Oh, donât get me wrong. I absolutely adore being able to pay with my phone. But âconvenientâ is a relative termâ itâs convenient for you because you have a smartphone, and know how to use a smartphone.
But sooner or later a technology is going to come out that youâre not going to need. Maybe you appreciate it, maybe you think itâs pointless. It provides a new way to do X, but you already have a way to do X, and either donât have the money or just plain donât see the need to have the new shiny, since you can still do X perfectly fine, the way youâve always done it.
And then ten or fifteen years later, youâll discover that you no longer can do X, because the only way to do X is with a technology that has been absent for the first 40 years of your life, and optional for the last ten or fifteen, but suddenly you just canât. Not without buying this new technology that you donât know how to use and donât want.
Hereâs a real-world example thatâs absolutely fucking the over-sixty crowd: Two Factor Authentication.
When it first rolled out, it was only in high-security operations, and consisted of an electronic keycode generatorâ the little keyfob. Then they added the ability to send codes over text. Then they developed smartphone apps.
Now, the thing isâ each one of those options require its own technological infrastructure. And when 65% of the client base is using the app, and and 30% is using text, the 5% thatâs using the little keyfob generators are now an unreasonable expense. Youâre maintaining the infrastructure to work with the keyfobs and a business relationship with the manufacturers of those keyfobs, not mention the manpower required to add the keyfobs to individual accounts. So you drop the keyfobs. A few years later, only 5% of the people using text messages for 2FA, because smartphones have really caught on, and once againâ youâre spending a huge chunk of your budget on the servers that generate the 2FA codes, the capacity to send the codes, and a per-code cost. (Admittedly, usually broken up across a batch of thousands, but still.) So you drop that capability.
Now, a lot of 60-70 year olds have never owned smartphones, and are being declared âunavoidable collateral damageâ by companies that use 2FA, because the cost of supporting such customers is more than the profit they generate. To make it worse, the apps themselves are, by necessity, getting more advanced, and in some cases older phones wonât run them.
And thatâs a change dictated by security, market, and cost factors. Thatâs not even getting into things like⊠well, have you noticed a lot of companies are trying to get you to order and pay with the app? It has nothing to do with YOUR convenience, and everything about how McDonaldâs wants to spend less money on cashiers. Thereâs a lot of technology out there thatâs âfor your convenienceâ but really itâs âfor our profitâ, and âfor your protectionâ but what theyâre protecting you from is saving money or spending it somewhere else.
I mean, hell⊠you donât even have to leave [tumblr] to see Millennials complaining about how physical copies are going away and you canât OWN things anymore, whether itâs music, software, or movies. Or how we used to have a cable provider, then it was a cable provider and Netflix, now itâs fifteen streaming services and a cable provider.
I canât tell you what it isâ though as Gen X, I will probably start complaining about it before you doâ but some major component of how you interact with the world is going just go away. And maybe it will just be the steady march of progress, or it may be the forward offensive of capitalism. Maybe you WILL be keeping up with the technology, but the company that makes the technology goes out of business and you have to learn something new. Maybe the company that makes the technology gets bought by another company for the sole purpose of shutting down the easier, better technology instead of the one that is more difficult and makes the new owner more money.
But I assure you, you will find yourself saying âIt doesnât need to be this complicated. I could do this LAST MONTH. I have been able to do this since before you were born, and there is absolutely no reason I should not be able to do this now.â
This problem will be complicated by the fact that the first time it happens, it will turn out to be totally possible, itâs just that this particular clerk doesnât know how. The second time it happens, it will be hidden behind a menu option that maybe makes sense once itâs in front of you, but neither you or the clerk feels like they should have been expected to figure that out intuitively. There will probably be more than one case where the problem is, in fact, the little shit behind the counter doesnât want to admit they they might be wrong, or just doesnât want to spend forty-nine seconds to find out/do it the hard way because they could spend that time talking to the cashier in the next line. And then one day there will be a hardware upgrade, a policy change, or the last guy in the store who knew how to do it accidentally was talking about going to Communion and management just heard âunionâ and now heâs not allowed within 500 feet of the store or any of its employees.
(Although I did not know it at the time, when I left my first help desk job, I was the last person who knew how to use the cockamamie Rube-Goldberg system that was used forâŠ. well, in modern terms, dial-up VPN. They didnât know it at the time, either, and because the damage was done, there was absolutely nothing they could do to help the guy who HAD to use the legacy platform, and if it werenât for the facts that he remembered my name, I was listed in the phone book, I remembered HIM as a caller who was always easy to work with, I had the time, I had the patience, I had the kindness, and most importantly, I am a goddamn robot who was able to sit down on the floor and pull up all the configuration screens for an app I had not even seen in three months in my head like a fucking terminator HUD, he would have blown a I-shit-you-not EIGHT FIGURE SALE. To this day Iâm mad that extortion didnât even cross my mind.)
But the day is going to come where you Just Canât Do It Like That Anymore⊠and that day is going to come sooner for you than it will for me, and sooner for Gen Z than for you. Technological growth is exponential, and prone to sudden leaps forward that nobody can predict until mid-leap, and even then weâre not even sure where weâll land.
