There was once a student who lived in his parents’ house, somewhere between safety and stuckness.
He didn’t have to choose between rent and food; his parents covered the basics and drove him where he needed to go. But he had no steady income of his own—just a small balance in a checking account—and the sense that one bad family crisis could stall his plans for years.
What he needed wasn’t emergency cash. He needed slack: enough room to study, take the right internships, and say no to jobs that bent his values.
One day, he saw an offer from a bright green finance app.
They were proud of not being a bank:
“We’re not a bank. We’re something better.”
They “partnered with banks,” they said. They helped people the traditional system had failed. Alongside their accounts, they ran a Scholars program: grants, laptops, a small community, all framed as investing in students like him.
He knew fintech lived inside the same financial system he distrusted. But the scholarship itself looked simple: free money for school, no repayment, no interest, no obvious trap.
So he applied—not as an endorsement, but as a tactic.
When he was accepted, the relief was real. The grant wouldn’t decide whether he ate, but it would decide how much mental bandwidth he had to build the life he wanted.
His gratitude was real, too.
Before the money could land, he had to click “I accept.”
In the portal were the usual boxes and disclaimers:
- The company itself was not FDIC-insured.
- Deposits lived at partner banks that were insured.
- The app sat between customers and those banks, routing paychecks and moving money around.
On the marketing surface, that was “innovation.” At the infrastructure level, it meant something sharper:
“When money sits in a bank, FDIC is supposed to catch you if the bank fails. When money is in flight between banks, through an intermediary that isn’t itself a bank, what happens if that middle layer fails or locks up—especially when your users are the ones who can least afford it?”
For wealthy customers, that’s an inconvenience. For the poor, it can be everything.
And he knew how most platforms evolved: first they shower users with benefits, then, once people are dependent and switching is hard, they slowly enshittify—small changes to holds, fees, float, and terms that shift value from users to the business to shareholders, click by click, quarter by quarter.
From a distance it looked like a friendly budgeting tool; up close it looked like asking precarious people to play Russian Roulette with their savings on an ever-tightening ratchet of exploitation—and not even telling them there was a gun on the table.
He felt a flicker of unease—and clicked anyway.
On the surface: relief and gratitude. Underneath: a warning light covered with a sticky note that said, “We’ll think about this later.”
“Later” arrived when he met the Scholars community.
At the first gathering, he met other students: underfunded, overqualified, sharp. First-gen kids from trailer parks, border towns, hollowed-out cities. Families always one step away from overdraft fees and “insufficient funds.”
They told stories of eviction scares, of juggling bills, of how a few thousand dollars had changed the slope of their lives.
They were genuinely grateful. He understood that feeling down to the bone.
Corporate staff were there too—hoodies, pronoun pins, smooth talk about equity and “changing banking for good.” They listened, nodded, and repeated the company story: no fees, no shame, just empowerment.
The more they talked, the more something inside him boiled.
It wasn’t their individual manners. It was the structure they floated on:
- The company controlled the on/off switch for access: fraud models, automated “risk” flags, and compliance scripts that could freeze or close accounts with no human context—turning someone’s rent money into a ticket with support instead of cash at the register.
- Its revenue depended on turning every act of survival into a tiny payday: a percentage of every swipe, referral bounties when users pulled friends in, carefully gamified “credit builder” and edge products that nudged people into behaviors the company could monetize.
- The in-between plumbing was tuned for float and friction, not safety: “instant” transfers and early direct deposit on good days, but on bad days, long ambiguous windows where it wasn’t clear whose books the money was really on—leaving poor users arguing with both the app and the underlying bank while the bills kept coming.
- And above all of that sat the growth mandate: investors and, eventually, public shareholders who wouldn’t be satisfied with “enough,” but would keep demanding higher ARPU and better margins—pressure that historically gets answered with slower releases of funds, more aggressive upsells, more dark patterns, and more risk pushed downward.
Against that backdrop, the Scholars program snapped into focus:
a small, real grant for a few; a large, soft-focus halo for the machine.
His conflict wasn’t about bugs or horror stories. It was about first principles:
“This company has its hand on the tap between precarious people and the money they need to live, profits because they’re trapped on its rails, and is rewarded by markets for finding ever subtler ways to squeeze. My scholarship makes me a polished example that this arrangement is ‘good.’”
That mix—real help, structural risk, and cheerful self-congratulation—made him livid.
He found it hard to stay in the sessions. The more executives and staff talked about “empowerment,” the more he heard, underneath, “We found a profitable place to stand between people and their money—and your gratitude is part of our product.”
He skipped a couple of events. He just couldn’t sit in that atmosphere without wanting to scream.
The scholarship, he realized, had two faces:
- On one side, it materially helped him and others—real money, real laptops, real slack.
- On the other, it morally whitewashed a system whose structure, incentives, and likely future he would never choose to build.
His gratitude didn’t vanish. But it stopped belonging to the company.
It belonged to the coordinator who answered emails. To the staff who checked on stress. To the other Scholars who traded survival strategies in quiet corners.
His anger, meanwhile, stayed aimed at the machine and the class running it: executives and corporate staff whose careers depended on not thinking too hard about what their architecture and growth model meant for the people in that room.
So he drew a line.
- He would say thank you to the humans who showed up for him.
- He would not become a shield for the structure that paid them.
When internship pitches and “share your story” invitations appeared, they sounded flattering:
“You’re exactly the kind of student this program is for. Come intern with us. Tell your story. Help more people see the good we’re doing.”
His internal translation was simpler:
“Turn your gratitude and your pain into our marketing. Help us grow a user base whose money we control but don’t fully insure. Stand in front of our logo so no one looks too closely at how this will get worse under shareholder pressure.”
He declined.
He used the grant and the laptop. He showed up for fellow Scholars when he could. And when the self-justifying gloss got too thick, he walked out instead of swallowing it.
Inside, he reclassified the scholarship: not as a sacred bond demanding loyalty, but as a small, specific redistribution out of a system he opposed. Something he would accept for himself and for the work he wanted to do later, while keeping the right to say, “This machine is dangerous, and the fact that it helped me doesn’t make it okay.”
His gratitude stayed with the people. His anger stayed pointed at the design, the business model, and the incentives.
And he turned back to the more important question:
“What would it take to build financial tools where people can hold and move their own money without an uninsured, profit-maximizing middle layer wedged between them and the only savings they have?”
That question pointed him toward the Orchard:
credit unions, co-ops, public options, transparent rails, free software—systems that don’t need scholarships and glossy success stories to prove they’re decent, because they’re not quietly extracting from the most fragile part of the flow, nor beholden to shareholders demanding they get worse over time.
Insight
Sometimes a real gift comes from a system you still don’t trust.
When gratitude and anger rise together, you can thank the people, use the help well, and still refuse to bless the machine that made their help necessary.
⛩️🖥️
