Connectivity Has Slowed Us Down

In 1998, my educational institution had gotten its first internet connection. It was called a leased line-a dedicated, high-speed connection measuring about 10 Mbps. What went unsaid was that it was intended for our 1500-strong campus.

Yet, it was a luxury. Students got their slots assigned for access, and one barely got 4 internet sessions in a 6-month long semester. This was in a developing country. Internet cafes were slowly becoming a new business, but not yet the norm.

Home internet was a pipe dream. A telephone line was a prerequisite, and most families didn’t fulfill that requirement. Every time we read news about telecom houses lobbying and auctioning for home broadband, we felt elated at the brighter prospects of our tech careers.

College Internet:

What were we using the college internet for? Just the emails — that’s what the college policy mandated. To begin with, most students got no one who sent them emails. Professors didn’t take the pain to learn how to use an email client. In the last college year, between the preassigned 3-weekly slots, all everyone did was enlist company HR emails that one could pitch to for the internship/job. Within the 30-minute email slot, 15+ minutes often went after reconnecting the dropped connection. If one was fast enough to type, he could accomplish his email job application target. If not, next time.

Apart from the emailing, there weren’t many great places on the web to visit, apart from Yahoo and its siblings. We talked about websites for hours offline. But when the most-awaited 30-minute college slot came, austerity reigned.

The most surprising aspect was: If you had the full package, you were allowed to browse websites having graphics! Undoubtedly, our college restricted the full package only to teaching staff, most of which barely knew what the newest fad called internet meant.

A year later, only the richest of my friends had internet (mostly the full package with graphics) in their homes. We took turns pleasing them to be at their place and browse some truly personal stuff. In those days, it rarely went beyond the lustful pictures of the favorite movie stars.

The rise of the workplace internet:

Internet was a luxury before Y2K. But within the next 2–3 years, it entered the transition of becoming a commodity — firstly, an enterprise one.

A corporate connection was broadband by default (a leased line nonetheless), and much better than the educational institution one. My software service company boss insisted we spend 8 hours a day doing the billable work, and then spend 3–5 extra hours meeting with the offshore client. The only motivation to perform such an impossible job was: Free internet.

Demand for networking professionals was at an all-time high, because not only did IT companies need them but also because ISPs were hiring them en-mass. Network certifications were an in-thing, and everybody and his dog gained one.

This created a curious situation: A company either had no net admin, or an extremely competent one, whom the bosses would not allow to work. As a result, the entire company found itself in the browse-all-that-you-can mode quite frequently. Live scores and newsfeeds became meeting room subjects that sometimes lightened up the otherwise gloomy deadline atmosphere.

Chat messengers, both web-based and desktop clients, became an irresistible norm. Before spammers reined, Yahoo chat rooms dedicated to subject or specialty hosted discussions that could beat ClubHouse. Programmers sitting on the bench often got married over them.

Needless to say, they were the wild wild west days of workplace browsing.

The mushrooming world of online content creation:

As the market got saturated with Y2K-born IT companies, clients came crushing on back office offshore budgets. As content sharing became mainstream, the Internet also became ripe with NPFW (a twist on today’s NSFW: Not Productive For Work) content: Blogosphere, IMDB, Reddit, Orkut, and early-day Facebook.

This situation demanded a greater need to regulate workplace browsing. VPNs and Firewalls became the new default, and much necessary to afford to sustain workplace productivity levels. Yet, browsing Amazon.com or BestBuy.com at the workplace right before Thanksgiving eve was an event that brought the teams together. Retail was one of the sectors that realized the maximum profitability of the internet. Not surprisingly, Amazon built its public cloud AWS in 2006, and Microsoft soon followed up with Azure.

Online content creation, the new and the less-monetized foray of the internet was picking up rather slowly, but it was enough to occupy people’s attention at home beyond 9–5. WordPress and Blogger were popular already, but no one spoke about side-hustle. Yet for outliers who signed up thousands of subscribers with one-to-one connections, it was the end effect of the constant web immersion past their work lives.

Bills began to be paid online. More was done in less time. If it took more, it wasn’t particularly taxing because it felt new, and everyone understood the delay. Internet suicides from increased anxiety levels were a rarity.

The 2000s was the time the world fully appreciated the certainty and speed of the new medium called the Internet. So much so that soon after the 2008 market crash, it was the network-powered tech (Organisational software, Remote work, Airbnb, Uber, et al) that began to lead the market economies.

This perfectly coincided with the launch of the smartphone-ruled Web 2.0. It was disruptive. Due to cameras + the internet, smartphones intertwined work + leisure in previously unimaginable ways.

Somehow, things didn’t go the way they seemed headed.

The disconnected world of the overly connected systems:

Two weeks ago, I wanted to open a business bank account.

After going through online reviews, I decided to go with Revolut. On top of the fastest business account, they offered it for free with limited features — something no bank in my area offered. I made my application.

The next day, I was bugged by its (possibly automated) email that said: Please provide your selfie + personal ID. Without thinking for a moment, I happily uploaded both. Business, after all, required no-nonsense decision-making where the risk was the lowest.

The very next day, I was expecting my account number to be operational. Instead, I was greeted with yet another requirement: Please upload the proof of your business registration. I was a bit taken aback since I believed that both my personal and business ID would check against the residence country’s respective databases. Turned out that was not the case. Paper was required, albeit in the soft form.

My business registration was already made, and I also had paid the fees. But it wasn’t processed by governmental authority yet. An online API would show it was in the pending status. I had all the proofs of my application and the fee receipt.

I uploaded all of it on Revolut. An email followed in 8 minutes. To my dismay, though, it said the system rejected my documents. I kept uploading various screenshots telling them it was in the queue, and it was just a pending formality from the approving authority. But it wasn’t enough. At the end of 4 uploads, Revolut told me my application was rejected, and I should upload no more proofs now. Instead, I could contact their support channel.

To this day, I haven’t managed to find their email. They have a community forum though, where people write their problem details en-mass — definitely not a place to write personal details with technicalities.

When I decided to address the bottleneck, I called up the government authority responsible for handling the requests. They said mine was in the queue; they were unable to process the request load. It was quite opaque what they checked in a business registration application, given the fact that it was all connected to the national ID database.

When I pressed for details, the staff spokesperson said that the business register took time to get its updates from the application register. When it would do so, an officer would look at my application, and check all the connecting details (financial records, credit history, criminal history, probably? I have no idea.) If the officer would not understand it, he/she will send it back to me, allowing for the edits, and once again, I would be at the back of the queue.

Being a techie, I was aware of what technical layers she was speaking about. I remembered an incident a few months ago when my bank officer refused me my online credentials simply because their 2-factor authentication was unable to validate me, and she was unable to override it.

In both cases, what appalled me was not that a foolproof software system always required a human pair of eyes, but the fact that despite knowing fully the legality of the parties involved, an authority was unable to move. A system’s approval was an undeniable requirement, despite its million shortcomings.

When I thought why things were the way they were, I remembered about Cambridge Analytica and the surrounding data privacy nightmare Facebook unleashed upon the world. I remembered the times when Zuckerberg and Pichai had to answer American Congress. Agencies (especially governmental ones) had grown strict past that, for sure.

But I wasn’t quite sure the delay I was facing was serving that greater cause. If at all, the challenges of a common man in a connected world have only multiplied.

The only difference the tech has made is: It has reduced the initial friction in customer acquisition. In exchange, what the world got was:

• Segregation of responsibilities — the classical Not our problem aka bureaucratic window hopping has only got online, not eliminated
• Redundant obligatory checks, not unline airline security checks that fail to capture terrorists but manage to harass the common man.

I signed up for Revolut in under a minute but ended up not availing of its services after 2 days of follow-ups. As of today, I do not even know if the Revolut staff that rejected my application was a human or a bot.

Whether or not I use Revolut’s shiny metal business debit card, it has gained a customer registration from me. When it pitches its next investor, I would be counted among its million other customers, and a hundred others like myself would make the investor write a handsome check.

I would be helping some Revolut competitors too, without getting any services in return. And it wouldn’t matter if it would be a paid or a free service.

Conclusion:

In the meantime, if I decide to go to the business authorization office, I would be out of luck. The person responsible for authorizing my application could be working from home. Or I could be illegally jumping the queue — deadlocked by an external system that no authority could override.

All this was possible before the Internet took over, and few bad actors exploited it, because it was, after all, a case of simple form filling coupled with 3 directory lookups spanning 5 minutes.

To alleviate the pain and kill the time, I just turn ON my malfunctioning smart TV. Suddenly I remember that it fails to even complete a YouTube video, because it has run out of OS updates, and YouTube has dropped supporting my version. Probably my latest 5G modem is to blame, but my 20 year old tech career refuses to believe it.

Thanks to their exploitation of my addictive habits, I can’t sleep without watching a random Netflix show. I have to go and buy a Chromecast to make it work anyhow.

I do it desperately. When I do so, leading by example, I inspire my 11-year-old to demand a Disney+ subscription — something I have successfully avoided buying for the last 6 months.

As soon as I press the beautifully crafted Subscribe button (probably a week’s effort by a highly skilled UI designer), my son rushes to the living room. I imagined that this time, too, there would be some kind of blocking 2FA, and his moment of delight would be delayed. But I was wrong.

Within 2 seconds, his favorite Star Wars movie is playing on what I had labeled as an Idiot Box Pro Max a day before.