Please Log onto Our Portal
Imagine getting a letter in conventional mail which announces that there is information now available to you, but to get it you will need to drive to an office located in a strip mall. That, in effect, is the email I got from Apple earlier today:
Of course I clicked on the link and jumped through the identification process—at least twice but at some point you lose count—to find out that, for those curious, the refund had indeed been granted.
Now, the refund was a small one, but it’s for a subscription that I never signed up for and which is not listed in my subscriptions elsewhere in Apple’s portal. That is, I have no way to unsuscribe from this subscription, and so I believe I am doomed to request a refund every month for the rest of my life.
I noted this in my refund request, but there appears to be no other way to address this issue in Apple’s online infrastructure. And that inability is important.
I have already written about the inanity, and the ubiquity, of portals. What I did not point out in that piece was all the things that portals will not allow you to do, and if the portal does not allow it, if the infrastructure the institution has imposed upon your interactions with it does not allow it, then you cannot do it.
Think of all the times that you wanted to initiate a response to something you purchased on Amazon: the product works, but it breaks when used this way and it would be nice to report that to someone. Only you can’t because there is no option for that kind of report.
All of this is made worse, of course, by the fact that messages issued by these infrastructures begin with noreply@, so the ability to engage in any meaningfully direct way is barred across all possible points of entry.
This isn’t the fault of the technology. This is the fault of the implementation of technology. It is, to some degree, part of the larger enshittification process that Cory Doctorow has been writing about. (His personal site is CrapHound, if you would like to read outside the Medium galaxy.)
