Remember when “real people” meant “human beings”, not a chatbot?
The good old days! Meanwhile, Adobe, the maker of Photoshop (now just one of many applications among a growing and massive catalog of products that have less and less to do with empowering artists and more to do with empowering surveillance capitalism), has become just another corporate behemoth with buggy applications, subscription services that sneakily lock features behind additional charges, and useless support; just another corporation that puts more effort in to monetizing our data (which people need to understand is all opaque to us; we are not able to know what data they even gather, and who they sell our data to) than anything else.
While attempting to resolve an issue with Lightroom sync taking hours to days to finally sync up new photos from my mobile device, an outstanding bug widely reported in the Adobe “support” forums for years now still without a fix, I foolishly and naively attempted to get support from an actual human being. What an idiot, right? So I did find this helpful link tucked way down at the bottom of their support pages, implying I could get actual human support, and guess what? It leads to a chatbot. Yep.
Notice under Contact Us, where it says “Real help from real people”? Well…. clicking “Start now” just opens up that automated chatbot. Yep. I did finally manage to get the chatbot to understand I wanted actual human support, only to have it tell me to type out all the details about the issue I am experiencing, then only to pop up a message saying they are, wait for it, busier than usual and please be patient. And I don’t need to tell you whether or not I actually ever heard back from a human being, do I?
How did we get here? Did it all start with the advent of ATMs? ATMs at least did seem to provide an actual positive step forward - no longer were you constrained by the availability of a teller in the bank. If you need cash at 11 at night, you can get it. If you are nowhere near your bank, but need cash… you can probably find an ATM nearby. This was good. This was a step forward. It has certainly changed the way I travel - I never bother getting cash in the local currency ahead of time, as I will just get cash from an ATM in the airport after landing. This is helpful. This is a step forward from having to wait in line at the bank, getting traveler’s checks, or getting a huge wad of cash that you then had to exchange at your destination country after waiting in another line at a cash exchange kiosk.
Then pay at the pump arrived. Again, need gas while the station is closed? Yay! It is possible now! But this may be where things started going awry: it was great to be able to get gas 24/7, but a trend started at some point in time of “inconvenient” human employees being thrown to the curb. The good old American greed kicked in: wait, so we do not have to actually pay people to handle these transactions? So… what other customer support activity can we eliminate humans from, who get sick, who get cranky, who actually expect a paycheck and erode the bottom line?
And now we have hit the apex of this technical “solution”, where even if you DO want to actually speak with an actual human, it simply is not possible. Often this is by design, as a cost-cutting measure. Why pay customer support agents when you can just have a bot running twenty-four hours a day that never calls out sick and does not expect a paycheck? Then you can giddily tell your shareholders how much money you saved by laying off all your customer support agents, and viola, stock goes up, and that is all that matters anymore. And you can get that bigger, sleeker yacht now!
It is a sad, sad situation. Makes you wonder if capitalism is not all it is cracked up to be, no?