Something’s Wrong . . . 

I’m currently locked out of my bank account.

I’m also locked out of my HR pay and benefits site.

Also my home/auto/life insurance account.

I am not going to call my health insurer to regain access to my account until my current prescriptions expire.

My various online subscriptions are only accessible from one device as I am required to register and remember passwords for each subscription. For each device.

Christ, even my dog food auto-ship is currently suspended.

Passwords are now supposed to have capital letters, lower case letters, special characters, numerals, and be a minimum of 12 characters long.

Don’t use a name, don’t use a country song lyric, make them so nonsensical that you can’t remember them—or type them—consistently.

Often you also have to have a four-to-eight character PIN.

Given issues with browser security and the various patches that allegedly secure our web use, until the next “vulnerability” is announced like an airliner’s crash, cookie and ad blockers, which are the flimsy shields that make the online experience tolerable—and at least complicate the efforts of corporations and our governments to track our every online whim—also foul up the newly “re-secured” browsers and logons.

I am a professional who, though no hacker, has fooled around with computers for years, done Linux and Chrome Beta installations on laptops, hacked a webcam to image Saturn and wired my house for many of the internet-of-things “conveniences” that our online world is supposed to provide.

And online security foils me.

We, the 99% of the internet-using public are daily harassed and locked out of our “online services” to stop the 1%—most often a fourteen-year-old in Beijing, Moscow or Schenectady—who can render any one of us financially naked and ruined within two hours.

And don’t fucking tell me there’s an app for that.

The online experience is becoming much like the ritual humiliation of air travel: we are subject to imaging that amounts to a strip-search and emerge with our trousers falling down, in our stockinged feet, as we fumble with a see-through baggie of tiny hotel shampoo bottles.

And some fanatic is still going to down an airliner with a bomb in his cellphone, or duty-free bottle, or colon.

We don’t ride the railroad, the railroad rides upon us.