Can’t wait: the high price of superfast tech
A burgeoning lust for all things convenient has made us impatient – and vulnerable to fraud
It was a bright, cold day in New York City, and a dishevelled man with a placard was explaining to me how everything around us was ruled by Satan. He cited the Book of Revelations, chapter 13, which describes how during the end times we will all be forced to accept a “mark” in order to buy or sell anything. “Pretty soon,” he told me, “they’ll make you get a microchip in your hand for payments. And then Satan’s got you. That’s the mark of the Beast.”
Living in London, breezing up out of the Tube with my Oyster card and paying for a sandwich with the merest flourish of my contactless card, I’m sure that time is soon a-coming. For those willing to accept these new payment technologies, life is becoming incredibly smooth. Even some churches have contactless collection bowls. But a Telegraph investigation has exposed a new risk: not only to our bank accounts, but to our memories.
Back in the Noughties, the move from signing for card payments to entering a PIN code led to a big fall in fraud. It was much harder to discover someone’s PIN than to forge their signature and hope nobody checked. Yet now card companies are finding that consumers spoiled by frictionless commerce forget their PINS more often – so they are once again allowing signature payment, with the wrinkle that shop staff are now even less likely to check signatures than before.
It is symptomatic of how rapidly new ways of conducting our ordinary business can make the old ones psychologically intolerable. I’m an even-tempered person, but I become apocalyptic with fury when my internet connection is slow or inconstant. This makes no sense: three decades or three centuries ago, I would have had no internet at all, so really I’m angry because I have something where I could have nothing. But I know it’s not just me.
Probably you, too, have experienced the stabbing frustration of a dodgy tablet or smartphone. Perhaps you have raged at a courier company that failed to deliver your parcel on time (a logistical achievement unprecedented in human history, but who’s counting?). Maybe, having lost your TV remote, you have sat glumly watching something you don’t give a fig about rather than make the arduous journey which your ancestors endured every day. Whatever the specifics, we’ve all found ourselves growing childishly impatient over tasks we used to accept with grace.
That’s humans for you; one of our most enduring and endearing qualities is our capacity to be bored by the extraordinary. But the internet has supercharged our lust for convenience. Never has so much been available to so many so quickly. Many writers describe a growing inability to muster sustained attention. Researchers say we have developed a new kind of reading, “power browsing” through titles and contents pages in search of “quick wins”. Better tech only makes it worse: one study found internet users with faster connections gave up waiting for videos to load more quickly than those with slower ones.
This impatience is also the driving force behind our continual surrender of ever more information and power to internet companies. The tech journalist Alex Hern once tried to go a week without using any service for which he had not actually read the voluminous terms and conditions which most people simply skip past. They totalled 146,000 words.
Contactless cards already make it easier for a mugger to enjoy their spoils. Soon we may have fingerprint payment, which will certainly be safer. But security researchers long ago achieved scanner-fooling fakes which could in future be 3D-printed. Combine that with the endemic vulnerability of customer databases – demonstrated by the Equifax breach – and you have a recipe for crime sprees against which the main defence is that most thieves can’t be bothered.
Are we finally so lazy that we must rely on laziness to protect us? I don’t think so. More often than lazy, we are busy, our cognitive resources churning away at so many problems that we welcome anything that can reduce the load. Economists call this “bounded rationality” – rationality operating under imperfect conditions – and it’s why we make so many superficially reasonable but stupid decisions. As our lives get busier, I’m sure it will only get worse. I can’t wait.