Analog and Digital Challenges

Rastinews — I am trying to get an appointment with a doctor. I try to reach the practice by phone. The answering machine says that appointments can only be made online and gives the relevant address. I go to the website. Various questions appear before me: "Do you want this?", "Do you want that?" But my need does not exactly match any of the options offered. It falls somewhere in between. And the system has no such in-between field. I cannot proceed without checking one of the predetermined options. Since there is no option that fits my need, I cannot get an appointment either. I call the practice again. The answering machine plays the same recording and directs me to the same website. The website sends me to the phone, the phone sends me to the website. I keep going around in the same closed loop. I hit a wall. When I finally reach a secretary, they say they understand me too. They even find what I've explained reasonable. They accept that I need a doctor. I am right, my need is real and my request is understandable; but I still cannot get an appointment. Because even the people who are responsible for granting appointments do not have the authority to grant them. Overcoming the obstacles placed between me and the doctor becomes harder than reaching the doctor itself.

In modern society, being right does not mean obtaining what is rightfully yours

A person's request may be considered reasonable, their need may be acknowledged, they may even be found to be in the right about the problem they are facing; but none of this ensures the problem gets solved. For this reason, many of the incidents we encounter in daily life keep turning into an ongoing experience of injustice. A person can be victimized even while trying to do an entirely ordinary task. Getting an appointment, changing your seat, correcting a bill, or explaining a transaction that was carried out incorrectly can turn into a struggle lasting hours. Modern society turns into a community of people who are all in the right yet still end up victimized. Because the person facing us usually agrees we are right, too. The official at the airport agrees, the secretary agrees, the customer-service employee agrees. But no one can solve the problem. Thus the two sides facing each other stop being one right and one wrong. Both sides are left helpless before the system.

What I actually want to say is this: we live in a world that claims to make everything easier, while at the same time leaving people radically dependent and helpless. The system promises us convenience. "You no longer need to call," it says. "You can complete your transaction with a few clicks." But when your problem does not fit the options the system offers, moving forward becomes nearly impossible. Convenience only works if your request is standard. The moment you deviate even slightly from the standard, the system stops functioning. There is no one to whom a person can explain their trouble. The problem cannot be solved, and the person keeps circling within the same closed loop.

Those Whose Story Is Taken Away

Here another difficulty arises: in order to understand what the system wants from me, I actually need to already have prior knowledge of how the system works. Questions appear before me, but sometimes I don't even know what the question means. Understanding which option to select requires one kind of expertise, while grasping why that question is being asked requires another. Moreover, the system usually does not provide this knowledge; it behaves as if everyone already knows the concepts, categories, and the logic behind the procedures being used. Thus the system, which was built with the aim of making things easier, creates a strange paradox: you are expected to do the work yourself, but no one asks whether you have the expertise required to do so. In the past, you would explain your problem to an official who knew this information; they would translate your everyday language into the institution's language. Now this intermediary translator is being removed, and the citizen, the customer, or the passenger is expected to be their own clerk, secretary, and advisor at the same time. The convenience the system promises can thus turn into a new form of helplessness.

What's more, in the forms filled out online, questions appear that have no direct connection to the actual appointment or the transaction we want to carry out. What is presented as convenience can thus turn into something more than just speed and practicality; it can become a system of classification, surveillance, and data collection. If you don't follow the path they want, if you don't give the answers they have determined, you are cast out of the system. The options seem to have multiplied; but in reality you are only allowed to move among pre-prepared answers. First option, second option, third option… You have no opportunity to give your own answer. In this way, stories are slowly being drained out of our lives. Yet human experience is mostly not made up of options; it has a course, a time, a context.

For instance, a person wants to tell the doctor something like this: "While I was walking down the street, a pain suddenly shot into my back. It started right here. Then it moved toward the back of my neck. After a while it settled into my shoulder muscle and stayed there." Even pain has a story. It moves through the body, changes direction, sometimes disappears, sometimes reappears somewhere else. But the system usually does not ask you for this story. It asks, "Where is your pain?" Back, neck, shoulder… You have to choose one. "How severe is it?" You are expected to give a number between one and ten. "How long have you had it?" You enter a date into a box. In this way, a lived experience is broken apart and turned into a set of data points. Illness stops being a story and becomes data.

The problem, of course, is not data itself. We need data. The problem is that data completely takes the place of the story. Because categorization is also a form of restriction. The system determines what you will be able to say before you even say it. It decides, in your place, which part of your experience is meaningful and which is unnecessary. Perhaps one of the things we lose here is the freedom to narrate. A person is not merely a being who chooses among options; they are a storytelling being who links together what happens to them, builds cause-and-effect relationships, cares about details, and gives shape to their own experience. When you eliminate the story, you do not simply clear away unnecessary details; you also narrow a person's right to construct the meaning of their own life.

And here is what is strange: as the system offers us more options, it creates the feeling that our freedom is increasing. Yet sometimes the sheer number of options conceals a decrease in the freedom to answer. There may be a hundred boxes in front of us; but if what we want to say does not fit into any of those hundred boxes, then we in fact have no option at all.

Not Fitting Anywhere

When your need does not fit among these options, the system does not recognize you. Because in the eyes of the system, you exist only to the extent that you can be classified. If you do not match any of the pre-prepared categories, your need becomes invisible as well.

In this process, part of the information we provide also turns into economic value. The information taken from us is not used only to carry out the transaction; it is stored, classified, and cross-referenced with other information. In this way, even a simple transaction like getting a doctor's appointment can turn into a process that increasingly forces a person to provide more information.

The person seeking a service simultaneously turns into a source that supplies data. While the system serves us, it also renders us usable for its own purposes.

The Address of Anger

I go back and forth between the doctor's answering machine and the online appointment system. After a while I slam the phone down in anger, then shut my computer hard. Because there is no person in front of me I can talk to, to whom I can explain my trouble. My anger does not come only from being unable to get an appointment. My real anger comes from being unable to find someone to whom I can explain myself. But my anger no longer has a clear address either. It scatters within the system, grows vague, and disappears. I try to be angry at someone. "You made a mistake here," I am told. I get angry at the secretary. "I'm not responsible, I'm trying to help you," they say. They are right. I apologize to the very person I was just angry at, and even thank them for trying to help me. I get angry at the doctor. When I think about the doctor's working conditions, they too seem more in the right than I am. I get angry at the healthcare system. Then someone mentions people elsewhere in the world, for instance in a village in India, who die without ever having seen a doctor in their lives. This time I begin to consider my own anger shameful.

In the end, I get angry at "the system"

But this thing we call "the system" is also strange: a faceless structure that takes shape differently in everyone's mind, and whose exact beginning and end no one really knows. The moment I say "the system," I remove what I'm experiencing from the world of personal relationships, and distance it from any human being. There is no longer anyone left whom I can confront, talk to, object to, or hold accountable. And it is exactly here that anger returns like a boomerang. Maybe it is I who made the mistake, I start to think. Maybe I misunderstood the question. Maybe I checked the wrong box. Maybe I searched for the appointment under the wrong category. Maybe I failed to behave the way the system wanted. After a while I begin to become convinced that the questions are correct, the categories are correct, the procedure is correct — and that I am the one who is wrong.

This is exactly what is strange: a person sets out with an entirely legitimate anger at the start, but by the end of the road, they feel guilty, incompetent, wrong, and at fault. Everyone, one by one, turns out to be right. The secretary is right, the doctor is right, the official is right, the institution is right. Hundreds of legitimate reasons can even be found for why the system works the way it does. But in the midst of all this rightness, the problem I am experiencing still remains unsolved. In this way, the outside world toward which the anger was directed slowly disappears. The anger can no longer reach a demand, a request for change, or an addressee. Unable to go outward, it turns inward. "Why couldn't I manage it?" "What did I do wrong?" "Why can everyone else do it while I can't?"

Perhaps this is one of the strangest experiences of our age: that despite being so clearly in the right, we ultimately keep feeling that we are the ones who are wrong. At the point where we lose the address of our anger, criticism of the system easily turns into self-criticism, and helplessness turns into a feeling of personal inadequacy. And in the end, while the problem is still sitting right there, the anger is left with us. Being right yet being victimized… Being unable to move forward… Getting stuck somewhere… And on top of that, not being able to find a real address for the anger that one's own victimization creates. When anger finds no outlet outside, it accumulates inside a person. After a while it turns into something that becomes the person's own burden, weighing on their body and spirit. But anger does not always stay inside. Sometimes a person creates other victims in order to escape their own victimhood. Unable to reach the place it was truly angry at, the anger turns toward people who are closer, more reachable, and often weaker than itself.

Someone who feels defeated at home, at work, or in other areas of life can come home and yell at their child. Someone who is constantly humiliated, devalued, and squeezed by the system can threaten to kill a complete stranger in a parking-space dispute. Someone who is not given a chance to speak all day long refuses, in the evening, to give that same chance to someone they consider weaker than themselves.

In this way, a structural problem turns into a horizontal conflict. Anger that cannot be directed upward flows sideways and downward. People begin to live out, with one another, the conflict they could not live out with the system. As the true addressee becomes invisible, anger goes looking for visible and reachable targets. This may be why everyday life hardens so easily. Part of the tension that accumulates in traffic, in the supermarket line, in the parking lot, within the family, or at work cannot be explained only by the small incidents happening in that moment. A person sometimes reacts to the one in front of them not only because of what that person did, but under the weight of all the helplessness they have been carrying for a long time. The person facing them unknowingly becomes the bearer of an anger that has accumulated elsewhere. Another possibility is that the anger never manages to come out at all. In that case, anger takes an auto-aggressive form; the person turns it against themselves. They blame themselves, belittle themselves, wear down their body, and exhaust their spirit. The objection that should have been directed outward turns into an attack on the self, on the inside. In this way, we get stuck between two possibilities: either we pass our anger on to those weaker than us, or we direct it at ourselves. In either case, the real problem stays exactly where it was.

Perhaps this is exactly one of the moments when systems are at their most powerful: when people fail to see the structural victimization they experience as a shared issue, and instead either mistake it for their own personal inadequacy or turn it into anger against one another. Because at that point, the system stays outside the discussion, while people begin to make each other and themselves pay the price for the helplessness it has created.