Road rage on the Information Superhighway

by David Benjamin

“Men have become the tools of their tools.” — Henry David Thoreau

MADISON, Wis.—One of the banks where Hotlips and I store our money communicates with its depositors only by app.

I should note that I didn’t choose to patronize this bank—called CCF. I was shunted to it when a previous bank—HSBC—experienced some sort of corporate transubstantiation and disgorged its fiscal riffraff. This, our second disgorgement, resulted from an earlier decision by our Citibank branch to renounce all plebeian affiliations (with slobs like me) and focus its energies on “wealth management.”

Now, I’m not what you’d call an app maven. I have some apps. We all do. They’re like blackheads, ingrown toenails and those little crusty patches that crop up inexplicably on hard-to-reach areas of your body. You tap your mobile phone and there they are, row-on-row of little two-dimensional succubi awaiting the brush of a careless thumb and a dizzying nanosecond journey into your brain, where they contrive to live forever, growing like tumors and supplanting thought and reflection, love and literacy, couth and karma.

When CCF told us that an app would henceforth provide our only access to deposit, withdraw and keep track of our balance, I spent the better part of a day installing CCF’s abstruse software on my little-used but suddenly vital smartphone. I lost two more hours when first I tried to make contact with CCF to see if we had enough in our balance to cover our autopay bills. I achieved digital communion with the slippery app by accidentally taking a selfie, which the app interpreted as my decision to eschew password security in favor of facial recognition.

By happenstance my kisser became my bond. But I remained nervous. Like most of my contacts with apps, I blunder to a result—or an uneasy truce, or a state of impotent rage—through random thumbstrokes I can’t remember and could never replicate. Of course, the app. like Sgt. Schultz, remembers nothing. Nothing!

My truce with the CCF app, dependent on facial recognition, lasted ’til my smartphone grew old and—despite still being able to sit up and take nourishment—failed its latest OS upgrade. A “technician” (salesperson) at the smartphone store said there was no way to access the new OS—as well as all its successors and the whole wonderful world of apps—unless I bought a new phone, for only $629.

(I should note that we have another bank, three blocks away from where we live. I walk in, sit down at Richard’s desk and make small talk while he transfers money from hither to thither and “manages” our “wealth.” “Facial recognition” is also part of this process. I know him, he knows me. But I’m spared from engaging my thumbs, whispering a password and confirming that I’m “human” by tapping blurry photo arrays of traffic lights, motorcycles and highway bridges.)

My new $629 smartphone cleverly lifted the CCF app from my old phone but ceased, of course, to recognize my face. It demanded instead that I input my user ID and password. I might’ve once generated an ID and password but I couldn’t find or remember either one. I had become dependent on facial recognition, which only worked—by accident—on my old, obsolete dumbphone. If the CCF app knew these two secret words, it wouldn’t say—because they’re secret.

I can’t relate details of my subsequent ordeal, because I can’t remember everything I tried. Easier to recall is the rage that mounted with every digital dead end and with Hotlips’ every effort to counsel me through the struggle. Somehow, you see, she has reconciled to the fact that the ubiquitous technology that suffuses everyone’s life on the grid does not “think” like people think. She advises me to proceed step by arduous step through a software sequence of ones and zeroes “coded” by a fluorescent-bleached recluse, in a sub-basement cubicle, whose closest link to reality is the latest iteration of “The Legend of Zelda.”

Suffice to say that, after two hours of failing to do what I used to accomplish in ten seconds by opening a monthly envelope from the bank, I dug my old dumbphone out of the junk drawer, recharged it with my obsolete USB-2 (or USB-3, or USB-X15, who the hell knows?) cord and stared at the screen. It recognized me. I opened the CCF app. There it was, still humping away on an obsolete OS. It was up to the moment, bless its silicon, with my balance and autopay data. I had a victory, but it felt Pyrrhic.

This wasn’t my only recent onset of road rage on the information superhighway. Recently, while accessing a streaming channel on our LG multimedia flat-screen TV, which replaced a three-year-old Sharp TV (hey, remember vacuum-tube TVs that sometimes lasted twenty years?), I tapped the wrong key on the remote-control device typically referred to by the technologically uncool as a “clicker.”

When Shakespeare wrote, “”What a piece of work is man—how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god,” he did so before the invention of the clicker—a device of finite faculties incompatible with the dimensions of the average human thumb
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My thumb, which I regard as slightly below average, is 22 millimeters wide. On the TV remote of my discontent, the buttons are as little as six millimeters in width. The “big” buttons sprawl across 11 millimeters—which is roughly the diameter of a ladybug. Perhaps most important, the spaces between the 44 buttons—arrayed top-to-bottom in rows of three and four, on a panel barely 44 millimeters wide—is less than two millimeters. Anyone who’s ever used a clicker has suffered the agony of inadvertently brushing the wrong button, a millimeter off-target from the correct button.

Suddenly, you’re still watching SpongeBob but you’re listening to it in Farsi. Suddenly, you’ve gone from “Ted Lasso” on Apple TV to an informercial about Jacuzzi bathtub renewals on QVC. Suddenly, you’ve lost your cable feed and the only show you can watch for the rest of your life is an “NCIS” marathon on the Ion channel.

The clincher is that you can’t go back. You can’t unclick. That remote control, designed apparently by a malignant elf with itty-bitty thumbs in a sub-basement cubicle, has no “cancel” function. There’s no reset button. The rabbit hole you face, just to get back to SpongeBob, is a labyrinth where the only hope to find a way out is through “chat rooms” occupied by AI-generated bots named Steve and Brenda who feign good cheer, offer a water-torture series of dead-end detours and shit odorless bricks of FAQ.

Hence, I rage. And Hotlips, angry at my anger, storms out of range.

I’ve reached a point, with clicker and computer, website and chatbot, that I’m constantly on the brink of losing my cool and screaming pointlessly at insensate devices. I’ve realized that I’m afflicted—as are millions of otherwise sane slaves of high technology—with a mental illness that might be called chronic digital stress syndrome. An attack of CDSD is triggered by interaction with machines purported to be infinitely smarter than humans but intrinsically dry of the milk of human kindness. They won’t change to become more human. They can’t change. There’s no software for that. We have to adapt to them. By design, they can’t help us adapt. They don’t know we’re adapting.

Then, just as we—on our own—figure out how to adapt, the machines “upgrade.” It’s up to us to adapt all over again. And they don’t help. They can’t help. So, all over again, we get something profoundly human that they can’t get:

Pissed off.