Incompatible

Have you bought a new personal electronic device of late? Silly question, probably: our new friend built-in redundancy has more than likely forced your hand on that one. So I’m pretty sure you’ll be familiar with the following scenarios. 

You’re setting up your new Android phone, Kindle tablet or Mac. The first thing they do is force you to sign up for a Google, Amazon or Apple account, right? Nothing works until you pass that test. You never used to have to do this before everything got ‘connected’, did you? But now, before you’ve so much as read an email or opened a document, you’re dragged, willingly or otherwise, into the Google, Amazon or Apple world.

But hey, who wouldn’t want a one-stop shop where you can deal with communications, photos, music, transport, your diary, booking dinner, navigation, ebooks, finding a fiver-star plumber, files, apps, hotel rooms, cat videos, dirty laundry, web browsing and pizza orders? Just like a supermarket is more efficient than a high street, this makes sense. All the tech giants - no longer merely the search engines or online retailers or computer makers they once were - want to be that supermarket. That’s why they try to railroad you into it via their devices. They’re hoping you’ll get lazy once you’re snagged, and stop shopping around. 

None of this is headline news, but keep reading. I have a bigger statement to make here.

Returning to life as a Google-oid, Amazonian or Apple-ite, it must be said that these are theoretically wonderful services. Linked by one account, your hardware devices (assuming you’ve not been a free-thinking rebel and tried to use an Android phone alongside your Mac laptop...) can sync up with each other and even understand your voice. Natural language communication will improve. Payments (unsurprisingly) are being made ever easier. Soon you’ll be able to drop a few Dollars on an electrician’s visit just by sneezing.

Even at the stage we’re at, the tech itself is fantastic. And it’s getting better. We could make the most wonderful advertisements about how they’ll smooth our lives - and do we ever! Wanna dance, Alexa?

It could be so great, couldn’t it? If you really commit with all your soul - it doesn’t much matter which tech conglomerate you serve, and their offerings keep evolving anyway - then it’ll be like finding heaven. The dream is that some software/hardware extension of your account will gently wake you up in accordance with your natural sleep cycles, send you an espresso, read you the morning newspaper and give you a pat on the head before sending you to work in the Uber it ordered automatically. Password-free.

But here’s the thought that hits me every day: we’re being sold a dream that cannot work for humans.

The clue is in the word ‘sold’. Theory and television commercials are not reality. Reality is that at the end of the day, profit-driven humans ultimately lie behind all of this angelic, seamless technology that allows us to smile beatifically at cameras and (apparently) spend all our new-found free time playing with labradors and philosophising.

There are two logical problems why Alexa’s dulcet tones (again, just an example) can never be the smooth life hack we’re told they will be. One is that a profit-driven game means consumers have to deal with the consequences of competition. The other is that as long as there are corruptible humans on this planet (and I do mean the whole damn earth - Mexico and Fiji are only a mouse click away from you), then we can never trust diving headlong into a connected world.

I’ll try not to dwell too long on the competition thing. I’ll write a longer, grumpier missive on that some day. But an example from last night probably illustrates it very well. I was reading my Kindle, and discovered that I had some photos on ‘Amazon Photos’. There were also some on my ‘camera roll’, which was apparently a slightly different thing. I never even knew I had ‘Amazon Photos’, but was presumably signed up to its potential existence the moment I was forced to log in to the Kindle three years ago.

The point is that the discovery made me roll my eyes and decide to go back to printing everything out and sticking them in albums. As the owner of a Kindle, a Chromebook and an Android phone, and former owner of Windows computers/phones and a Mac/iPhone, I have photos, music and files scattered across a vast variety of clouds, dongles, hard drives, galleries and Lord Almighty knows where else. It’s a complete and utter mess that raises my stress levels and has already gobbled up whole weekends to no avail. And it’s also the inevitable result of several companies trying to channel you into a much broader digital world beyond the device itself.

(I know someone’s going to say I should have just stuck to one brand/company/ecosystem, but please, this isn’t realistic. Most of us can’t afford to buy Apple-everything all the time. Cash flows vary. We get given incompatible presents. You buy a Kindle for the reading experience the hardware gives you, but you still need something else for Excel sheets. Sometimes your job makes you use a different system to what you have at home. Sometimes you hurriedly buy your next phone in a small Australian outback town, and the Windows phone is the only one in stock that you can afford. For me, this mess really was inevitable.)

Competition is at the root of all this. All the updates and Google Ones (can’t you just leave it alone, guys?) and revisions and getting-ahead and built-in redundancies and deliberately-engineered (or not) incompatibilities I don’t need to go into here. Completely understandable for businesses, but for consumers? I can’t help thinking that a benevolent monopoly is the only way connected technology could avoid everything in the last two paragraphs. (Which, like all the other paragraphs in this story, were inexplicably separated by two line breaks instead of one after I pasted my text from a Google Doc. Case in point, I think?)

But since history has shown benevolent dictatorships to be quite unlikely - theory versus reality, again - we’re stuck with competition, right? Reason number one why the smooth-sailing dream consumers are sold will remain just that.

And so to the fundamental trust problem: Tech doesn’t do dishonesty: humans do. The aforementioned may be corruptible, greedy, crooked or all three. And after years of naivety and burying our heads in the sand, all of us are now aware of this. The geeks are wreaking their revenge day and night.

It’s easy to forget that you’re ultimately dealing with people, not technology. It's a silly thing to forget.

When you become aware of this, you end up self-censoring. I use ‘fake’ email addresses just for the purposes of setting up my phone, because I saw a talk once about how easy it was for people to hack your mobile. ‘Fine, I thought, let them hack...I won’t have any real email on my phone.’ Likewise, no Facebook on the mobile. No paying for anything, either.

And this is what I mean when I say humanity has failed technology. Our connected machines have amazing potential. I should be able to have Facebook on my phone. I should be able to use all the functionality, plus whatever marvels come in the future. But because we can’t trust strangers any more than we could in caveman times - and there are billions more that can threaten us now, as opposed to just the ones in nearby caverns - we can’t use that potential. 

Can the fact that some humans will always be greedy, thieving, hacking swines actually mean that we will never be able to let technology be all that it could ultimately be? I’m starting to think so.

I think the fact that the bad guys are invisible will be a decisive factor in how the story of humanity and technology plays out. When a burglar jumps over your fence and your dog starts to bark, at least you know what’s going on and what you might do about it. But while OneDrive might well be more secure than our gardens, we everyday folk don’t know whether it is or it isn’t. And then, rightly or wrongly (it doesn’t matter for my argument here) trust goes.

And a loss of trust is something that worries even those big shots. If you’re like me and a conversation about online security sends you to sleep faster than you can say ‘web developer’, you’ll just err on the safe side and forget the whole business. I might close my Facebook account tomorrow morning, and move to an mud-loving hippie commune that eschews all digital presence. Zuckerberg knows most people might not be that extreme (there’s a good such commune next to the Dead Sea, if you’re interested), but he knows from very recent experience that even his behemoth of a company ultimately relies on trust. 

Competition, of course, feeds the whole loss of trust thing day and night. With so many easy-but-sketchy ways to push users in your company’s direction, how could you resist using them in the race to get ahead?

Take the fact that I have multiple social media accounts on multiple platforms. If I use all of them on my phone, it becomes a minefield of pitfalls. I don’t mean posting under the wrong name because I chose a wrong drop-down menu - that would be my fault. I mean when Facebook buys Instagram, and starts automatically mixing up accounts you’ve gone to great pains to separate. Including ones you never even used on your phone.

It’s the insidious and unpredictable creep of those identities, photos and files that you put in one place for a reason, and which then end up somewhere else without your say-so. California does what it wants, it seems. All of that undermines trust as well. It makes you want to throw all your devices in the sea - along with that faceless nerd reading over your shoulder from the other side of the world.

The dilemma is this: every step connectivity brings us closer to each other, it also brings us closer to danger that couldn’t get at us before. And the more disembodied, distant and monopolistic the companies who do such a fine job of packaging connectivity into something useful become, the more control we give up. The more tempting services we go for, the more intrusion we invite.

If we were just dealing with pure technology, there’d be no concept of danger or control. Intrusion would be meaningless. But it’s not like that. There are always people, so those things will always be things.

I don’t honestly see a way for the Pages and Cooks of the world to solve this. You can bring all the algorithms and features you like, but at day’s end this is a question of humans trusting humans. And unlike having to deal with the reality of a shifty guy on a street corner or your corrupt neighbourhood policeman, this is about long-range trust of strangers. A kind of trust that’s ultimately optional.

And I’m just wondering if we’ll all ultimately opt out.

(UPDATE: Four years after this article was written, I feel entirely vindicated. We have no idea if Elon Musk is any more or less trustworthy than an army of nameless hackers, while wars are being fought in the fake newsroom. Humans seem to be failing tech more than ever, and the feeling that we're living in 1984 is pervasive.

And as for my technological setup, streamlining and compatibility remain a dream. I gave up using Google Drive (and associated tools) because it failed to save things between devices the way it was supposed to. I had to export half the work I've ever done into Office documents, which was tremendous fun as you can imagine. I switched to Apple computers because iCloud works and because the best self-publishing software only worked on Mac. I still use Google email addresses, because those are the ones my contacts have. But I can't use an Apple phone, because they're too expensive. The joy of mixing and matching is ever-present.)