Perhaps I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't know bots get through anyway. Being well aware of the prevalence of bots and how they've been permitted to skew the world of live events, I do wonder sometimes at the futility of these little tests and captchas, destined to prove I am not a robot.
A few days ago, I was trying to get tickets to a concert for my brother, yet kept coming up (endlessly) against the same badly pixelated pictures asking me to pick out bikes, buses, crosswalks and fire hydrants in an effort to prove I am a real person looking to enjoy a real person event. On the surface, it's a way of keeping bots out of ticket-scalping, to prevent prices going through the roof through resales. Except. Anyone who's bought live event tickets in the past few years knows it's becoming quasi-impossible to score tickets for bigger events, since the bots get to them first (duh) and organizers let them. After all, organizers are in on the deal, and know well scarcity will force more desperate fans to pay hundreds of dollars for a mediocre ticket and 90 minutes' worth of entertainment.
Nothing drives sales like FOMO, and there's only just these few, absurdly expensive tickets left. You wouldn't want to be left on the outside, would you?
Luckily, my brother managed to score the ticket in the end, so all ended well, but the experience left me with some questions.
A few days later, installing Grammarly to my browser, I found myself once more face to face with my old nemesis - the assembly of badly captured bikes.
I wondered, when is it enough? When will we escape this absurdity? After all, I'm asked to prove I know what bikes are to show I'm not a robot, then send my answers to a robot who, presumably, also knows what bikes are to check my accuracy. Am I the only one confused by the process?
While this might've been a good robot-check ten years ago or whenever captchas first appeared, now it seems needlessly arrogant to assume superiority because we know what bikes are and they don't. We are rapidly arriving at a moment in time where assuming intellectual superiority to robots is not only false, but also betrays our own grave, ego-driven limitations.
So then, if we all know what bikes are and these tests don't really prevent scalping bots (or whatever types of bots might be interested in using Grammarly), then what is the point?
Perhaps it's to give us some impression of control, a suggestion that there is (after all) a limit to what robots are permitted to do in the online world. Perhaps they mean to reinforce that misguided sense of superiority. As long as I know what bikes look like, I am not becoming obsolete.
Seems a little narrow-minded, to me. Besides, absurd. After all, what need does artificial intelligence have of accessing services like Grammarly, a program designed with human-specific errors in mind? I'm sure that's the case for a lot of these websites and add-ons, because in the fields where we're desperate not to let bots "game" the system, it seems we are failing. Bots, we are told, have infiltrated everything from ticket vending to politics and electoral campaigns. Bots have been involved, regardless of what you think or whose side you're on, in most important elections in the past few years.
If this is our best effort to keep the robots (or rather, the clever people behind the robots) from influencing us, we have failed.
And so, I can't help but think (and I know it sounds a little like a conspiracy theory) that these tests are put in place for our benefit alone. It is the act of maintaining an illusion of control in a world that is rapidly spiraling out of it. As I wrote the other day, I think we're advancing at such a rate that it's causing grave dissonance in our cognition. We need to think we still maintain borders, some means of limiting the reach and complexity of technology.
As in the pandemic, war, and any other major crisis, it's paramount to support the illusion that we are (in some way) controlling the chaos. As long as we can understand the narrative, we do not panic, and perhaps in this case, we should.
I'm wondering if, not too far into the future from now, there will come a time when these captcha tests will be in place to restrict us to human-specific areas of the Internet. Because so far, we've thought of it in terms of proving we are NOT robots.
Perhaps it's time, and will be in coming years, to reframe that as proving we are STILL human.
Perhaps that time has come already. After all, no robot worth their salt would spend the better part of an hour clicking bikes and fire hydrants like an idiot for a concert she didn't even want to attend.
There's going to be parts of the internet where we WON'T be able to access BECAUSE we are human. Crazy to think about this, no?