There’s something very weird about expecting turnkey results from technology and having it back out on you.
Back in 1995, my high school friends and I saw “The Net” when it first came out. The internet was just a vague gleam in people’s eye and I’m not sure we’d even had the Re: re: fwd: fwd: Mail Delivery Failure experience (a long story, but basically one in which Gris and I were pioneers of the concept of spam with our Academy e-mail addresses) yet. People knew the internet was coming and that it had strong implications for the way people lived, and it was somehow related to ATMs and identity theft and such.
“The Net” was really a prescient film and did a great job of creating a scary scenario where life turns on you with the aid of inhuman technology that lacks compassion or any checks on its “objectivity”. And I think every time a password starts to reject on me, my mind goes straight back to this film and its elegant paranoia.
The most profound moment of this was something that happened late in my career at Glide, something that I guess was too spooky for me to even post about at the time, since I just went back and looked through the archives for it and I couldn’t find anything. (Maybe it’s been disappeared!) For some unknown and unnotified reason, my ATM card PIN had been suspended. I spent a frantic day running through San Francisco trying my PIN at different ATMs, trying to use my card at various stores, even having a burrito made for me at Herbert’s Mexican Grill that I had to leave uneaten and unbought because I was out of cash and had only the one card that was persona non grata.
Toward the end of this miserable day, I actually started to question my memory. Our faith in the objectivity of computers and machines is such that I started to believe my recollection of my own PIN number may be faulty, that it was actually something else. I remember having dialed the number for the Wells Fargo help line and actually putting down the receiver and heading back out to an ATM to try a transposition of my PIN, because I suddenly felt silly and had remembered that it was really something else. Of course, I had been right the first time and I was just trying to convince myself of an easier explanation than the one that was true. Humans have this tendency to blame themselves for phenomena, to feel that they must be the exception or the outlier. One’s mind is more likely to go to “I must be crazy/mistaken/misinformed/misremembering” than “the world has turned on me or made a major error”. Or at least that’s my mind, but I (ironically?) don’t think I’m alone on this.
In any case, I eventually called Wells Fargo and they were unable to tell me why my card had been locked initially (or why they hadn’t placed the standard courtesy call to verify that I was the one really using it), but they had a good time talking askance to me about my frantic attempts to use it once it had been locked. The unsettling reality was that my behavior did a pretty good job of mirroring what someone who had just stolen the card would have done, running from ATM to ATM trying to use the card as though different machines would somehow yield disparate results.
By far the most disturbing phenomenon, though, was the self-editing of memory, the fact that my on-the-ground experiences could so easily convince me that my steel-trap memory was faulty, that there was something wrong with me. Combined with the sort of frenzied panic I’d gotten into that afternoon, it was “The Net”-style eerie to realize how quickly I could go a little crazy and, obviously, how reliant I was on a plastic rectangle in my wallet for sustenance, travel, and everything that kept me from being one of the clients we were serving on a daily basis.
Fast-forward to this morning, when I try to update Duck and Cover, posting the 1,223rd comic in the series. I groggily log-in to my website as per the usual starts of my days, extra late in the afternoon since I was up writing till 6:30 this morning. The password rejects. Not surprising, really, since I’m barely awake. I recheck my fingering again and the password rejects again. Hm. I look for the keyboard lights – NumLock, CapsLock, ScrollLock. None are illuminated. Strange. I watch myself very carefully peck out each key of the password. Rejected.
And panic starts to ease in, settling itself comfortably like a wet blanket over my psyche. My website has been hacked again. It’s been stolen and erased and will have to be rebuilt from scratch somehow. All is lost.
I race to a new browser to check my site. Front page seems fine, so does my blog. It seems to be loading a little slowly, but maybe my heart’s just racing. What can explain this? I head back to the FTP login and try twice more. Rejection. And now I have to stop and think, because I could get a lockout triggered by too many failed attempts. Already I can feel myself questioning my own memory and I even think back to the frantic day at the San Francisco ATMs.
Maybe the webhost has been hacked. Maybe something has gone awry. I check my e-mail to see if there’s any notice. And… lo and behold, there’s a notice from the webhost about mandatory universal password resetting to force people to choose stronger passwords that are vetted for variation. Sigh of relief. Mild annoyance, but I guess there’s no other way to notify me. Breathe. Calm down. Everything’s totally fine.
But it occurs to me, as I reset the password, how much rides on these little things. I remember that one of the things that compelled me to draft a will in 2006 was the thought that if I passed away, no one would have my passwords to anything and all my online work, my archiving of e-mails and the like, would be lost. I wonder what e-mail account servers do with information like that… do they make accounts available to loved ones with proof of death and relation? I heard something about Facebook deciding to leave the pages of the deceased up as memorials, which makes sense, but does that mean loved ones can access said content without the password?
More importantly, perhaps, it still just seems too easy to keep me out. I guess this is why people get so jumpy about hacking, so nervous about viruses. A computer can make a couple mistakes and suddenly a decade’s work can disappear. Granted, the internet has a lot of checks on these things, like the Internet Archive, and I backup my site in its entirety pretty regularly. I probably have a lot more control and access to my site than to my money, when it comes down to it.
Probably for the best to have these slight reminders, though, of mechanical fallibility. If only for the sake of remembering what’s most important is upstairs and one’s faith in same, not what’s stored on the chips.
