The constipated password

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis.—Every Christmas season, I suffer an onset of password constipation. To shop for the holidays, I visit websites that I use infrequently, once a year at most. Usually, I’ve been there before. Typically, on my first visit there, I laboriously provided my personal data. Obeying orders, I made up a password and—knowing that I’d forget it almost immediately—tucked it away in personal password file.

I approach these annual website forays with a pessimistic attitude that verges on fatalism. This is because, after typing my “user ID” on my computer display and pasting in my password, I tend to receive—from the algorithm in charge—the message that I have attempted to foist upon it an “invalid user ID or password.”

The algorithm never tells me which is wrong: user ID or password?

Hence, if I want to continue my effort to buy a sweater for my son or pair of ear rings for Hotlips, I have no choice but to click on the death-spiral link: “Forgot password.” This is a coerced confession that occasionally goads me into shouting preposterously at the insensate screen. “I didn’t forget the goddamn password! I wrote it down! I saved it. YOU forgot it, you bit-flip son of a bitch!”

After my tantrum, I clicki despondently on “Forgot password” and begin the ordeal—as few as five minutes, as much as an hour—of resetting my secret code with the correct combination of upper case and lower case letters, plus numbers and allowable dingbats. Each retailer’s digital program, of course, has its own particular alphabetic, numerical and symbolic protocols, which must studied, observed and obeyed, lest the dread “invalid password” message recurs and sends me back to the digital detention center sardonically referred to as “Home.”

Often, I’m foiled in my reset effort by a message that tells me I can’t use this user ID and password because someone else has already registered with these identifiers. That someone else, of course, is me. There can’t be two of me. The algorithmic solution to this quandary is to set me against me, in a cybernetic duel of self-obliteration. If there can’t be two of me, there must be—in the superior logic of artificial intelligence—none of me.

However, when it can’t find a way to cancel me summarily, the algorithm still has a few tricks up its sleeve. Foremost among these devices is the founding principle of computer technology: There is one way to do things. Only one. This path to enlightenment follows a sequence not native to the human mind, which contains the power to detour, deviate, leapfrog, invent and circumvent.

I doubt that any elementary school teachers still convey the rules of English grammar by compelling pupils to diagram sentences, fencing subjects away from predicates, sidelining modifiers onto gentle slopes and forking off subordinate clauses. I was good at this but many of my peers would be caught misplacing an adjective or disrespecting an article. One little mistake and the kid would have to start all over again, enduring the pedagogical equivalent of returning, shamefaced, to “Home”.

Resetting my password is like being back in fifth grade. But now, I’m not the sentence-diagramming whiz kid. Today, I’m one of the doofuses who couldn’t tell an adverb from a past participle. The difference is that the algorithm that determines my fate is not a teacher patiently striving to help me get it right. The merciless algorithm gives me several tries and—if I persist in screwing up—decides that I’m a black-hat hacker trying to backdoor Macy’s software code and rob the corporation of its entire supply of fragrances and colognes.

And I’m blacklisted.

Which is okay. I can buy the damn sweater somewhere else. I could even get off my ass and go to an actual store, with palpable products and flesh-and-blood salespeople. But the rub is that I’ve given the website and its finicky algorithm an hour of my time, too no avail. I’ve bought nothing. I’ve accomplished nothing. And, perhaps more significantly, I’ve spared the corporate proprietor of the website an hour’s wages that would have otherwise gone to a human being who might have taken my order and answered my concerns through the medium of an older, analog, more malleable and sociable technology:

A phone.

But this analog outreach would not have taken an hour. To order a sweater over the phone, talking to Mary Lou or Antoine, would be a matter of ten minutes—less than that if we were strictly businesslike and didn’t shmooze about the weather, our grandkids or the choice of which color looks best against a “summer” complexion.

So, it occurs to me. If my feckless struggle to outwit its mischievous algorithm saves Amalgamated Tanaka an hour’s wages that would otherwise be sucked up by Mary Lou or Antoine (to waste on rent or groceries), aren’t I entitled to the equivalent wage. The existential question of the igital revolution is whether the purveyor’s time is worth more than the consumer’s time.

I spend a lot of incalculable time every year—let’s round it up to forty hours—struggling to follow protocols on websites designed by cloistered misanthropes, that I would not otherwise spend if I had access to, well, a person. If I were talking to this person, he or she would be paid for serving me. But when the corporation has replaced that person with a digital Svengali that I have figure out and obey—slavishly—I’m not bring served.

I’m serving.

And I wanna be paid for my forty hours.

So, Senator Belfry, here’s what you should do. Go back to Washington after Christmas and pass a law that a) gives a tax break to every company that mothballs its online algorithms and and rehires human beings to take orders and talk to customers about the weather, our grandkids and the choice of which color looks best against a “summer” complexion, and b) requires every company that sticks to its website protocols, subjecting customers to the bloodless tyranny of algorithms, to count every minute squandered by every customer and pay us—for all of our time wasted trying to think like a machine—at least $15 an hour. Better yet, twice that much.

I’ve tried this idea out on a lot of people. They all agree that there oughta be a law.

But I won’t hold my breath.