Helen Heaton 🇵🇸

Digitisation is regressing society and called it progress. You used to walk into a bank and talk to a human who knew what a cheque was. Now you need three apps, a password you can’t remember, a text code that arrives after you’ve already locked yourself out, verification by winning an online grid game to spot blurred traffic lights or motorbikes and a chatbot that says “I understand your frustration” while understanding nothing specific about your enquiry. What we actually got is a world where you need an app, wifi signal, two passwords, a QR code that expired 47 seconds ago, and a phone with 2% battery to buy a sandwich. We used to lose our keys. Now we lose access to our own phones because the app decided our face looks “suspicious” at 6:14am with a hangover. You used to get lost and ask a stranger. Now you stare at a blue dot on a GPS map until the signal dies and discover you have no idea which way is north. Customer service used to exist. Now it is a FAQ written by someone who has never used the product, followed by “would you like to take a short survey?” after they have already failed to help you. We replaced paper maps with phones that need signal, paper tickets with apps that crash at the barrier, paper books with subscriptions that vanish when the company “updates its terms,” and monstrosity AI data centres built on beautiful countryside while guzzling up energy and water to construct AI memes while we get a hosepipe bans when it’s sunny for a few days every summer. We ended up living in a society that cannot function if the Wi-Fi is down, friends that often socialise more through WhatsApp groups than meeting in a pub and the elderly who need their children to log into the NHS so they can see a doctor. Digitalisation didn’t make life smarter. It made life brittle, time consuming and dependent on a rectangle that spies on you while charging you £12.99 a month. Digital has automated the human out of the human experience and called it user experience efficiency. Bring back the queue. At least the queue had people in it. Banks close branches. GPs move bookings onto apps. Parking, tickets, menus, council tax, pensions, TV channels - all requiring verification via another QR code. We digitised the world and somehow made everyday life feel like trying to assemble IKEA furniture while the instructions keep auto-updating and the allen key requires two-factor authentication. Congratulations. We are now less free, more tracked, constantly interrupted, and still late because the parking app crashed. But at least we successfully found the three burred traffic lights on a “verify you are a human and not a robot” to access our own electricity bill…

It’s simple. Put solar panels on car parks rather than on thousands of acres of prime farmland.