A frustrated individual recently vented some valid complaints over the intrusion of digital technology into daily life on her blog. Close, but missing the mark, I am both warmed at tech commoners waking up a bit and also disappointed in their predictably limited perspectives.
Before I rip into the article I just want to acknowledge that Elayne is probably a lovely lady and I probably even agree with her on much of the state of digital affairs in the abstract. However, a set of boomer blinders appears to be affecting her assessment of things. Let’s dig in!
Fast forward to the 21st century and you will understand the frustrations of living in an impersonal, stressful, infuriating new world. It’s one in which computers and corporations have taken over our lives and made artful obfuscation a new art.
Computers and corporations have taken over our collective lives because the general population has enabled them to do so. When you elect to involve devices in your life without at all considering how any of it works, who controls it, or the ramifications of its design, you enable exploitation by corporations through the use of their technological products.
Remember what it was like before our lives were ruled by algorithms, AI, autopay, QR codes, social media, virtual chats, usernames and passwords?
Nearly all of this is completely avoidable through the simple power of saying “no”. When I am asked to scan a QR code or download an “app”, I politely decline, offering that I do not have a cell phone. Social networking? Just don’t use it. See your friends in person instead. Algorithm[ic feeds] are largely leveraged in social networking. Avoiding the aforementioned stikes this one off the list as well.
Additionally, despite not having signed up for the daily plan, my husband received twelve texts on his cell which shouldn’t have been there. “Oh,” said the first agent, “he should have been on airplane mode.” I explained that he hardly knows how to use a cell phone.
While I also harbor a distain for “smart” phones, even I can understand that there is no excuse to remain ignorant in how to operate a device one expects to use on a daily basis. I hear this excuse all the time from older people, and it is very obviously a thinly vieled attempt to justify one’s laziness. It takes only a few moments to explore the layout of a graphical interface that you’ve never encountered before. And even if it takes you longer, then set aside some time to familiarize yourself with the device. It is not the responibility of others to accomodate you where you’ve put in no effort to help yourself.
When we moved house two years ago, Comcast gave us the wrong email addresses and landline number after I’d printed 500 business cards and alerted family and friends of our new contact information.
Why are you putting yourself at the mercy of your ISP to decide your email service for you? Who actually does that? Exert some agency over your technological decisions. Most normies at least opt to use an email provider that operates independent of their internet service provider. Wait, is this just a holdover from the era of landlines? Where subscribers got their phone service installation and the telecom selects their phone number for them? So this is just a case of boomers applying the lens of legacy telecommunications over the internet, expecting things to work the same way.
Allow me to try to offer a terrible analogy: Your internet service, being a utility, should just be cosnidered a dumb pipe. It moves data in. It moves data out. It is up to you to decide what kind of data moves across it and how. And your water utility is all the same. They will bring water to your home, but it is up to you to decide what to do with it and in which ways it gets used.
Hopefully, you don’t expect your water utility meter man to pour you a glass of water and subsequently raise it to your lips. And if somehow you do, don’t get mad at your water utility for deciding you should be drinking water from a glass instead of filling a pool or showering with that water instead. The idea that people just passively accept an email account tied to their ISP is simply ludicrous to me.
We also went through hell trying to access everything from bank accounts to credit cards to companies who were paid by autopay because their websites wouldn’t recognize our usernames or passwords.
I suspect that the issue in reality was that the wrong credentials were being supplied. Your email address being changed should have little bearing on this.
Sadly, the future looks bleak given corporate power, lack of regulatory policies, and a frightening explosion of artificial intelligence.
Corporations have as much power as people collectively give them. When 90%+ of the general public decide “I don’t want to have to think about it, I’ll just use whatever defaults my computer comes with!” then they shouldn’t be shocked when they later find that the Microsofts and Apples and Googles of the world now rule over ther lives.
But right now, I have to stop writing. Staples has finally called back to say my new laptop is ready.
So you’re having somebody else provision your devices for you? It’s no wonder people “hardly know how to use a cell phone”. Normies have grown so indolent that they must outsource something as simple as device setup. I can’t help but to find that much of the author’s stated injuries are self-inflicted. A cursory, surface level examination is often all it takes to determine if a piece of software seeks to manufacture captive users from which to extract value. Here’s a hint: If you have to agree to any “EULA”, then it is most likely proprietary software. If it is proprietary software, it (and its authors) most certainly seek to subjugate and exploit you.
Yes, the world is increasingly becoming a technological hellscape. But it isn’t solely the fault of corporations. We also have the general public to thank for that. A majority who deem basic technological literacy as “too difficult” to bother with. Just give ’em a big shiny button to get Bread & Circus streaming on Netflix. How it gets implemented and any downstream consequences be damned.