One Digit Off
Kohi, Hai
A clerk typed one digit wrong on an application for a store card, prompting a fraud alert to be placed on my wife’s credit. The clerk called the credit check company and tried to explain that he had erred. Made no difference to them. They then talked to my wife, asking her a series of questions based on public access data mining. This was to confirm she was who she claimed.
The questions were based on the data of the person with whom they had her confused. She could not answer these questions, so she failed their ID check. Explaining that, no, she was not a man, not an Army veteran, and had never lived in any of the places they mentioned, was a waste of talking.
She must now wait until a letter is sent from the credit checking company, then follow the instructions on the letter to reinstate her credit.
We all know it’s not going to be that simple.
We all know it’s possible the ramifications will reach hellish proportions. She may lose her clearance, her credit, and all her property. She may even be whisked off to one of the torture prisons or camps, if she can’t confirm her identity to some mindless bureaucrat’s satisfaction.
Kafka would recognize a world in which a single keystroke error in the typing of a complicated number could and does result in a person’s life being utterly ruined. It's life now, not satire.
Kafka would understand a world in which such an error, so easy to make, prompted no way, either simple or convoluted, to correct such an error. It’s a world called Despair.
In such a world, the individual despairs of any justice, any rationality, or any fairness from the state. The state may be the government. It might be the credit companies and banks. It might be the vast consumer control complex. It might be the military. Under all the masks is Despair.
My wife, standing in Nebraska, talked to a woman in India. The credit company farms out its telephone jobs, it seems. It was an international call. Minute, intimate details of lives were discussed openly in a call anyone could monitor. They pretend to worry about security even as they blatantly violate it.
They are not informed. Although their Total Information Awareness gathering of all manner of details can put together a dossier on each of us that contains far more than we can ever remember, or even know, about ourselves, there is no information in such files. Only data.
To become information, data must be analyzed and made useful. This credit system that dominates our lives is patently not useful, except of course to protect the credit companies and banks, and their hold on vast sums of money, and the power it buys them. That it is senseless, like using a nuclear bomb to hammer a finishing nail, only insulates them further from inquiry, regulation, and exposure.
Mindless data idiocy is massed against us. It’s worse than the Borg. It’s worse than a hive mind.
Kafka’s despair is palpable now everywhere. The information society makes sure of it.
As long as they let you play unmolested, you believe yourself to be free. The instant they choose, for any reason or none, to deny you access to the game, you discover that there is nothing you can do. Including continue to live.
They hold all the data, and aren’t interested in being informed, especially not from your viewpoint.
Anything you say, do, or were in any way associated with can, and will be used against you in a credit society. Cradle to grave lack of privacy equals the ability to bully each of us more thoroughly than any despotic fascist state Kafka could have imagined. He simply had no idea how far it would go.
Next time that clerk smiles; next time that sales register beeps; next time you do anything at all having to do with your credit -- and I dare you to think of something that doesn’t -- you’d better pray to what ever illusions of security you still entertain that it’s not even one digit off.
Because if it is even one digit off, you may find yourself without a life, and no way to prove who or what you used to be, one keystroke earlier.
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