The Dystopian Present
This isn’t even going to be about politics. This is about phones. In the past year, I’ve stepped into a caregiver role for my dad and his husband. This is sort of against my will. I never intended to be even remotely helpful — we had been estranged in recent years — but my dad’s cognitive impairment and his husband’s physical challenges have left them unable to deal with most major life issues, including finances. I’ll skip ahead to the most recent challenge.
They got a new debit card a couple weeks ago. It was supposed to stay in Patrick’s possession but he was in the hospital. While the wallet was at home, my dad used the card to buy something on the Apple App Store. A few days later, I got an overdraft message from the bank. Somehow, my father had incurred over $340 of in-app purchases in a week!
On Friday, I visited to take Patrick to a doctor’s appointment and took a moment to look at my Dad’s iPad. There were at least two hundred apps on it, most of them solitaire and three-match style games. There were also lots of apps called AI Cleaner or similar vaguely helpful but definitely fraudulent programs.
The first thing I did was go into the Parental Controls and turned off Allow In-App purchases. Then I looked in his Apple Account settings. He had downloaded dozens of apps multiple times. There were 27 identical solitaire apps, for example. I went to the subscription page and, sure enough, there were several dozen subscriptions for “app cleaners” that cost between $2.99 and $19.99 per week. He had even subscribed to the same ones several times. I unsubscribed to everything and deleted all those apps off his iPad. Ditto his phone. I also deleted a lot of games but since he does play them, I left quite a few. Then I went back into the Apple Account settings and disallowed him to download more apps.
Why is this legal? And why does Apple allow apps to be downloaded multiple times, charge in duplicate, or allow identical apps to flourish (if that’s what is happening — I can’t tell)? I know the answer is A) Congress lacks the will to pass any meaningful legislation whatsoever and B) Apple makes so much money from this that they have no incentive to monitor their app store in any meaningful way.
When I told Brook this whole saga, he pointed out that if we had known there was a product that would defraud us, lower our self-esteem, destroy our attention, make our work available to us 24/7, cause extreme social anxiety, and even promote suicide, we would never have let that product into our lives. Instead we structure our lives around making sure this product is charged and available at all times, store all our private information in it, and sell our attention to the highest bidder.
Aside from its obscene length (1079 pages) and the font-size of its voluminous endnotes (388 endnotes in 10-pt font, some of which have their own footnotes), a challenge of reading Infinite Jest was imagining what exactly people were so fixated on that they could not break their gaze, eventually dying (of laughter?) for want of food. I wonder no longer; David Foster Wallace clearly envisioned the iPhone and iPads we’re all addicted to.
Hopefully, this particular problem is solved for this particular parent. But take a moment to open your Settings > Apple Account (its at your name at the top) > Subscriptions and make sure you really want to be paying for those apps. If you want to turn off in-app purchases, go to Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions (turn that on) > iTunes & App Store Purchases. Then you can decide if you want to allow download/delete/in-app purchases.
Or take your phone to the nearest large body of water and throw it as far away as you are physically able.
In other news, I finished a first draft of my novel! I’ve been working on this off and on for a few years but the Northern California Writers Retreat that I went to last month gave me the final push to keep it rolling to the end. What happens next? Well, no, you can’t read it. I am going work on revising it for a few months, and then it’ll be ready for “beta readers” to give me feedback. Then revise again and maybe THEN I’ll see about getting it published. I’m not going to worry about that now. No one is going to steal this idea and publish it themselves because, frankly, this story has been told a hundred times before. People love an apocalyptic road trip, though, right? So someone will like it.
Have a great week!