Not built for humans

Spending time helping elders in our family, I would regularly say “this world isn’t built for older humans.” Now I’m wondering if this world is built for humans at all.

By “this world,” I mean the technology-enabled giant corporations that run most of our lives, from banking to health insurance to waste removal to communications. They all seem increasingly constructed to serve as vehicles to move wealth to the powerful and power to the wealthy.

Try, for example, to cancel the service for a lost prepaid flip phone. No one at the local retail outlet can help; they are not allowed to cancel accounts locally. After wading through their corporate customer service menu, you are told they can help at the retail outlet, if you bring in the PIN for your account and/or your handset (which has been lost). In that case, come in person with photo ID. Oh, wait, they don’t need to help, after all, because (they tell you) all you have to do is stop paying your prepaid service and the account will close in “two or three” months. Your prepaid service is set up to be automatically paid by your credit card? No problem, just cancel the autopay. But wait - you can’t access the credit card account online because its multi-factor authentication pings your phone (which has been lost). Can the bank branch help you? Sort of. They can change the phone number on your account, if you go in person with two forms of ID, but they cannot (even with you sitting in front of them) make changes to any auto payments you set up on your credit card from the same bank. You will have to do that online.

But you do have their app on your phone, right? That makes everything easier!

It’s a flip phone, you remind them.

Oh.

And during all this time, who is making the money? The multinational conglomerate phone company is being paid for a lost phone, and a new replacement. The multinational conglomerate bank is using your money to invest in companies whose profits you will never benefit from, and to fund loans to people who are already billionaires so that they never have to draw down their own cash.

Each human being you encounter who is employed by one of these conglomerates is nice enough, seems to care, and even sheepishly acknowledges the difficulty of the bureaucratic hoops they explain to you. “Security,” they chant, the reason for it all. Whose security? I wonder. Yes, of course, there are cyber criminals out there who will grab what they can get. But security is not the reason an employee at a retail outlet is not allowed to cancel phone service - it would be far more secure if they could. Security is not why a bank employee cannot complete a transaction on a credit card issued by their bank when the credit card holder is in front of them with ID.

It’s not even pure profit that drives these practices. It is the relatively new notion that the product in our late-stage capitalism isn’t a phone, a credit card, an item or service.

In our late-stage capitalism, the product being bought and sold is us. Our consumer attention. Once entangled, their purpose becomes not letting you go.

My mom, whose lost flip phone set off this chain of events, did not start out banking at a multinational conglomerate. Her local bank was bought by a bigger one, and then merged with a bigger one, and then bought and merged again and again. She could have moved her accounts to a more local bank - but there is no guarantee they wouldn’t have been merged or bought, either. And we could set her up at a local credit union; but her Social Security and federal pension are both automatically deposited into her Behemoth Bank account. Can you imagine the challenges associated with changing those? The late-stage capitalism customer has little say in who ultimately controls their money and their time.

This is just one symptom of how our broken economic/political system serves its billionaire masters instead of our moms, dads, kids, neighbors, all of us. The work of change continues, calling us to rebuild the world we need at human scale.

Be safe and well.