Fading Light
Another one for the "modern life" files.
I got a call from my credit card company a little over a week ago. It had something to do with fraud, but the call got disconnected and I was too busy to follow up. A few days later I got another call, and this time I was able to listen to the message. My card was being canceled as a result of a data breach (nothing to do with my specific card).
I contacted the credit card company and was informed that my card would be automatically canceled and a new one issued. I could do it immediately if I wanted, otherwise it would happen a few days later. It turned out that choosing to do it immediately would have been a pain in the ass, so I just waited.
Now all of the services I subscribe to are turning off one by one, as they try to charge my card and it doesn't go through. I haven't received a new credit card and I have no way of updating my card information for these vendors. Also I probably can't buy anything with my credit card.
I should emphasize, I'll be fine. Once I get my new card I'll turn the services back on and presumably my access to my subscriptions will be restored. In the meantime I have access to cash. And if I really cared, I could use another credit card to maintain access to my subscriptions (I prefer not to because I do not generally use that credit card, so I would have to update my information twice). So this is at most a minor inconvenience for me.
That said, it's happened to me quite often in recent years, whereas I can't remember it happening at all in the first 10 years I used credit cards. And there are a lot of people who would experience this kind of thing as not just an inconvenience but a real disruption.
It feels as though something has gone wrong with the basic institutions and technologies that we use in daily life. For a lot of people (including me for a while), a large majority of phone calls are spam. Of course that's long been true of email. There is no easy way to prevent data from being misused, and meanwhile the changes in advertising are destroying traditional media companies.
I don't think there's a single unifying theme of all of this (e.g. Matt Stoller's "hipster antitrust" garbage), I think it's simply the cumulative effect of (fairly) rapid technological change, plus regulatory inaction/perfidy. But I think these kind of daily frustrations add up and contribute to our general sense that despite significant economic and technological gains our lives are getting worse and important sources of convenience and comfort are slipping away. And in turn it forces us to consider the possibility that we were never good at institutional design, we were just lucky, and our luck has run out.
I got a call from my credit card company a little over a week ago. It had something to do with fraud, but the call got disconnected and I was too busy to follow up. A few days later I got another call, and this time I was able to listen to the message. My card was being canceled as a result of a data breach (nothing to do with my specific card).
I contacted the credit card company and was informed that my card would be automatically canceled and a new one issued. I could do it immediately if I wanted, otherwise it would happen a few days later. It turned out that choosing to do it immediately would have been a pain in the ass, so I just waited.
Now all of the services I subscribe to are turning off one by one, as they try to charge my card and it doesn't go through. I haven't received a new credit card and I have no way of updating my card information for these vendors. Also I probably can't buy anything with my credit card.
I should emphasize, I'll be fine. Once I get my new card I'll turn the services back on and presumably my access to my subscriptions will be restored. In the meantime I have access to cash. And if I really cared, I could use another credit card to maintain access to my subscriptions (I prefer not to because I do not generally use that credit card, so I would have to update my information twice). So this is at most a minor inconvenience for me.
That said, it's happened to me quite often in recent years, whereas I can't remember it happening at all in the first 10 years I used credit cards. And there are a lot of people who would experience this kind of thing as not just an inconvenience but a real disruption.
It feels as though something has gone wrong with the basic institutions and technologies that we use in daily life. For a lot of people (including me for a while), a large majority of phone calls are spam. Of course that's long been true of email. There is no easy way to prevent data from being misused, and meanwhile the changes in advertising are destroying traditional media companies.
I don't think there's a single unifying theme of all of this (e.g. Matt Stoller's "hipster antitrust" garbage), I think it's simply the cumulative effect of (fairly) rapid technological change, plus regulatory inaction/perfidy. But I think these kind of daily frustrations add up and contribute to our general sense that despite significant economic and technological gains our lives are getting worse and important sources of convenience and comfort are slipping away. And in turn it forces us to consider the possibility that we were never good at institutional design, we were just lucky, and our luck has run out.
posted by James | 10:16 AM
1 Comments:
These problems could be easily solved. If the government announced today that whichever carrier had the most complaints about spam calls starting Jan 1 2020 would not be eligible to participate in the following spectrum auction, spam calls would go to zero.
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