Going tharn...

It's been a long time since I clicked on a link in an email. I'm not an idiot, after all. And yes, I know, I'm the guy who sends out emails to you with links in them. I don't think of myself as a hypocrite. Just refreshingly inconsistent.

So, when I found an email from the feds in my inbox yesterday telling me it was time to update my Relationship Authorization Manager because it was about to expire in seven days, I typed "relationship authorisation manager Australian government" into Safari's search box and let Siri come up with a legitimate link.

That's when the trouble started.

To log into the gov.au site and update this thing, I had to use the MyGov ID app. Okay. No biggie. It’s on my phone somewhere, and I have it set up for FaceID. I pulled it out and...

BZZZZZZT!

No, I couldn't use the MyGovID app because I hadn't updated the Relationship Authorization Manager. Can you see where this is headed? To hell? Yes, it's headed straight to hell.

I spent four to five hours in the sulphurous suburbs of Admin Hell yesterday trying to resolve the Zen riddle of logging into a government service to update an app that wouldn't let me. I spent just over an hour of that time on hold, waiting to talk to a human being in a call centre, hoping that they might be able to deal with it from their end.

Yeah, nah, not so much.

The third rep I spoke to was the most helpful. He suggested giving up. Just give up and walk away for 24 hours and come back and see whether it works. Honestly, it was the most excellent thing anybody said to me all day.

It all felt very Robodebtacular and evoked some genuine sympathy for the millions of people who got caught up in that supermassive shit show.

But it also got me thinking about how common this experience is: the feeling of powerlessness and hopelessness in the face of modern systems technology. That feeling, or maybe it's a lack of feeling, was beautifully if painfully described in Richard Adams’s famous novel of Lapine adventure, Watership Down. Adams's furry protags called it 'tharn', the paralysing fear that seizes a rabbit in, say, the headlights of an onrushing vehicle.

When I ponder modernity, as I often do around this time on a Friday morning, I think about the sorrows of the world and the deep wellsprings from which they arise. Some of them are obvious: billionaires who refuse to pay tax, psychopaths with a will to power, and algorithms exquisitely designed to prey on our most basic urges.

But I think I might add going tharn in the headlights of accelerating technology. How often do we find ourselves pinned in place by the impossible dominion of information or management systems that seem almost perfectly engineered to induce a tharn-state of demoralisation?

Endlessly branching phone tree menus that lead you deeper into perdition without ever reaching a human representative. Complex and opaque insurance claims processes that demand multiple appeals and hours of phone calls. Online platform algorithms that flag or remove content or even nuke entire accounts without clear explanations or avenues of appeal. Dumbass smart home devices that just don't work. Airline booking and rebooking systems. Job application tracking software. Two-factor authentication loops.

Every time we encounter one of these things, it's not just a systems failure or a poor user experience; it's belittling, discouraging, and even demeaning. The loss of agency can be felt as a passing frustration or as something much deeper. In the final extreme, I suppose, it can be dehumanising.

I had a similar encounter a couple of weeks ago when Amazon stopped paying me because... well, just because. According to the auto-generated email I received, there was some problem with my bank account.

Spoiler: there was no problem with my bank account.

It took me two months to resolve, and I couldn't be certain I had resolved it until the overdue payments finally showed up in my account. Even now, I remain anxious, even fearful, that I'll get another one of those emails alerting me to some unspecified problem that no human being within Amazon can identify but which the platform's processes have decided is serious enough to warrant action.

It was only after solving that problem that I discovered I was not alone. Turned out there were hundreds, possibly thousands of other writers in Australia who'd also been cut off by the Beast of Bezos for... reasons.

It could have been something as simple as a software update with a comma out of place. We don't know, and we will never know. But finding out that it wasn't just me was, in some ways, more reassuring than seeing the money they owed me eventually drop into my account, letting me pay the bills that had been piling up.

It felt like I wasn't alone.

That is the terrible power of modern systems, I think. They make us alone, atomise us, and disconnect us from each other. They turn us tharn. They replace those human connections with a User-Platform relationship that feels remarkably similar to the old master-servant relationship in its power imbalance.

It makes me think I need something more than a Relationship Authorization Manager.