*it’s a fuking bullshit!
Online services effectively shift the time spent on customer service, thereby reducing costs (for the service provider, which replaces the physical desk with an online one).
Back in the day, you’d go to the post office, the Chamber of Commerce, or the Office for Complication of Otherwise Simple Affairs, etc.—you’d be bounced from one service desk to another like a pinball until you found a kind soul who’d make you spin around the perfect number of times to find the right way out. Well, with online services, you’re screwed twice over.
You wasted time before, and you waste time now—screwed over number one because you paid for that digital time-wasting, yes, in some way you did. Before, you could physically go to an office and strangle someone; now you’re sitting in front of the screen cursing like a sailor because, when you pick up your phone and call customer service, that little tune starts playing (or the AI for the wealthier among us)… you look at the clock and two hours have passed without you having accomplished anything. You had to do one thing, but the menu option directed you to another thing that seems necessary; you did it, but you have to wait to get the data to access it… so, in fact… nothing has changed from before. You’re left holding your cards without having managed to complete the action. You just have to wait patiently.
The second screw-up you run into has to do with the unknown: the interconnected world of confirmation emails—when you buy some junk on Amazon, when you have to use a certified email account to verify that you’ve been verified—but then, when you need important information… say, because you forgot your login for the tax agency’s website, you don’t get any confirmation email. You sent the form… but you’ll never know if it was actually received electronically by the other side. You’ll wait for a response that might take a few business days or six months, or you’ll never get a response because the system was down for maintenance that day and never received any emails. Who knows, maybe in ten years the Tax Agency (kneel, slave) will send you an email passively ordering you to pay interest on a payment of €10.47 that wasn’t received on X/X/2017, for which you’ll have to shell out €4,573.29. At least when you were in an anonymous office, besides being able—as mentioned above—to strangle the person behind the desk, you could see and tell if that person wasn’t listening to you, wasn’t responding, or if the response was useless. But in the digital world, you’ll never know if your question was received; you won’t be able to look into the eyes magnified by the office clerk’s glasses and sense that you’ll never get an answer. At least realizing that your problem has no solution in the two-dimensional world of paper is a hope for the future; not knowing and having no clue in the one-dimensional world of time—where an answer is valid now but may not have been before or may not be valid later, or where not answering is an option—is a declaration of premature death.
Your bureaucratic shadow will beat down on the rear ends of your descendants, who will curse your inadequacy in failing to understand the systems of systems without, in turn, clearly understanding them themselves, and thus they will be destined to perish from poverty in the same way. The Kafkaesque cockroach has turned into a human; the cockroach is Fantozzi. Today even more than yesterday, human filth takes shape not only in office workers but in the majority of complacent, bourgeois, bureaucratic, and progressive humans.
PS, if you don’t know Fantozzi you’re a Merdaccia!