Meet the ATM That Tells the World How Much Money You Have
Do we have to worry about this ATM becoming our reality? Ummm... yeah.
Art Basel runs in Miami Beach once a year. As you might expect, the international art fair event attracts celebrities, influencers, and wealthy art aficionados, among others.
It’s not just the high-priced artwork that draws such an illustrious crowd. Viral pieces of “art” and various stunts do as well. Remember the banana duct-taped to the wall that sold for $120,000? And how it was subsequently eaten from the wall?
Well, this year’s big “stunt” was a real working ATM. This isn’t your normal ATM though:
After inserting your debit card into the machine, it takes your photo and places it onto a leaderboard alongside your checking account balance. You’re ranked based on how much money you have.
It goes a step further. The screen responds in different ways depending on how much money you have. As ARTnews reported:
When someone inserts their debit card and plugs in their pin, the camera takes a picture as the account balance flashes on the screen and an animation spins around, declaring the participant well endowed or…not so much. When this ARTnews journalist put her card in, an animation of a toilet stuffed with money popped up with big blue letters telling me, “BYE!”
The Bigger Implications of the Leaderboard ATM
There weren’t a lot of people who actively walked up and used it, though many of the ones who did knew it would make them look good. Like Diplo:
As Liz Ryan of MSCHF (the art collective that created the ATM) observed:
“It’s really interesting, because whether or not people end up putting their card in, everyone has their moment with it. You can see them going through this introspective pause where they’re asking themselves if they can go through with it.”
These bystanders who gawked and took videos and cheered as others used the ATM are a lot like the majority of our population. They don’t want to have to participate or take any risks, but they still want to be seen as part of the group.
Aside from a few rumblings on Twitter, I really didn’t find many people concerned about this ATM. There certainly were no public protests at Art Basel. That’s worrisome.
Is it because people are so focused on the idea of this being a stunt that they’re not even thinking that this could easily become our reality?
Is it because they think it’s a fun spin on going to the ATM and could never be used against us?
Is it because the kind of people who attend and pay attention to events like Art Basel are so out of touch with reality and the common man that they know this would never negatively impact them?
Right now, this might just be a viral stunt. But what if it’s not? What if this was a test of the people and we just failed it miserably?
A seemingly random art installation could be the start of a social credit system like the one we saw in the “Nosedive” episode of Black Mirror:
This is the kind of world we’d end up in. Where there would be no such thing as private selves or activities. Everything we do and say and own would be judged in the public sphere and used to determine our worthiness in terms of relationships, services, etc.
If this sort of thing infiltrates our daily lives, there will be no more freedom of thought or movement. Everything that (most) people do will be done in the hopes of controlling the rating they receive and the public perception that comes with it.
Technically, we’re already being conditioned to do this on social media — especially on visual platforms like Instagram where phony, highly staged, enviable lives are “liked” more than real ones. But we shouldn’t be complacent and allow other technologies — like the ATM — do away with our privacy and gamify our lives. The second we do, it’s over for us.