The Great, Undeniable Value of Paper Trail, Not Purely Digital Systems
Suppose you have nothing but bits on someone else's computer and "word of mouth"...
This past month or so I wrote a great deal about banks and banking in relation to technology and enshittification thereby. Verbal communication goes unregistered, but with verbal communication there's physical access (except over the telephone), so exchanging documentation is both feasible and almost immediate. There are many advantages to physical access, but some businesses don't like it because it's "expensive" (they need to - gasp! - pay staff).
This month we saw a success story for "Luddites" (hi!) who insist on paper trail. Sometimes bankers make mistakes and if there are printings/printouts one can show these mistakes, without having to demand access to the back end of tellers (or equivalents). Moreover, handwritten notes also help track mistakes, then prove them definitively, passing responsibility and liability to the one/s who make/s mistakes, not the one who argues more loudly or more assertively.
Receipts are being described as "bad for the environment" while much greater menaces (to the environment) exist. Months ago Evri tried to replace actual support (customer services) with chatbots and later it stopped issuing physical receipts that serve as proof of shipping, instead asking people for their their E-mail address and sending them a "digital" receipt. That's no good. How is one supposed to get back to a store with physical proof of anything? "I'm gonna send you an E-mail"? Shops don't have E-mail addresses. Especially small shops.
Physical checks and balances existed for many years not just because of a lack of computerised systems; they existed because of convenience. Similarly, in airports, as already noted this morning, what good are paperless or digital or "e" (electronic) tickets if some skinnerbox starts malfunctioning, runs out of battery, or gets stolen? I wrote a lot about this in the past. Going "paperless" has nothing to do with the environment; it's a negligible factor and excuse of negligent companies.
Working on paper has many advantages, including accountability. Without paper/s, businesses can more easily gaslight people, blame the wrong people, and cover up for mistakes of their own staff. Asking them to give you access to their own system (for instance, to refute some face-saving lies they tell) is like asking them to gain access to their own CCTV footage rather than making recordings of one's own.
We need to stop hating paper and in particular paper receipts, paper boarding passes, paper bus passes etc. A lot of this assault on paper trail is an assault on privacy/anonymity, which relates to the war on cash or anonymous travel. The people who promise to rid us of "cumbersome" paper (no more papers in our lives) have another agenda. Paper bills printed and mailed to customers have many functional uses other than proof of address; paper receipts are an efficient ways to handle returns and refunds; paper money helps people purchase things without leaving a digital trail where none is needed/justified. █