Ringing The Changes

Wring out the Change


Are you kidding me? I'd like to ring out the change. And this is remarkable as in one of my careers I had the dubious role of 'Change Manager'. In one of their analyses of why Donald Trump won the US election commentators saw that people in the US are drowning in blasts rather than rings of change. AI, losing jobs, loss of religion, loss of daily human contact, climate changes and even the possibility that there was no big bang. You get the picture. So now with his alligator assurances of stabilising life in the existential swamp Donald Trump will become for the second time the President.
I put some of this anxiety and rage down to daily problems with tech changes. Take auto correct or predictive text. They are like overly needy partners – wanting to finish your sentence or show how they know you so well. Predictive text is meant to help us. But how many times have I been desperate to text a message and the predictive text just slows down my already fumbling typing speed and disrupts my writing flow. Here are two wonderful examples from the no fuzzy logic world of the auto corrector:
‘One high value customer had a point of contact named Myron. Every time auto correct would change his name to Moron.’ Courtesy Reddit.
‘My last name was autocorrected to Hitler on my phone, and I sent it in an email’ says another Reddit contributor.
We’ve stopped owning our technology, our programs and our data. We now consume via subscriptions. And these surely will be the reason I won’t retire for years.
Subscriptions I made under pressure because for example the Transport App I’ve been using for free for years is going from free to paid and if I want to not when the next bus arrives, I need to pay up. What about the BMW subscription service to turn on the seat heaters in my new car. The seat heaters were pre-installed. So I already paid for the heaters. But BMW wants me to pay them a monthly subscription to "turn them on". And I am wondering if they would make me have the subscription year-round, even if I only need it the heaters for a few months.
Oh and one of my recent hates is Data storage. ‘You're out of storage. Avoid interruptions to Gmail, Drive, and Google Photos by getting more storage with Google One.’
Google has been hunting me on phones, laptops and tablets for ages warning me daily that I’m almost out of storage. I finally gave up trying to clean up my data and just paid.
And then of course there are those terrifying words
‘We are updating this site to give you a better experience.’ Or before you go please give us some feedback. How was your last call, Uber, dinner, hairdressing appointment, flight experience in stars and you can’t click out until you write something.
We often talk about how we carry incredibly powerful computers in our pockets, which is true to an extent. However, we don't really have full control over these devices. By default, they're managed by corporations, filled with unremovable bloatware and restrictive features. We're confined to closed ecosystems, with little to no authority over what these powerful devices do.
It's a horrifying situation, demonstrating that people will accept anything if it's introduced gradually.