Borrowing the post title from the great Calvin & Hobbes comic, that’s something I’ve been wondering the past day or so. The Economist delved at length on the topic in their end-of-the-year double issue with the theme “Progress and its perils”. It’s a good issue, so pick up a copy or read what you can online if you haven’t yet. While The Economist looked at some big issues, morals and all, I’ll leave those alone for now and focus a minute on some smaller ones where “progress” is actually a four-letter word.
Remember when flying used to be fun?
10 or 15 years ago, flying was a pleasant experience. But now? Now flying is a royal pain with all the added “security” hurdles and restrictions. The latest bombing attempt incident has already – again – caused even further tightened security measures, like the completely braindead approach of demanding passengers sit down for the last hour of the flight. That’s just mind-bogglingly dumb. All this even though everyone should know most of the so-called security procedures are futile. As Bruce Schneier has pointed out:
Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.
The rest, i.e. most of it, is just a nuisance that adds up. In essence, we the passengers have to put up with great inconveniences for the sake of security theater. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with all security theater, but do we have to pick the most annoying, counter-productive, useless, expensive and abusive theater practices? That sucks. Especially when we could do something useful.
Remember when e-commerce was actually convenient?
“Progress” is also creating problems in another walk of life: credit cards. Even though we all agree they should be more secure (I should know, my card details were compromised two weeks ago), the layers of added security are becoming a painful thing for the user. The Visa/Mastercard 3D-Secure protocol in particular is annoying as hell and has caused many a transaction to fail. It has, in fact, worsened the user experience so much that I have reduced my card usage because of that. Why? Because 3DS adds numerous steps to the payment process, the verifying bank’s systems often don’t work or the transaction just mysteriously fails. Who cares if it’s more secure if it doesn’t work?!
Remember when the Internet was actually global?
Back in the 1990′s the Internet was a rather nice place to hang out in. Of course we didn’t have all the cool services we have now, but the signal-to-noise ratio was vastly better than it is now. IRC was used for intelligent and/or interesting conversations. Usenet was actually useful. And so on.
Now, ironically enough, electronic national barriers seem to be popping up everywhere. You would think the region codes in DVDs were the last geographically limited media thing we’d see, but no. Try watching YouTube videos from anywhere but the United States and you’ll soon enough hit the “We’re sorry, … is not currently available in your country“-message. Ditto for Hulu. And for crying out loud, even the Daily Show’s official site bans visitors from Down Under. What’s more, if an item in Amazon is sold by another merchant, chances are they don’t ship abroad. What kind of globalization is that?
Of course there are ways to get around some of this stuff – like having a VPN tunnel to the USA or buying a redirecting service with a US address – but the point is one shouldn’t have to do that.
The really big picture
All that is, of course, peanuts compared to situations where real progress actually would’ve been needed. Back on the larger scale of things, economically the past 10 years have taken most of the developed world nowhere.
And don’t even get me started on the political ineptitude of dealing with climate change; the worst part is that it is only a political problem as technically and economically dealing with climate change is perfectly feasible, relatively simple and even relatively cheap. Just reminds me of the quote:
The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’ meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’ meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’.”
Hence, globally, 2010′s better be better than the “naughties” or whatever you want to call this decade.
In the spirit of improving things – or at least not making them any worse – I shall now do the most economical and environmentally responsible thing I can imagine: hit the local beach. It just so happens it’s also one of the most fun things to do.
Lucky coincidence.
