Banking used to be that you walked into a small local bank, with your money and your reputation. The bank manager would shake your hand, if he trusted the secon

Banking used to be that you walked into a small local bank, with your money and your reputation. The bank manager would shake your hand, if he trusted the second-hand reports of your honor and integrity. Then you could get a loan, or a bigger limit on your checking account. He was incentivized to be careful and thorough, but all that happened gently over the previous few months in a vibrant and talkative community, long before you walked through the door of his little bank. Of course, that is all old hat (you and the bank manager would probably wear hats on the street outside the bank). With automation comes remoteness. With remoteness comes distrust. With automation, remoteness and distrust, comes optimization for the simple case, and the impossibility of anything that strays from the One True Happy Path. There are rising sea levels, but it is a Wide Molasses Sea that is rising. Everyday life is drowning under a tide of viscous stickiness, pervading and delaying all we hope to achieve. It induces a vague techno-dystopian premonition, then occasionally, and suddenly, a sense of desperate powerlessness. The trivial small-print on a nonchalantly-ticked online form stops your life, like a blunt rusty bureaucratic stiletto pushed slowly through your wide disbelieving eye.