big tech

Drowning in my usual sea of online media saturation, I recently spotted an article in The Boston Globe that validated a long but increasingly less lonely quest against the perils of technocracy. It focused on a security safeguard we all know and love: two factor authentication and how it’s driving most of us bonkers:

How hard can it be to grab your phone, retrieve a six-digit code, and type it in—seemingly the simplest task in the world—to avoid, oh, having your bank account emptied, your identity stolen, or yourself rendered a kind of stateless person, adrift without access to your own life? Don’t get Thomas Lee, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital physician, started. “Two-factor authentication is sapping my will to live,” he said. Or litigator Kara Thorvaldsen. “It’s the bane of my existence,” she said. “Every time my husband tries to log into NESN, it somehow requires me to get a code and unlock something with Face ID, etc., etc., ad nauseam.” Or Kim Smith, a playwright, an actor, and an empty nester. “Sometimes the only reason I hear from my [youngest] daughter is when she needs the code that’s been sent to my phone,” she said. As porch pirate thefts mount, residents feel besieged. As two-factor—or, even worse, multifactor—authentication becomes inescapable, it’s safe to say that somewhere in America, a spouse is shouting from another room, “Did you get my code?” An employee can’t get into his work platform because he left his phone at the gym, or thinks he did. And an adult child is trying to help her cognitively faltering parents pay a bill, but can’t, for lack of that darn code.

Not a pretty picture but one that we all know all too well. For some reason, it got me thinking about T.S Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock," a masterwork. In one of the more memorable lines, a disillusioned elderly man complains to himself muttering: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” He was basically lamenting that he has let himself be lulled into a diminutive humdrum existence—characterized by small and inconsequential actions making his own narrow life feel smaller and smaller.