter if your message is a full letter-style correspondence or just a simple message like you would send over WhatsApp or Instagram. Email doesn't care what the body of the response is. It's entirely up to you. The difference is that it supports the longer form in a way that feels unnatural and uncomfortable to formulate on instant messaging solutions. Writing a long message on WhatsApp feels unnatural because that's not what it was designed for. It was designed for you to quickly send messages back-and-forth in the same manner as IRC. Instagram's messaging service was originally designed for you to send Instagram posts to other users and is therefore acually really bad at pretty much everything else. Email, on the other hand, was designed to be electronic mail with all the variations that it includes.
I was at a meetup recently and someone asked me how I usually communicate. When I responded "email", I got an odd look. I ended up having to give out my Instagram details. This is so strange to me.
People have become so accustomed to ignoring their email. They associate it with marketing junk and work-related tasks to the point that they find no joy in it. They will happily put up with the worst-designed protocols and platforms rather than just learning how to unsubscribe from mailing lists and properly interact with a system which has worked just fine since 1981[1].
Where this becomes less understandable to me is in the reluctance to just share an IBAN rather than defaulting to a far more complex and inefficient method of sharing money such as PayPal. In countries like the US, I'm a bit more sympathetic. US banking systems appear not to have changed much in the last 50 years, and simple functions are often paid addons. Payment processors like PayPal and Square Cash and even Venmo take some of the pain out of these archaic systems. The better solution, of course, is just to introduce better standards and stop charging people to use their own money, but I digress.
SEPA is a fantastic system that enables European users to exchange money seamlessly. Historically, SEPA payments have been allowed to be artificially slowed down by banks, with instant payments attaching a charge. However, the EU council recently introduced new legislation to stop this practice by the end of 2024[2]. There is now no argument against using SEPA instead of PayPal/N26 Moneybeam. In the UK, we've had free instant inter-bank transfers for years via BACS and CHAPS, as well as free access to cash from all bank ATMs (which is now the law[3]).
2 - EU council adopts regulation on instant payments
3 - Free access to cash protected
Now that SEPA is (finally) being brought up-to-date, I hope people will start winding down their use of external processors and platform-locked bank transfers, but I won't hold my breath. People get so used to the convenience of these systems that they become a natural part of day-to-day life, even if a provably better-regulated and more standardized alternative comes about. If I could completely move all of my payments to cash/SEPA, I'd be pretty happy.
This has been long and rambling, but it's the culmanation of 3 years of frustration. If you're reading this, the chances are you already agree with me to some extent (given that most responses to my posts come from Gemini users). On the off-chance that you're someone who doesn't already think like me, thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings.
I don't really have a problem with people using whatever system they agree to when chatting or sending payments. My primary problem comes with the assumption of these systems being a part of another's lives and the reluctance people seem to have to using alternatives. If I tell a person I only have email, why do they recoil at the idea of using it? They have it too! The same goes with SEPA. If you ask what payment system I use and I send you an IBAN, the only reason not to use it is if your bank is not a Euro bank, in which case we can discuss an alternative. Just please don't assume that I have or want to use the same platform you've opted to lock yourself into. It adds a lot of friction to everything if you always start the conversation with non-standard solutions.