A walk in the town and the dictatorship of the apps
It was another one of these photocopied days and in order to make a difference for myself I decided to stride down town and make the best out of my daily exercise combining it with what otherwise would have been an unpleasant chore. I had promised my little ones that I would open a savings account for each of them, in an effort to teach them the value of money, savings and financial planning. I had unsuccessfully tried to do this online and on the phone until a very helpful lady on the Barclays hotline suggested I should just walk in one of the brunches and hope to be lucky! I was not impressed with their organisation and customer service I must admit, but I needed to walk anyway and to be honest I had missed the sight of our mighty castle and the idea of a less crowded town centre felt appealing. I took a long and intense walk enjoying the half empty central Edinburgh streets under an undecided over the past few days grey sky. Sweaty and puffing, I arrived at the bank. Unsurprisingly the people at the brunch couldn't help me. 'We don't make appointments during the lock down I am afraid', a young female employee told me through a pair of manually half opened automatic doors. 'Unless...' she mumbled through her mask. 'Unless what? Is there a way to do it from home?' I asked her eagerly. 'Well you would have to download our app, and then we could arrange a video conference with you in order to show us some identification and open the accounts for your children'. Here we go again, I thought. The app. Of course. 'No, thank you. I will see you when the lock down is over!', I reassured her while stepping away from the inhospitable slit door opening. I am not sure what exactly the story with the apps is. There are definitely other ways to use technology in order to achieve the same wanted results but we are often called to download another one of these apps. These apps that sit on your personal phone and send all your data to a zillion highly interested companies in order to make a fortune out of them (us!). You cannot really control or change the app settings in order to prevent it from spying on you. I just firmly believe that companies and organisations should be providing people with an alternative option. I am not in any way obliged to use Google or Apple. This is a free market society, a capitalistic world where there should be healthy corporate competition and options, right? How come are we suddenly, or not so suddenly evidently, all so happy to fill our phone memory with all this rubbish? Why don't people opt for the browser version of software where you can potentially disable cookies and have some control over what you share with the corporate vultures? Shoshana Zuboff amongst others has been warning us for a while now but nobody cares to listen. We all live our restricted lives in our restricted space, trapped in our restricted social interactions digital world. Deprived of our mental health and in some cases of the meaning in our lives, we have within months lost a great deal of our feeling of community and in some ways our civilised manners too. What matters equally if not more at this point though, is that we have also lost our feeling of freedom and consequently have given away our rights of free speech and dialogue in a ridiculously easy manner. We behave as if democracy is irrelevant, the same way we have been recently behaving as if our privacy rights are irrelevant since 'we have nothing to hide'. We do have a lot to hide, and democracy or privacy are never irrelevant. It feels like a crime to give away in a blink of an eye, all this rights that our ancestors have fought and spilled their blood for. Maybe it's time to re-evaluate our current situation weighting the pros and cons. Is the virus related threat to our physical health greater than the threat to our mental health, functionality within our communities and most importantly the threat to our most precious democracy? AT