Of course I still use checks! Anyone taking your money should hear the power flick of your pen, dearie.
Writing a check looks like an innocuous bit of financial sleight-of-hand. You scribble on a piece of paper, and some bank talks to another bank, and suddenly your dog walker can pay for DoorDash this week.
But in fact it’s an everyday invocation of a far older, and scarier, form of magic.
You see, people think that electronic bank records are just databases. Rows, tables, ones and zeroes. But all those numbers are really encodings of promises. A web of them. Pull on one, and the tension ripples outward: all the others feel it.
No money actually ever moves around—at least, not in any ordinary sense of movement.
Your check is a promise to settle a debt. And since you’ve promised the bank that you will cover that debt—by letting them hold a hefty fraction of your net worth, or first claim on your next paycheck—they are willing to promise the other bank that you’re good for it.
And that bank has made its own promises. And the next. And so on, until the 29-year-old proprietor of Paw-menade, Inc., can promise DoorDash that when they go to reimburse their suppliers and couriers and employees and shareholders, you will cover your small but necessary piece of the deal.
No money moves, but that chain of trust—an unbroken lattice of promises, some of them centuries old—is the world economy.
You’d better believe that beings that trade in promises are paying close attention.
Anything that lives on promises and debts notices when humans build an entire civilization out of them. Especially when we pretend there’s no price for default.
So what’s the last little thing you do when you write a check? The final act that transmogrifies paper into obligation, ink into leverage? You pick up a pen and sign your name.
You’re not just authorizing a transaction.
By invoking your name, you’re binding yourself to an ancient international web of promises.
Talk about power.
