Post
Colin explores the historical antecedants for this malicious, sludgy compliance, including (hilariously) the notorious Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a US military guide designed for citizens in Nazi-occupied territories, detailing ways that they can *seem* to do their jobs while actually slowing everything down and ensuring nothing gets done:
https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf
6/
In an interview with the 99 Percent Invisible podcast's Roman Mars, Colin talks about the factors that emboldened companies to switch from these maddening, useless, frustrating outsource call centers to chatbots:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/644-your-call-is-important-to-us/
7/
Colin says that during the covid lockdowns, companies that had to shut down their call centers switched to chatbots of various types. After the lockdowns lifted, companies surveyed their customers to see how they felt about this switch and received a resounding, unambiguous, *FUCK THAT NOISE*. Colin says that companies' response was, "What I hear you saying is that you hate this, but you'll tolerate it."
8/
This is so clearly what has happened. *No one* likes to interact with a chatbot for customer service. I personally find it loathsome. I've had three notable recent experiences where I *had* to interact with a chatbot, and in two of them, the chatbot performed as a perfect accountability sink, a literal "Computer says no" machine. In the third case, the chatbot actually turned on its master.
9/
The first case: I pre-booked a taxi for a bookstore event on my tour. 40 minutes before the car was due to arrive, I checked Google Maps' estimate of the drive time and saw that it had gone up by 45 minutes (Trump was visiting the city and they'd shut down many of the streets, creating a brutal gridlock).
10/
I hastily canceled the taxi and rebooked it for an immediate pickup, and I got an email telling me I was being charged a $10 cancellation fee, because I hadn't given an hour's notice of the change.
Naturally, the email came from a noreply@ address, but it had a customer service URL, which - after a multi-stage login that involved yet another email verification step - dumped me into a chatbot window.
11/
An instant after I sent my typed-out complaint, the chatbot replied that I had violated company policy and would therefore have to pay a $10 fine, and that was that. When I asked to be transferred to a human, the chatbot told me that wasn't possible.
12/
So I logged into the app and used the customer support link there, and had the identical experience, only this time when I asked the chatbot to transfer me to a human, I was put in a hold queue. An hour later, I was still in it. I powered down my phone and went onstage and, well, that's $10 I won't see again. Score one for sludge. Score one for enshittification. All hail the accountability sink.
13/
The second case: I'm on a book-tour and here's a thing they won't tell you about suitcases: they do not survive. I don't care if the case has a 10-year warranty, it will not survive more than 20-30 flights. The trick of the 10-year suitcase warranty is that 95% of the people who buy that suitcase take two or fewer flights per year, and if the suitcase disintegrates in a nine years instead of a decade, most people won't even think to apply for a warranty replacement.
14/
They'll just write it off.
But if you're a very frequent flier - if you get on (at least) one plane every day for a month and check a bag every time☨, that bag will absolutely disintegrate within a couple months.
15/
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
