Why does it have to be so hard?

This morning I got an email from Myki, the Melbourne public transport ticketing system.

“We’ve listened to customer feedback and are extending the life of eligible myki cards that have recently expired or are about to expire.

A myki registered to your account may be eligible for an expiry extension, adding a further 2 years to your myki’s lifespan.”

Hallelujah! I’ve never understood why myki cards expire anyway. Shame they’re not removing the expiry date altogether, but this is progress, right? Well… kind of. They’re not just extending the expiry date automagically. No. That would be too easy, make too much sense. Instead, you have to go to a station and insert the card in a machine. Or download the app, scan the card (assuming your phone has NFC capabilities), and work through the menu system to try to figure out how to extend it. I expect it works as well as applying for a refund via the website, which consistently gives this response:

Spoiler alert: later never comes.

This is a perfect use case for technology. It should be so easy. If it had been setup in a human centred way there would be no expiry date (more than that, you wouldn’t need a card, because you could simply use your phone, but we’re getting there). Failing that, the extension should apply automatically. Failing that, the refund process should work. Failing that… it fails us. Every time.

This is just one example of tech causing frustrations. There are so many. Every day we butt heads with technology in a myriad of ways, some tiny, some huge. All of them take their toll.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Now picture yourself getting older. Your eyesight is a little worse. Your hearing, your mobility, your fine motor control are all combining to make life a little bit harder in millions of tiny – and sometimes large – ways.

Technology should be a wondrous boon for you! From speech recognition to customised interfaces, it could make life so much easier.

Imagine a calendar that pops up an alert on a display in whatever room you are in, and disappears when you tell it to.

Imagine a tablet, light enough for you to hold comfortably, and easy to prop up on a bench somewhere without having to fiddle with cases and controls, that has only the functions you need, and they are large, with big, clear text labels. They are fixed in place so you can’t accidentally move them, hide them, or delete them when you’re carrying the tablet from place to place. You don’t have to login or find tiny buttons to make it work, because it knows who you are and what you need.

You can ask your tablet to read you a book, or help you read an ebook by making the text bigger. Messages occasionally pop up on your tablet, they ask you if you want to reply, and accurately converts your replies into text, that sends easily, tells you that it has sent successfully, and is easily retrieved in case you want to check that you gave the person the right information. All without you having to login again, figure out which app you should use, or grant access to all of your data in perpetuity for the app’s makers to mine for profit.

Imagine remembering that you missed your favourite crime show while you were at lunch, and being able to watch it from your comfortable chair, without having to find the remote or figure out which app it’s on. In fact, imagine you settling down in your comfy chair and having your tv say “hey, you missed Doc Marten, do you want to watch it now?” and being able to say “Sure!” or “Maybe after my nap.”

Imagine being able to manage all the government services you need – your physiotherapist, your occupational therapist, your meal service, and your cleaner – using one seamless system that knows who you are and how you like to be contacted, and puts appointments in your calendar with your approval.

Imagine your phone being able to tell whether you are actively using it or carrying it around, so that it doesn’t accidentally respond to the touch of your fingers when you’re just carrying it to the kitchen.

None of this is technically difficult. We have the technology to do it all right now. You might think things work this way, but if you’ve ever supported an elderly person with their technology, you know painfully well that it definitely does not!

What actually happens is that every service requires a different set of identification documents and access codes, from texting you a code to scanning a QR code. From face ID that doesn’t work if your eyes are closed or bloodshot, to fingerprint ID that doesn’t work if your fingers are wet. It uses different apps for authentication, different names for the same concept, different layouts (sometimes in the same app), different processes, and has different broken bits with different work arounds. One works on your phone but not your ipad. One works on your laptop but not your phone. One works in Safari but not Chrome. Sometimes.

Try to setup an account with the ABC so that you can use iView (because you can’t do that without setting up an account, for reasons of no benefit to you whatsoever), and it will send a code to your email that might not appear until 3 hours later (even though you subsequently logged in with another authorisation code that came straight away…).

Apps disappear unexpectedly when your fingers linger too long on the screen. Codes appear for services you don’t use. Is it a genuine email, or a scam? Have your contacts been deleted, or are they filed in a folder that got accidentally created when your stylus slipped?

Most of us, whether elderly or not, spend far more time each day than we’d like ritually cursing technology, and wrestling with authorisation emails that don’t appear, codes that don’t work, identity matching systems that fail to match our identities.

(Shout out to anyone with a Mc followed by a capital letter, or a hyphen, or an apostrophe, or a single name instead of the “normal” minimum of two, multiple surnames, or any other variation on what some programmer thinks every name obviously includes. I see you!)

We wrestle with videos that cast to the tv but will only play sideways. With photos we can’t open because they’re in a different format. With music that won’t play because the wifi has dropped out.

With web forms that say there’s an error but don’t tell you what the error is.

Forms that don’t load. Forms that unexpectedly reload.

Forms that ask for things that don’t exist, or don’t leave space for things that do.

Phone systems that say “we’re full, use the web site” when the web site is down.

Systems that say you’re not logged in when you are. Systems that insist on logging you in to the wrong account. Systems that remember what you did once three years ago but appear unable to learn the thing you do every single day.

Charging cables that don’t. Here’s a good one – recently I learned that usb-c cables, which are a great innovation because they can be plugged in either way up, sometimes don’t actually work in one orientation, because they’re cheaply made. What?!? A device that explicitly has no up or down suddenly has an up and down AND only one of them works AND you can’t tell the difference between the two by looking! Great! Oh, and I now own a wonderful massage device that is great for relieving muscle tension. It has a usb-c plug, but refuses to charge from a usb-c to usb-c cable. It only works with a usb-a to usb-c cable, because the power management is a bit borked. WHAT?!? I thought it was broken and nearly sent it back. Ahem. Breathe.

Ritually cursing technology is just a regular part of life. And yet. It need not be. Technology could be doing all the things it promised. It could be saving us time, helping us communicate, easing the stresses and pressures of modern life. It could be human focused. Humane. Usable. Accessible.

Cory Doctorow argued in Melbourne on Tuesday night that the reason technology is so bad, so difficult, so enshittified, is largely the result of the USA’s insistence on anti-circumvention laws that effectively cuts competition off at the knees and magnifies the power of the big tech companies. Doctorow calls them “felony contempt of business model” laws. They allow companies to make it illegal to reverse engineer their products, to produce other products that interact with their products, or, effectively, to produce products that work better than their products.

Ironically, the US forced countries to introduce these laws by promising to enact tariffs on imports if they didn’t. Now, of course, we have tariffs anyway. A great time for governments with a smidgeon of courage to rip up those laws and declare open season on big tech. Imagine if we had genuine choice. Imagine getting fed up with Google and easily moving to a small, ethical company with a better product. Ah. We can dream!

Imagine being sick of Microsoft Teams and being able to move to a different platform without AI slop and wild levels of dysfunction. A platform that does exactly what you need it to, without driving you over the edge a hundred times a day. With people you can call when it breaks. Better yet, imagine not having to worry about what platform you have, and what your friends have. Imagine them all just talking to each other seamlessly, without trying to lock you into a range of increasingly toxic ecosystems!

Imagine it not mattering whether the person you’re trying to reach is on WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger, or FlyingPigChat, because they all interconnect without drama.

Imagine having a genuinely repairable smart phone (or, hah, a genuinely smart one!), or a smart watch that actually does what it says it does. Imagine having genuine customer service available when tech fails you.

Imagine a world where technology supports you, serves you, builds community instead of dividing it, makes your life easier, and gets the heck out of your way.

We could have that world. Tech billionaires would rather we didn’t, but we absolutely could. Maybe it’s time we made it happen.