inquiry

Something in the general vicinity of this happened to me in the Amazon (online store, not the river) realm the last month or so.

Basically, I somehow became a “prime” member without realizing it, and thus of course without knowing how I managed to do that, and then went through degrees of hell twice attempting to become free of it for not needing/wanting it.

Rendering a much longer story short, I'm no longer convinced that – all things honestly considered – online shopping is more efficient and/or trouble free than brick-and-mortar excursions, which for me is especially troubling given the latter at least somewhat benefits my local economy.

So I will most likely never again “dick around” – i.e. shop – Amazon, including having to navigate their increasingly burdensome product pages, not having my password accepted down their increasingly hidden “contact us” path (EVEN after having just reset the password via their “Forgot your password path?”), being bothered by ongoing questions from other customers about products I've purchased (shouldn't there be at least SOME compensation from Amazon for providing that service on their behalf?), and so on, and so forth.

And I'm increasingly feeling similarly about most online “services”. I'm tired of the advertising, tired of the tracking, tired of having to incessantly answer the goddamned “cookies” question, tired of having to create gobs of email aliases to have control over most likely receiving gobs of unwanted email in the future for having simply tried an online “service”, tired of having to manage all the accounts/passwords, tired of realizing that deleting an account probably never means a company having utterly discarded my information, tired of customer “service” becoming a disingenuous joke at best, etc., etc.

There's a John Lennon song coming to mind called “God” that I could easily rewrite to be called “Internet”, complete with a laundry list of internet “features” and/or “benefits” I no longer believe in – and also ending with the words “the dream is over...”