Eccentric Flower:201012/The Bones of Dead Technologies

I began composing this in my head on Friday when I went to the mall, and unfortunately the longer I spend composing something in my head the more unlikely it is that I will actually write it. Forethought is actually my nemesis when it comes to writing; the longer I plan something, the less likely it is that I will be able to write something that lives up to the beauty and grandeur of the plan, and the more work it seems like, so the more daunting it becomes.

[Almost everything you see in these pages is a barely-edited first draft - I have to let it spew onto the page before I have a chance to think about it. It's one thing to say "OK will dash off a journal entry in ten spare minutes now" and then finally sit back after having tweaked it repeatedly and tinkered with it and it's 45 minutes later. That's fine, because I snuck up on it. But if I spent the same 45 minutes sitting planning it and not typing it, it might never happen.]

Anyway, so, I went to the mall, and I paid some bills, and I read some news, and I read an entry from Jan which happened to be about the same things coincidentally, and I thought about this for three days, and now, by god, I am going to try to make all of these streams converge without destroying the universe*. On an empty stomach, yet.

* AMENDED: Didn't get to the mall part. Will do that tomorrow.

Some things live almost forever. Some things die. Some things die faster than others. Some things survive, but in greatly reduced circumstances.

You know that nasty game "fuck, marry, kill?" Well, as I approach my decrepitude at increasing velocity, I find myself playing a game called "live, die, niche." What aspects of our daily life are going to survive intact for a good while longer; what aspects are already dead and just haven't admitted it yet; and what aspects will survive but will be carried on only by a small group of devotees/fanatics/iconoclasts.

I play it all day long and it's probably one of the reasons I feel twice my age, but I can't turn it off. You see, many, if not most, of the things I have a personal attachment to are Marked For Death; I'm too honest to deny it and too set in my ways to try to adapt/change, so it's depressing. Not disastrously depressing, just mild. Like the feeling you get when you see that there are only a few of the homemade cookies left and you know they are delicious and you wish you could make them last longer but you don't want to stop eating them even though they'll be gone soon. All day long.

This is complicated by the fact that I cling to some of these things for reasons which are stubborn and ridiculous, and I know that the longer I wait to read the writing on the wall, the greater the chance that my stance will actively penalize me. As Jan puts it:

Regular readers may remember how much I bitched and whined when I was effectively forced to get a cell phone. The sad thing is, I was right, as I knew I would be. I picked a phone mostly in terms of "what is the least annoying dead weight I will now have to carry around every day?" and this was the correct criterion - because I place an outgoing call on my cell phone about once a month, and I receive incoming phone calls on it about twice a month, and they are both my wife asking me to pick up something at the grocery store on the way home.

Mind you, I'm not saying it hasn't been helpful. The camera is useful, even though it's not great, because it's always with me; I take notes on it when I have nothing else to take notes on, because, again, it's always with me; text messaging is great (I use that about three times as much as I use it for voice calls, although still not very often). But what I resent, what I will always resent, is that even if it were utterly un-useful to me I would still effectively be forced to carry it because the adoption curve, as Jan notes, has passed the point where anyone who does not adopt is penalized. There are no pay phones anymore, or had you noticed? Everyone assumes you have a cell phone, for emergencies if nothing else. Hell, some people are getting rid of their land lines entirely (which makes me pungently, unreasonably angry - it makes me want to EMP the cell phone network or crash a car into cell towers just to teach them all some lesson about emergency reliability, because I still consider cell phones to be about as reliable as low-budget Chinese balsa with melamine filler).

Cell phones are a horrible technology. There has never been a cell signal that didn't make the person at the other end sound like they were talking underwater. There has never been a cell signal that didn't drop every fourth syllable of the conversation. There has never been a cell signal that didn't suffer interference from every toaster and radio nearby. They give you brain cancer/hearing damage (circle the answer you believe, or both). They consume power in a very poor ratio to their bandwidth. All of these are solved problems - they are the reason that we learned to talk cheaply, safely, and reliably via copper wires strung everywhere rather than, say, using radios to communicate. We solved a problem, and then we deliberately regressed to a less advanced, less desirable situation.

When we do this - and in the last decade or two we seem to be doing this a lot - it is usually because we are trading a mostly-good solution for some other solution which is mostly-bad but has one or two shiny aspects which override our judgement. In the case of the cell phone, the shiny attractive nuisance was the ability to be constantly in contact with the world everywhere one goes. Since I do not see the "attractive" part of that nuisance, myself, I am not beguiled by cell phones - I see them correctly for what they are, a step backward.

Yet I am not given a choice in the matter.

Paper mail is dead. The U.S. Postal Service, the newspaper (remember newspapers?) tells me, is in dire straits. A story this week about people in Tiny Hamlet, New Hampshire somewhere complaining that their local post office (which was part of the general store) is closing and now they will have to drive to the next town for their mail. Well, folks, the reason the post office is closing is because you don't send paper mail any more.

I still get a few Christmas cards every year, but even my most fervent relatives seem to be stopping that habit one by one. I get a whole slew of postcards from Aet, but Estonia is different and anyway she's a diehard on paper mail. I get my bills via paper, and they gripe at me all the time about it (more on that in a moment). I even get less paper junk mail than I used to.

I can't complain, though, because I haven't written personal paper correspondence in I don't know how long. Last thing I sent in the mail other than a bill was when I mailed mix CDs (mix CDs which I noted specifically would be the last gasp of that particular dying technology, by the by) to a number of people some months ago. It was poignant, in its way - mailing a dead medium via a dead medium. And, damn it, those were good mixes. Several people went out of their way to tell me how good they were, so I know it wasn't just me. But we shall not pass that way again.

Oh, sure, there's packages and things. But the USPS missed an opportunity many years back. The one thing that would have saved them would have been to use their special status as agents of the government and any other non-competitive tricks they could have mustered to take business forcibly back from FedEx and UPS and that ilk. They should have gone after that business with every ounce of fire they had left, like it was their last best hope - because it was. Now they are doomed. They'll never get that segment back, and there are no other segments left. Personal mail is dead; junk mail is dying; business mail (bills) will be dead as soon as the businesses can sell us all on dropping it. What we have left is a vast government infrastructure which could have been really good at delivering packages more reliably and more cheaply than one of the private companies could, were it properly run. Think about it: With postal delivery, it's one of the few cases where you want the economies of scale of a single monolithic entity. But the USPS never had a chance to get good at that; it was used as a patronage dump or a budgetary whipping-post for too many years.

I shed no tears for USPS; as I say, I can't complain if something goes away that I wasn't using myself. But, again, it is not clear to me that we are replacing it with something better. Email has been killed by advertising and malice; the signal-to-noise ratio is just horrible, and you can pass hazards via email in a way you couldn't do via paper mail (unless of course you put anthrax spores in your envelope). Where I work we have a whole generation that never uses email unless forced; they just don't see the point in dealing with it. That same generation has probably never hand-written anything longer than three words at a time. Are we heading toward the time when we communicate entirely in Facebook status messages? I suspect we are, and I don't like it.

I got to thinking about the death of paper mail not because of the mall (I'll probably not get to the mall part until tomorrow, this is getting long and I want lunch), but because I took time from Oblivion to pay bills last night (as threatened).

Now, paying bills is an extremely obnoxious process. First you have to separate out the vital bits (the part of the form you mail in, and its envelope) from the remaining fifty pounds of waste paper. Then you have to write the checks. Then you have to put the checks in the envelopes with the bits of paper, making sure you turn the ones around who want the backs of the slips showing and make sure the check isn't on the side where it'll block the address window and all that. Then you lick them all and close them all. Then (and this is the absolute worst part) you write a return address on all of them. Over and over. Then you hope you have stamps. (Thank god, you no longer have to deal with licking the stamps or worrying that they have insufficient postage, because the USPS does occasionally do sane things.)

The fact that, as you do all this tedium, you are also watching yourself hemorrhage money is just adding insult to injury.

I dislike paying bills so much that I tend to put it off - like, until I have received second notices from at least two of my regular utility/service bills. But I will hate to see the process go away. And go away it will. The notices on the envelopes and waste paper about "OMG WHY ARE YOU NOT DOING ELECTRONIC BILLING U R SUCH A LOSER" are getting louder and bigger and meaner each month. Eventually, of course, the USPS will go bust and I will have no choice.

Now, of course, you are asking, "But wait, if you hate the process, why do you not want to see it go away?"

Well, my stock response is this: When the people I pay the money to are forced to themselves pay their bills electronically, then we will talk. See, here's the thing: The paper-check system in this country is woefully inefficient. Banks hate it; it now costs them so much to process checks that it's essentially a losing proposition for them. And anyone who wants as much float as possible (float = time between when you write the check and the money is actually removed from your account) loves the system - because of its inefficiency.

Businesses are, as a rule, horrible about paying their bills in a timely fashion. (Ask my self-employed contractor wife.) They use every trick they can to try to maximize their float. Yet they demand from us peons instant payment with maximum efficiency and minimum float. They threaten dire consequences. They charge fees. They try to force us into (floatless) electronic billing. To which I say, feh. When you play by the same rules you inflict upon us, then maybe we'll have something.

Electronic billing is horrible about leaving a paper trail. It is actually easier to hack and fake than a paper check (assuming you know how to write a check in a fraud-resistant way, which some people do not). It benefits the wrong people - big businesses and banks. And, frankly, I simply don't trust them. If I give them the keys to make a funds transaction once, one of these days some big business without scruples will say, "Hmm, let's just start billing this schlub automatically every month without telling him, we have the ability," and that way lies serious madness.

See, I don't want automatic billing for anything. It amuses me that my credit card site reminds me every time I make an electronic payment (yes, yes, we'll come to that in a moment) that "This is a one-time transaction and must be reauthorized every time you make an electronic payment" as if they are apologizing for something. To me that is a feature. In fact, I insist upon it. If you are getting money from my bank account, then by god I want to have to approve it personally, with my own eyes, each and every time so I know you are not up to any monkey business with my cash. Call me paranoid.

Now, I grant you, if I could set all these bills which I pay every month - and which generally fall within a narrow, known range of fixed costs - to debit automatically, it would be great. I could save myself a lot of paper recycling and a lot of hassle. I could get rid of my paper checks (they're the only things I ever write paper checks for). I don't ever reconcile these bills against any sort of accounts of my own anyway; and the companies would be happy because they would, on average, get their payments 20-40 days sooner than is my usual habit. If only I could trust them! But I don't, and I won't - until such time as I am forced to. And I will be. And after that I will be replacing one set of headaches with another as I will then have to go online and check a lot of electronic records every month for signs of mayhem and fraud and malfeasance.

As I said, call me paranoid.

You may have detected back there that the story is a little different with my credit card. Here's the situation with that:

My credit card company is a bag of sleazeballs. I have picked them, and stayed with them, because they are some of the better sleazeballs in an industry full of them; but "best of the sleaze" is still sleaze. Over the years, they raised my interest rate many times on the slightest pretext. Sometimes it was for late payments, which I cop to; other times, it was just because they were sleazy. My interest rate is now usurious, but I don't bother trying to find a better card because 1) they're all sleazy and 2) it serves as a fine inducement for me not to carry a balance on the thing.

However, because I hate paying bills, I still was a little late with the payments about one time in three. So the sleazemasters found a trick which (I have to admit) has been very effective: If I am so much as thirty seconds late with the payment, they deny any incoming transactions to the card. As soon as I pay, they turn it back on again. This can be a real hassle when you're not really sure when the last time you made a payment was (out of sight, out of mind) and you use that card for online transactions pretty heavily.

So these days I tend to adopt a "pay early and often" approach to the card, and in order to do that, the best thing to do is put myself in the habit of visiting their web site and authorizing an electronic payment fairly often.** This also has the bonus benefit that I inspect my transaction log whenever I'm there and thus (ideally) will pick up payment fraud fairly fast. Since I use that card for online purchases, and pretty much only for online purchases, it's not a question of if a bogus payment will show up; it's a question of when. (Actually, it's already happened, and their removal/dispute mechanism worked just fine. But that was about three years ago so I figure I'm overdue for another.)

I don't mind doing that with my credit card; constant vigilance is the price of convenience, in this new world. But I would definitely resent having to do that with each of the eight or ten other bills I pay every month - especially since, with them, I already have a system that works pretty well, even if writing and mailing those checks is annoying.

** Astute readers will note that the credit card's tactics have worked against them, because they now collect virtually no interest income from me and no late fees. This makes this approach even sweeter.

I guess what I'm trying to say in all this thicket of words is that I don't so much mind having one technology pulled out from under me and replaced forcibly with another - if, and this is a very important if, I think I am making a good trade. I have to be trading up. And most of the trades like this in recent and upcoming years seem to definitely be trading down. It baffles me.

I didn't even go into the matter of books - if we talk about what's happening to books I shall cry. I'll let Jan summarize for me:

I shall remain in the trenches until the bitter end, myself. Even if that does mean that fifteen pounds of my luggage on this upcoming trip will be the printed word. I can't read on one of those little screens without getting a headache, and on a train it would give me motion sickness as well.

Next up in this screed: A trip to the mall, and the future of the board game.