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Confessions of a Venmo Voyeur
The secret satisfaction of watching you spend
My Venmo membership is one of the most conveniently creepy aspects of my digital life. My profile is set to private, but to my absolute delight, most of you have a public Venmo profile. And I love watching what you do there.
Like most of my so-called microgeneration — that space between Millennials and Gen X known as “Xennials” or, as writer Anna Garvey memorably termed it in 2015, the “Oregon Trail Generation” — I rarely carry paper money. As far as I can tell, the founders at Venmo (now owned by PayPal) did not intend to create a looky-loo’s paradise when they cleverly responded to a problem they perceived among then-twenty-somethings like my friends and I.
Launched in 2009, when I was 28, Venmo was marketed as an easy way for pals to exchange electronic cash at a dinner where it may have been too confusing to split a check 15 ways. But the popular app doesn’t only exist to help drunk liberal arts majors divvy up the price of a giant Tex Mex Tower at TGI Friday’s, or, if one prefers a livelier evening, go halvsies on an eight ball.
It’s a simple way to tip a nail technician off the books. The same goes for most situations in which an independent contractor’s place of business takes a portion of a tip given via credit card. If you don’t like to carry cash but you do like to make sure all of your tip (except for a tiny fee) goes to a hardworking individual, Venmo is a very useful tool.
These days, many of us use Venmo to pay landlords, plumbers, babysitters, even chiropractors or psychiatrists. Some people use it for child support payments. How do I know? Because I watch people do all of these things and more, every single day. I watch my friends, and I watch strangers. And I am not alone in my scintillating hobby.
In “Public Displays of Transaction,” the playwright, author and screenwriter Chiara Atik wrote:
And maybe because Venmo is a fairly new platform, a lot of people seem unaware of the stories they’re telling in their transactions. This will likely change once it becomes more mainstream (in the same way Facebook use became more guarded once everyone’s parents got an account), but for now, it’s the Wild West of uninhibited, relatively…
