Brussels

(this was originally posted in !right_to_unplug ~~but for some reason it does not show up there~~ it’s there now.. just had a long delay)

In Brussels we are increasingly reaching a point where we can no longer talk to people face-to-face without technical hurdles and blockades. It’s clear why the Gang of Angry Elders are angry.

I simply entered a law office as a prospective customer. The door man said all visitors must register on the touchscreen tablet they had mounted on the desk, which made email and phone number a required field in order to advance to the next screen before submitting the registration. This is in Belgium, where the GDPR has a data minimisation protection in Article 5. You must surrender an email address (likely to a Microsoft user) as a precondition to sitting in the same room with someone.

Law offices, press offices, banks, and NGOs (some of which protect human rights) have put these security gatekeepers in their lobbies to prevent people talking to people. You ask to talk to someone and the response is always “do you have an appointment”? When the answer is “no”, they are helplessly incapable of making an appointment then and there. It’s a new level of human dysfunctionality.

Some Dexia branches have a very narrow time slot for people without appointments. You must get there early in hopes to get a queing position that does not get cut off at the end of the time slot.

The concept of a supplier that is subservient to the customer’s needs has been lost. It has flipped because too many boot-licking consumers are simply willing to be a doormat.

The persistence of CAPTCHAs proves this. If enough people were wise enough to refuse to solve CAPTCHAs, the CAPTCHAs would natrually be discontinued. But CAPTCHAs remain because too many boot-lickers are serving their corporate masters.