I have had too many experiences, from huge, international companies, to financial institutions, down to the IT department at my employer, where the first step of tech support appears to be “deny the reality of the experience that the user says they are having” for me to believe that there is anything dependent on the provider. On far too many occasions I have given tech support people a detailed description of the problem I am experiencing, and everything I have done to try and resolve the issue before talking to them, only to have them tell me, right out of the gate, something stupid like “that shouldn’t be happening” (why the hell do you think I’m contacting you then?), or to deny that what I see on my screen is actually what I see on my screen, or to force me to do again all the things that I have already done. No, I think it is an endemic problem within the technology industry that people who provide tech support basically, fundamentally, do not want to help, and really just want to close tickets and get rid of customers.

The worst experience I had in the last couple years was with a person providing telephone support on an application that I use daily. He gave me a certain task that he needed the to do, and I did it. But apparently I did it too quickly for him, because when I said I had done it, he denied that I had done it, and then accused me of lying to him. It was some of the most egregious gaslighting I have ever experienced from tech support. Then he spent the next thirty minutes on the phone with me trying to convince me that he was trying to do his job, and to help, to persuade me to write a good review for him when I got the email for that. I absolutely did not write a good review for him.

Another bad one I had was with my financial institution a few years ago after a major change in their online system. Significant functionality disappeared. So I got on the phone with them and told them what I needed to do. They kept giving me instructions to do things that were not actually available onscreen. Several times I read back to them every single word and option I could see on my screen, left to right, top to bottom, to explain to them that the thing they were telling me to click on simply was not there. Then they got impatient and angry at me for being obstreperous! Ultimately I had to talk to somebody else, who was able to see that, in fact, I was right, and the instructions the other person was trying to give me were not applicable. And then it still took months for the missing functionality to finally be added back into the system. (Interestingly, when it finally reappeared, it did not even work in the way the first “support” person was trying to instruct me!)

The most recent was just yesterday, when I wanted to change my New York Times subscription from home delivery to all digital. On their own website, they have a help page that says you can do this on your own—just go to the “subscription overview” section and choose “change subscription.” Guess what option was nowhere on my “subscription overview”? “Change subscription.” I read and re-read that page again and again, and tried clicking on various other options, for way too long. Finally I just had to use their chat support, which involved working first through an obvious AI, to a possible human with a script that they refused to deviate from. They changed my subscription, but I have no idea why it needed to be that difficult, especially when their own website had contradictory instructions.

Certainly, I have occasionally had decent tech support experiences. But those tend rather to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

This sort of thing is why I simply do not, ever, trust tech support people. In my experience, most of tech support is just gaslighting users into giving up and going away, and this is just further confirmation.

This is a great piece, which points in the same kind of direction that I have tried to point in some recent conversations: that obsessive comparisons of our present moment to some prior historical moment (such as 1930s Germany, to take what seems to be the most popular one these days) are not actually helpful. This piece gives me a little more of the vocabulary I need to say why: because they are worse than unimaginative; they are even against imagination. Those kinds of comparisons are the human-participatory equivalent of generative AI: an echo chamber.

But shouldn’t we seek to learn from the past? Sure, I guess. But that’s not what I see in these comparisons. Instead, I see a kind of nihilistic determinism of if this, then that, from which we have no freedom of escape. This must be coded as the nazification of the United States, and every decision must be fitted to that framework.

What we need instead is more imagination—more of the “necessary fiction,” as Butler puts it, of what the world transformed ought to look like. Not what the world looked like 90 years ago, or 80 or 70, but what the world ought to look like today. And that imaginative work must be inclusive and it must integrate all of our reality. We cannot just leave out the bad people.

Anyway, thanks for sharing this.

It’s worse than that. Those are not just things that right-wingers don’t understand or don’t like—they are all things that are focused on prioritizing people and their experiences over property and the interests of its owners. (And in that sense I think the right-wingers understand that perfectly well—they just do not want to say it out loud.)

These damned fools are going to get us all killed.