Tech Disabled

8/28/23

Tech Disabled

Smartphone with disabilities, by Bing Image Generator

Mobile smartphone technology has in many ways served as a great equalizer, enabling everyone equal access to every scrap of information. Or so goes the assumption. Yet there are still those who have held out against the tide of high tech gizmos and services. And as the gizmos and services have spread, society’s space for the tech skeptics, inept users, and curmudgeons has steadily shrunk, leaving the holdouts at a disadvantage as the non-tech options disappear.

In this vein, commenter Josh sends a link to an article in the UK Guardian newspaper lamenting the loss of offline, non-digital options. The article outlines the problem for UK denizens who have not adopted the innovations that most others have readily accepted as simplifying their daily lives:

The cashless society is effectively already a reality for most of us, but there remains a minority for whom it represents a continuing headache. The government last week told high street banks that they must offer access to cash machines within three miles of customers after the closure of thousands of branches had reduced the number of ATMs.

There are also an estimated to be 1.3 million adults in [Great Britain] who are “unbanked” – ie do not have a bank account. For them, something as mundane as parking a car is increasingly fraught – a quarter of London councils have removed pay and display parking machines in favour of smartphone-centred apps.

In the U.S. we often assume ourselves to be at the cutting edge of technology and its widespread adoption, but there are plenty of other countries that have more rapidly climbed the tree of technological advancement, abandoning older, previous-generation methods entirely. This can often make the United States feel creaky and old to those from elsewhere or who’ve spent significant time abroad. For instance, the U.S. banking system has held onto paper checks as a means of payment when much of Europe has long since abandoned the practice in favor of electronic funds inter-bank transfers. This was true going all the way back to the 1980s. But despite their antiquation, personal checks are still in fairly common use in America, even as payment processors, banks, and even the U.S. Postal Service officially warn that paper checks send by mail are considered prone to theft and fraud.

Countries as far apart as China and Estonia have adopted tech for every conceivable transaction. In the case of China, it has (probably) had to do with the government’s attempts to make its own citizens transparent and compliant. In the case of Estonia, it has been as a means of making government and commerce more easily accessible to everyone. Estonia has prided itself on using technology and the internet to simplify citizen participation in democracy, and as a way for businesses to access government services, such as licensing, tax, and permit applications.

For the average citizen who has simply adopted the technological conveniences, maintaining older systems that are slower and less secure represents an unnecessary cost on everyone else. Once society has quietly decided to abandon the old in favor of the new, how long can recalcitrant holdouts expect to be supported, many may ask?

To use a favored analogy, once nearly everyone has adopted motor vehicles, how long must public roadways remain accessible to horse-and-buggy transportation? Which is a question one might ask in locales where the Amish still hang onto pre-motorized transport.

The holdouts and skeptics themselves might reply that the tacit adoption of technology ignores the questions of reliability if conflict with another power should break out. Complete reliance on technology is a potential vulnerability that a hostile power would exploit to weaken us, and total tech adoption accompanied by abandonment of older methods would thereby leave us exposed.