{"id":3005,"date":"2026-08-22T10:19:45","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T10:19:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/?p=3005"},"modified":"2026-08-22T10:19:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T10:19:45","slug":"how-living-in-a-digital-first-world-has-made-our-lives-smaller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/?p=3005","title":{"rendered":"How Living in a \u2018Digital First\u2019 World Has Made Our Lives Smaller"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Yves here. Below Tom Valovic describes how the promise of digital liberation has not just often fallen short but created its own bad side effects. We discussed one syndrome back in the days of the foreclosure crisis: \u201cCode is law\u201d: how digital streamlining of mortgage origination and servicing created abuses like MERS that ran regularly ran roughshod over settled law. Yet judges too often sided with mortgage transfer abuse because the alternative to letting a party that did not have the right to foreclose off the hook would be to give the borrower the so-called free house. In fact, that was not the outcome borrowers sought. They wanted mortgage modifications, as was routinely done when banks owned the mortgages they had originated. But the new whiz-bang securitization agreements paid servicers to foreclose, which they figured out how to do in a high-volume process (again by bending the law) but not modify, which was a bespoke process.<\/p>\n

BTW tokens are terrific. One of my banks uses them on small business accounts.<\/p>\n

This post starts discussing security protocols, which are a pet peeve of mine. First, many force you to get SMS on your phone, which means I cannot have a relationship with that vendor, since I cannot get SMS overseas (all major US cell providers will cancel your account if they find you have been using it for more than 6 months tops overseas). Plus I do not having my cell phone be essential to identify verification. Second, I loath biometrics with the passion of a thousand suns. Aside from the wee problem that you can\u2019t get new fingers or a face if someone steals your ID, they often suck. Here, the biggest bank forces you into to do online banking\u2026.which they claim you can do from your laptop when set up, but no one at a branch has been able to make that work. Worse, they require selfies. I am unable to take one (I am too blind with my glasses off). It took a branch staffer 50 minutes to get one into the system using both my phone and my iPad. I have whinged to others here and they confirm that selfies are almost unworkable at that bank. They have to do transfers that can in theory be done online via a teller in a branch.<\/p>\n

Bad facial ID implementation seems to be endemic here. The government plans to roll out an integrated immigration app called THIM<\/a>. A friend who is a professional technologist was unable to get it to scan his passport in, let alone do the facial ID part. He went to Immigration to make them sort it out.<\/p>\n

By Tom Valovic, a writer, editor, futurist, and the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press), a series of essays that explored emerging social and cultural issues raised by the advent of the internet. He has served as a consultant to the former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and was editor-in-chief of Telecommunications magazine for many years where he was the first journalist to report on the advent of the public internet in the early 90s. Tom has written about the effects of technology on society for a variety of publications including the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Examiner, Columbia University\u2019s Media Studies Journal, Common Dreams, Asia Times, Naked Capitalism, AlterNet, Local Futures, the Sierra Club Newsletter, The Journal of Future Studies, and many others. He can be reached at jazzbird@outlook.com. Originally published at Common Dreams<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Drowning in my usual sea of online media saturation, I recently spotted an article in The Boston Globe that validated<\/a> a long but increasingly less lonely quest against the perils of technocracy. It focused on a security safeguard we all know and love: two factor authentication and how it\u2019s driving most of us bonkers:<\/p>\n

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How hard can it be to grab your phone, retrieve a six-digit code, and type it in\u2014seemingly the simplest task in the world\u2014to avoid, oh, having your bank account emptied, your identity stolen, or yourself rendered a kind of stateless person, adrift without access to your own life? Don\u2019t get Thomas Lee, a Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital physician, started. \u201cTwo-factor authentication is sapping my will to live,\u201d he said. Or litigator Kara Thorvaldsen. \u201cIt\u2019s the bane of my existence,\u201d she said. \u201cEvery time my husband tries to log into NESN, it somehow requires me to get a code and unlock something with Face ID, etc., etc., ad nauseam.\u201d Or Kim Smith, a playwright, an actor, and an empty nester. \u201cSometimes the only reason I hear from my [youngest] daughter is when she needs the code that\u2019s been sent to my phone,\u201d she said. As porch pirate thefts mount, residents feel besieged. As two-factor\u2014or, even worse, multifactor\u2014authentication becomes inescapable, it\u2019s safe to say that somewhere in America, a spouse is shouting from another room, \u201cDid you get my code?\u201d An employee can\u2019t get into his work platform because he left his phone at the gym, or thinks he did. And an adult child is trying to help her cognitively faltering parents pay a bill, but can\u2019t, for lack of that darn code.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Not a pretty picture but one that we all know all too well. For some reason, it got me thinking about T.S Eliot\u2019s poem \u201cThe Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock,\u201d a masterwork. In one of the more memorable lines, a disillusioned elderly man complains to himself muttering: \u201cI have measured out my life with coffee spoons.\u201d He was basically lamenting that he has let himself be lulled into a diminutive humdrum existence\u2014characterized by small and inconsequential actions making his own narrow life feel smaller and smaller.<\/p>\n

This line keeps surfacing in my ruminations about our culture\u2019s slow steady march into some kind of technocratic dystopia\u2014a digital panopticon where we all peck our way through life\u2026 where every action, gesture, word, deed, or genetic footprint is recorded and\u2014a more alarming trend of late\u2014presumably watched. In a curious inversion, this humdrum and plodding digital existence has turned out to be the precise opposite of the \u201cmachines of loving grace\u201d meme introduced decades ago by another poet, Richard Brautigan\u2014one often quoted by the techno-utopians who are now in charge of\u2026 well\u2026 almost everything it seems. Then I came across a similar lament from Alex Ross writing<\/a> in The New Yorker:<\/p>\n

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You wake up and brace yourself for the barrage of toxic gibberish that constitutes the modern public sphere. Your email is overrun with spam, scams, and smut. There are voice mails from no one about nothing\u2026 Publications from the Times on down employ clickbait headlines that treat you like a starving rat in a Pavlovian experiment. AI systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant 10-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does. When pressed, the chatbots admit that they cannot \u201cnaturally understand human morality, dignity, culture, or meaning.\u201d It all adds up to a continuous discursive tinnitus\u2014a buzz of random, fake, stupid, sinister chatter that nobody wants and nobody can stop.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Living our collective cultural experience by \u201cmeasuring our life in coffee spoons\u201d seems to resonate perfectly. We seem to be in some kind of number punching purgatory like the four sad corporate drones struggling to reclaim their humanity in the popular TV series Severance<\/em>. We click away and are hypnotized by our screens. We overdose on mandatory cuteness courtesy of goofy cartoonish emojis and robot figures that some programmer seems to think is going to brighten our day.<\/p>\n

Red Lights and Info-bureaucracies<\/b><\/p>\n

As a thought experiment, I started musing about how much of my own time is frittered away on digital trivia. Elaborate verification processes just to use basic services. Endlessly punching numbers and codes into phones and computers and often reaching a dead end. The constant use of codes just to access our own stuff as if in some kind of military intelligence operation. Forcing us to constantly look over our shoulder about being hacked. (Is my life savings still there today?) Frequent visits to customer service hell which are only going to get worse as more and more AI chatbots get added to the mix by clueless companies. (Why is it that many popular companies can\u2019t seem to figure out that customer service is the heart of their business?) Waiting on infinite hold because we might refuse to talk to some cartoon-like chatbot that\u2019s clueless about dealing with anything with the slightest bit of complexity. (Wasn\u2019t AI supposed to be \u201csmart\u201d? Or do companies just like to use \u201cdumb AI\u201d when it suits their purpose?)<\/p>\n

I call the framework for these experiential trips to digital purgatory info-bureaucracies<\/em>. They\u2019re like real-life bureaucracies\u2014only much more effective at giving us the runaround, wasting time, and conditioning us to accept the absurd as normal like the poor souls in Terry Gilliam\u2019s strange but prescient movie Brazil<\/a><\/em>. So here we are frittering away our already scarce and valuable time on these mindless digital chores when we could be doing things that enrich and sustain our lives.<\/p>\n

Now that we\u2019re rapidly moving to an \u201cAI first\u201d world, we won\u2019t even be able to navigate these info-bureaucracies ourselves. Unfortunately, this will probably get worse before it gets better. Tech-enamored companies are increasingly using AI agents for customer service and the results are horrendous. Being able to speak to a human agent means mastering different workarounds for every 800 number you might have to call. And we can easily spend hours of our day on hold listening to someone else\u2019s mind-numbing idea of snazzy music.<\/p>\n

Years ago, studies were done to determine how much time Americans spent waiting for red lights. According to<\/a> some researchers, people in the US spend about 300 hours a year driving, a significant portion of which is spent waiting for traffic lights. One research organization calculated that this \u201ccomes up to a whopping four months of your life if you drive seven days a week for 50 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, arguably, this is simply one of the inconveniences we tolerate as expected time wasted in the complicated business of contemporary living. But I couldn\u2019t help but think how much of our valuable quality time we now waste on the continual care and feeding of our Lilliputian-like digital lives. And how much already scarce quality time is also being spent on meaningless tasks plodding through digital labyrinths designed to increase corporate profit; unburden huge corporations from the anguish of having to hire more customer-service staff; and save them time while, of course, wasting ours.<\/p>\n

More often than not, the AI agents we encounter turn out to be quite stupid by any human metric. I can assure you from years of working in high tech that companies unquestionably have the technical ability to provide much more user-friendly systems. But this isolation from human agents is intentional and serves their own interests. Many customers just give up trying to fix order problems and take a financial hit out of frustration. And these are vital systems of daily life. We\u2019re talking about essential services such as banking, credit card transactions, paying taxes, and other functions. And once you\u2019re in the tech soup, you\u2019re forced to stay there if the matter is important enough.<\/p>\n

Henry David Thoreau admonished us to \u201csimplify, simplify.\u201d But how can we accomplish this as the digital maze envelops us? I believe that\u2014right now\u2014we\u2019re at a unique crossroads in history where we have a window of opportunity to shape the future and our quality of life. But this may involve some hard choices. I believe that Americans are intuiting this, and the AI data center pushback is a healthy and hopeful expression of this.<\/p>\n

Another great American poet, Wendell Berry, captured it well. In \u201cLife is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition,\u201d Berry said: \u201cIt is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.\u201d It seems clear that this is the unavoidable existential choice we now face. We have to decide what kind of world we want to live in and then summon all the agency we can muster to bring it about.<\/p>\n

\"Print<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yves here. Below Tom Valovic describes how the promise of digital liberation has not just often fallen short but created its own bad side effects. We discussed one syndrome back in the days of the foreclosure crisis: \u201cCode is law\u201d: how digital streamlining of mortgage origination and servicing created abuses like MERS that ran regularly…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[2981,4902,4653,4903,40],"class_list":["post-3005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","tag-digital","tag-lives","tag-living","tag-smaller","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}