We’re giving up power over our lives to people we can’t control

I felt angry, but more than anything, I felt powerless.

All I was trying to do was set up an account with a new company that my suburb had contracted to pick up our trash. The service provider has changed several times in the 11 years I’ve lived in my house. I normally just start getting a bill from a different company, but it didn’t work that way this time.

The new provider was a large national company. I saw its new trash containers show up for all of my neighbors, but mine never came. When I called the company, I was told that my phone number matched a local address that I’d never heard of. The only choice I was offered was to pay the bill for that address.

When I called from my office phone, I was sent straight to voicemail and nobody ever called back. When I called the city to ask for help, I was told to call the company. There was nothing they could do.

There is no local office for the company — and nobody would return my calls.

I went for months without trash pickup. Nothing changed until a different company took over the contract. I now have trash pickup again. It feels like a huge win that they’ll at least take my money.

This entire mess is just one tiny incident in a growing collection of ways in which I feel I’ve lost control of my life — in big ways and tiny ways — to faceless companies, indifferent bureaucrats and bored gatekeepers.

These people have more and more power over my life. I’m feeling powerless.

And I’m angry about it.

There have always been petty annoyances in life. (And major irritants, too.) But it was often easier to deal with the problems in the past.

More and more of the things in our lives are automated. We are treated like nothing more than another bit of digital data. We have to conform to whatever ridiculous procedures have been put into place. And to add insult to injury, the cold and impersonal message from the system tells us how important we are to a company or agency or platform.

And we know — from the way we’re treated — that it’s a lie.

When we have problems with a service provided by a large national company, we often call a phone number and sit on hold for an hour — while a cheery recorded voice repeatedly tells us how much the company values our business.

If I have a problem in most retail stores today, there’s little I can do about it. If I can even find a manager, I’ll typically be told that I can submit a complaint on the company website as “feedback,” but it’s clear the manager doesn’t care.

If I complained about something in the grocery store where my family shopped when I was in high school, I would be speaking to a manager who worked directly for the owner. If I complain about something in the grocery store closest to my house, I am complaining to someone who is about 12 management layers away from upper management — somewhere in Arkansas. It’s a pipe dream to think anybody local might have met one of the family shareholders.

About five years ago, Twitter suspended my account for a rules violation that made no sense. I appealed and the suspension was immediately overturned. But my account was never unlocked. No amount of complaining ever got the attention of a soul at the company. I had to abandon the account. (I even tried again after Elon Musk took over, but my messages were still ignored.)

Facebook and Instagram treat me like an employee, telling me that I should be posting more of certain types of “content.” In the past, Facebook has banned me from posting for several days, because I had allegedly posted something offensive — but nobody would say what I posted that was offensive or against any rules.

We’ve slowly turned over power to companies and platforms and bureaucrats who we can’t control. We were told that it was more efficient to deal with a huge company that could provide lower prices. That was true, but we didn’t consider the tradeoffs. We didn’t know that a company that was started by a man with a homespun idea of customer service would eventually be run by beancounters who didn’t care about customer service.

Online, we were sold the idea that it was an advantage to use large platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit. We were told that this was better than having to have our own distributed platforms — such as websites — that we had to manage. And that was true, but we didn’t realize that we were giving up control to people whose incentives were completely different from ours.

More and more people are feeling powerless.

They know they can’t control their government. They know they can’t fight the big companies that control much of their consumer life. They know they have to accept whatever the online platforms give them.

I think this is why people strike out in angry and irrational ways about all sorts of things. I’m not going to be more specific, because if you disagree with me about which public outcries are irrational, you’ll angrily go away. But we can agree that the public is acting irrationally, even if we see different groups reacting in different ways to different issues.

When you see people eagerly supporting populist politicians who promise to “fix everything,” it’s because people are angry and feeling powerless and don’t know what to do about it. They’re ready to support anyone who makes promises that can’t be kept — because they’re angry.

There are some things I can’t control. I understand that. But I do believe I can do a better job of choosing who gets my business and which digital services are worth my attention. If dealing with a company or organization leaves me feeling powerless — and I have a choice in the matter — I need to make different choices.

I believe this feeling of helplessness is growing. I think more and more people have a desperate need to feel control over their own lives. They want a sense of agency again.

I fear it’s going to explode at some point and I fear the results won’t be pleasant for anyone. But we’re so far down this road that I don’t see how things can change.

I don’t see how we can regain the power that we’ve slowly given away — the power to control our own lives.