The Erosion of Choice

             I’m one of an ever-diminishing minority in the UK.  Maybe, even, the world.  The western world, certainly – if research is to be believed.

            I don’t have a smart phone.

            Fair enough, you’d think.  After all, like anything else – car, television, microwave oven, dishwasher, house – it’s a choice.  No one says we have to buy any of these things. None of them is mandatory or compulsory.  And, as I see it, if I don’t either want or need them, then that’s all that matters: I don’t buy them.  And that’s the case with a smart phone.  I don’t want one.  I have a dumb-phone instead.

            Now, people have called me a ‘Luddite’ or a ‘dinosaur’ because of this.  Neither is the case.  I bought my first PC in 1997.  Since then I’ve owned four.  My latest - custom-built a month ago for a small fortune (though still less than a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6, and capable of doing far, far more) - is the nuts!  It can, among other things, handle Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on Ultra mode.  In fact, I had a nice, relaxing glide over the Himalayas earlier! I’ve also taught people how to use the tech.  So no… I’m no machine-smasher or brontosaurus!  I just choose to focus my computing tasks, including internet, on my PC – at home, in my own time, when I choose.  The rest of the time, I'm free of it and go about my day as normal.  As I want to do.  And as I always have done, throughout life.

            So far so good.

            Except – increasingly, so I’ve begun to find – it isn’t.  Something is happening – has been for quite a while now, actually.

            My choice in this matter is being gradually eroded.

            Not just mine, either. 

            Everyone’s.

 

            Here are a few of my own personal examples. 

           A couple of years ago, I went to log in to my workplace intranet – only to find that they would no longer let me in without a more thorough authentication process.  I rang IT and was told I now needed to download the Microsoft Authenticator app to my iPhone and use that.

            “What iPhone?” I asked.

            “Well… your smart phone.”

            “What smart phone?”

            “Er… you don’t have a smart phone?”

            “Nope.”

            “Right.  Er… we kind of assumed everyone did now.”

            Okay.  Well, you know what ‘assume’ does, don’t you. Over to you, mate.  Your problem – not mine.  

            In the end, it took them a few days to figure a way around it. But, like I told them: their assumption was not my problem.

           

        Then, last year, I went to an event at a local book festival – a discussion given by local writers about how they approached novel-writing.  £5 a ticket.  Bargain.  So, I turned up at the door with my debit card…

            “Sorry… we can’t accept card payment.  You need to pay online and download the ticket to your iPhone.”

            This was becoming a bit monotonous!

            “I don’t have an iPhone, and I don’t have a smart phone.”

            The guy’s mouth dropped open.

            I went on… “I’ve got cash, though.  Here’s a fiver.”

            He looked at it like it was a dog turd. I did think briefly about planting it in his still-open mouth.

            “Er… we don’t really have cash-handling facilities, either.  Haven’t you got someone with you who can download the ticket?”

            “Nope.”

            In the end, the guy agreed to take my fiver – but he wasn’t happy about having to keep hold of it.

            Again… not my problem. I arrived with perfectly acceptable means and abilities to pay.

           

           Last Christmas, one of the charities based at the place where I worked had a raffle.  I thought I’d buy a few tickets.  How did I have to do that?  You’ve guessed it! Scan the QR code into your phone and enter your payment details.

           

             Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I went to a local beauty spot and saw a sign in the car park:

            ‘You MUST pay to park by phone.  Download the Ringo App NOW.’

            (all emphases as on the sign – not mine).

            The car park in question is one of several run by my local council – all, as I later found out, now being ‘pay by phone’ only.  So I got in touch with them to ask what I was supposed to do if I didn’t have a smart phone.  Could I call them on my dumb-phone and make a payment over the phone, for example?

            The answer?

            No. The only other option is to pay online at home before making the trip.

            Erm… what about if I decide to visit one of the car parks spontaneously, without pre-planning.

            Then you can’t use the car park.

            Back-and-forth emails – including one where they sent me the requested Equality Impact Assessment – led to their final and absolute answer on the matter:

            ‘If you turn up at the car park and don’t have a phone, you cannot park if you don’t want to risk a penalty notice.’

            The decision, they said, had been taken on the basis of cost-cutting (that was obvious) – and although they realised that a minority of people would be excluded from the service, they were still in compliance with the Equality Act regarding people with disabilities and other protected characteristics.

            I don’t have a disability. I don’t have a protected characteristic – apart from being autistic, but that’s beside the point.  That point being that they are effectively discriminating against a minority of people – and any minority is still a minority – through their assumptions that: A) Nearly everyone has a smart phone; B) If they don’t, everyone has frictionless internet access at home… and is happy to pre-plan all of their days out; and C) The minority excluded is so small that budgetary considerations take precedence over their rights.

            My complaint has now been escalated to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman – with the full support of my MP – and is currently being assessed.  I’m pretty sure, though, what the answer will be: the complaint won’t be upheld because the Council is complying with the law.

 

            By now, some, many or even all of you are  thinking I’m just being a stubborn old git over this! Why not just do what all of these organisations (and the Big-Tech-Big-Bucks-Big-Brains) want me to do.  What everyone else is doing.  ‘Go with the flow’… and get a smart phone.

            Which brings me to the whole point of this piece.

            The erosion of choice.

            Or, as I prefer to think of it, ‘creeping coercion.’

            I’m quite prepared to step back, look at the situation rationally, and see what the real problem is.  And again… as far as I'm concerned, it isn’t me!

 

            Let’s go back in time just a short way, to 2007.  Not that long ago, really, in the grander scheme.  If you were born in that year, you’re just coming of age now. That was the year that the first iPhone came out.  That was really where the whole thing started: the beginnings of the most successful, and arguably most drastic, social engineering experiment ever conducted.  The beginning of a process that led – through our acquirement of desirable gadgets and our love of their apps and abilities – to the situation we have today, where most people (not my assumption, remember!) have a smartphone.  Not only have one, but seem increasingly unable to cope without one – unable to drive, shop, bank, date, travel, socialise… live without one.  If research is to be believed, it’s the first thing most people grab hold of the moment they wake up (what… not the kettle?) and it’s the last thing they hold before they go to sleep (I’m trying to keep it clean!)  We’re hooked on these things for all sorts of reasons, of course.  But the predominant reason is… because that’s what the tech tycoons want, and what they designed.  The attention economy.  Engagement = money, ergo maximisation of engagement = maximisation of money.  Massive profits, in other words.  Is it any wonder that they’re the richest people on earth?  And here we have this situation: a handful of men in Silicon Valley and suchlike enclaves… controlling the lives of billions of people around the planet.

            Controlling?  Isn’t that a bit strong?

            Well… is it?

            Do you any longer feel you can be in control of your life without your smartphone?  Try going without it for a day – better still, a week, or a month – and see.  Every aspect of our lives now is focused down on this tiny glass rectangle in our hands.  Quite apart from, for many people, their incomes (businesses, etc), there’s the social networking, banking, news, entertainment, shopping… and now, with AI bots, the ability to find out anything, at any time, anywhere (so long as the signal’s good).

            Where’s choice in any of this any longer?

            In short, there isn’t much – if any.

 

            Now, of course, many will point to the upsides: the instant connectivity offered; the ability to share experiences in real time from opposite sides of the planet; to do shopping without all the hassle.  Think of all the ‘convenience’ it offers. How can there be anything wrong with that? Well, maybe we can start by reframing ‘convenience’ in terms of what’s happening behind it: the increasing outsourcing of responsibility to commercial tech infrastructure at the same time as eroding and eliminating alternatives.  In short, even more power and money for the tech barons. Even more fuel for Musk's and Bezos's penis extensions (sorry... space rockets!)

 

            The problem is – we’ve become so enamoured of these perceived conveniences (and the way they’ve embedded themselves into our lives, whether we wanted them or not) that we’ve largely ignored the downsides… which are now becoming all too apparent to us: loss of privacy, mass surveillance, misinformation, disinformation, manipulation, doom-scrolling, mental health problems, ‘influencer’ culture, grooming, addiction, distraction, attention-deficit, echo chambers, data harvesting, election interference, social unrest, cyber attacks, etc.  That’s just a few of the more obvious ones.  The one that I think is the worst, though, is that we now have new generations of children coming up who will never know anything different.  Increasing numbers of schoolchildren have phones. I was chatting to a friend about this a few months back.  She has a son of ten, and he’s had a smartphone since he was seven.

            “We don’t censor him on it, or block him,” she said.  “He’s intelligent, and we trust him.”

            As a lot of parents do, I’m sure.  As poor Molly Russell’s parents did.  And others who came to tragic ends.  My opinion that they shouldn’t be given to children prompted: “But they have to get used to these things, so the sooner they have them the better.”  There are other things they have to get used to, too.  Driving cars, going to work, having sex, taking out bank loans, drinking alcohol.  Do we really want children having sex at nine, driving on motorways at ten, getting wasted at eleven? I’d guess not really.  Frontal cortex development and all that.  Which is why we have legal minimum age limits.  Which is why children are still children until they’re eighteen.

             

            Does it all have to be this way?  Or rather, did it all have to turn out this way?  There’s a fatalistic frame of mind that says it’s all ‘inevitable’ – that we have to go along with it, because what else can we do?

 

            Which brings me back to my main point.

            Do we any longer have any choice?

*

            If anyone is interested in any of these issues I’ve raised, you might care to watch this short and entertaining video.  Tristan Harris is an ex-Google guy who left after he saw what the tech was doing to society.  He went on to make The Social Dilemma, which remains one of Netflix’s most-watched documentaries.  He’s also the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology which is actively campaigning and trying to influence debate as we move forwards from the disaster of our first encounter with AI – social media –  and on into a world where the race to AGI and ASI is being conducted with scant regard for the possible risks and disastrous consequences.  It isn’t all doom and gloom.  It can be different.  It isn’t ‘inevitable’.

            But ultimately, it’s up to us.

            Do we want some choice left in our lives… do we want some say over what happens, and to gain some sense of control back?

           Or don’t we?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86k8N4YsA7c&ab_channel=AfterSkool

(Image credit: mine)