It’s hard not to feel as though our digital worlds are going to complete shit.
A week or two ago, I tried to buy concert tickets through Ticketmaster. I selected my seats – reasonably good seats for $100/per ticket for a show I’d really like to see (Michael Kiwanuka). When I clicked purchase, I got an error code and was prompted to try again with a different payment method. I tried again – same error code. I tried again with a different payment method – same error code. I tried again – same error code. I tried again with a third payment method – same error code. After a while the system timed out. When I tried again – the two seats I had chosen were no longer available (probably still locked in to my previous attempt). I picked two different seats and got the same results. I gave up for the evening. The following night, I tried again – my original seats were available. Same results. I called the phone number listed on the error code. I was on hold for ten minutes and was then prompted to leave a message. I hung up. I logged out of my account, logged back in – same error code. I gave it another day. Same issue. Eventually I left a message: my name, the problem I was having, my phone number. They never called me back.
This past weekend, my LinkedIn account was hacked. I was locked out of it for few days while they verified who I was. I changed my passwords on any account where the passwords were similar to my LinkedIn account. One of those accounts was my Ticketmaster account. On either Monday or Tuesday, news broke that Ticketmaster had been hacked and over 500 million accounts had been compromised. Cool. This reminded me that I still hadn’t gotten the tickets I was trying to get. I logged back in under my new credentials. The tickets I wanted were no longer available – tickets one section further back from the stage were either $75 per ticket or $150 per ticket. The only tickets left in the original section I wanted were $250. Thanks Ticketmaster. I went through the process for the $75 tickets. Same error code. I tried a few more times – no luck. I sent an email to Ticketmaster explaining (in detail) the error and the attempts I’ve made to fix it. They recommended I call the number. The number that puts me on hold for ten minutes and doesn’t call back. I seem to be out of options.
Yesterday, feeling a little antsy, I tried to straighten some things up and get rid of some papers. I came across a gift card that had a small balance left on it. I decided I’d buy and download some songs through Amazon. It had been a while since I bought songs… long enough that I noticed the changes Amazon had made to their music platform. They adjusted some of their buttons and links. Everything is geared towards streaming now – meaning it takes more clicks to get to the purchase song options that used to have their own button. While not a major inconvenience, I suspect this is Amazon’s way of driving business to their subscription services and away from artists – a process they’ve been undertaking for a few years. Sigh.
This morning, I woke up early. I went through my normal routine. Brew coffee. Open blinds. Make waffles. Eat waffles and scroll the news. The news (Google News) wouldn’t load. I closed the browser and tried again. Nope, no news. This felt ominous. For the first time in American history, a former President was found guilty of 34 felonies (a major news story) and now the news is broken. Cool. I went to “is it down” or some similar site to see if there was an outage. They weren’t reporting an outage, but lots of people were having the same problem. It turns out Google News had a major outage affecting millions of users. I finished my waffles and skipped the news. I read and wrote poetry. A little later, the outage had been resolved. I scrolled. “Santander staff and ’30 million’ customers have bank data stolen by hackers.” I used to have a Santander account. My mortgage was through Santander, too. I log into more accounts and change more passwords. I really have to stop using variations of PoopShovel77$$ for all of my accounts.
I know this is the price we pay for convenience. I’m not saying I want to go back to a world where I have to physically deposit and write checks and call to get my concert tickets. But these large corporations have to do a better job of protecting our data – millions of accounts being compromised on a weekly basis seems pretty unacceptable. I don’t know if these incidents are on the rise or if it just feels that way… but something about all of this feels off. And unfortunately, the only solutions seems to be even more digital monitoring and a greater reliance on tech or going completely off the grid. Each time I entered a new password, Google or Firefox or whoever asked me if I want it to store my information, and at this point (after several major hacks and a global news site outage), my answer was an emphatic fuck no, stop asking me.
I keep telling myself that I’m going to get my digital life in order: close accounts, consolidate accounts, reduce my fingerprint. Maybe I’ll set aside a day to do that – a day when I would normally be at a concert, but can’t go because I can’t find a way to buy the tickets.