I Know How Civilization Ends
I know how civilization ends: it ends with portals. Not the fun kind where you stick blue and orange ovals onto surfaces and jump through but the web kind into which you are endlessly dumping your data, your time, and your energy.
I draw this conclusion after a period of travel in which I had not only to wade through my own organization’s portal but another organization’s portal. And I had both applied for a few jobs as well as submitted recommendations for students and colleagues, and I was portaled out. Some organizations were renting their portal from the same vendor, and so it would both recognize me and not recognize me.
The 4th level of Dante’s Inferno requires you to enter your information via a portal, one which endlessly insists that you are misspelling your own name.
It’s not clear to me how much value portals bring to any organization except the appearance for management of “having done something.” This kind of check-box-ism is, of course, the first and last resort for the kinds of managers who can slow a good organization, trip a decent organization, and flock to bad organizations, who, being bad organizations, cannot discern between good and bad management.
So far as I can tell, when it comes to portals, the logic of such management appears to be “the more the better.” And hapless employees are then forced to sign onto and off a variety of portals just to get the basics done. One portal for travel management. Another for travel reimbursement. Another for health records. Another portal by the health insurer. Yet another by the hospital or medical provider. A portal for training. Yet another portal for performance evaluation.
None of these portals talk to each other, and so the chief task of the employee or patient appears to be to enter the same data over and over and over again all while juggling multiple login identities and a variety of password parameters — this site requires symbols; this site rejects symbols — and captchas — because who hasn’t fulfilled their lifetime quota of clicking on tiles that contain fire hydrants?
