The first ATM in Hong Kong was actually at the foot of the bank. I remember my father using it. And I find it... — John Lanchester

The first ATM in Hong Kong was actually at the foot of the bank. I remember my father using it. And I find it absolutely terrifying that - something about the way the machine just kind of coughed up money with no difficulty.

Author: John Lanchester

Insight: There's something genuinely unsettling about how casually we've accepted the ATM as normal. Lanchester captures that moment of vertigo—standing in front of a machine that simply decides to give you money, no questions asked, no human judgment involved. For his father's generation, this was genuinely weird. Money came from a person across a counter who knew you, who might say no, who made the transaction feel like an actual negotiation. An ATM just... complies. But that eeriness points to something deeper than just nostalgia for face-to-face banking. We've outsourced trust to machines in ways that feel both liberating and slightly wrong. The ATM made money feel abstract and abundant in a new way—always available, frictionless, almost unreal. We still feel that strangeness sometimes, especially when something goes wrong: a declined card feels almost personal, a betrayal by an algorithm. We've built an entire economic life around machines that work so well we forget they're there until they don't. What Lanchester is really describing is the moment when convenience started eating away at our sense of consequence. We gained access and lost something else—maybe accountability, maybe the feeling that money actually means something. That trade-off is still happening, just with different machines now.