Mastodawn

Mark Tyndall 4d ago

Capitalism has broken.

You're not aware of it until you put in your weekly online shop of a Friday morning. It all works fine until you come to pay, and then the spinner spins indefinitely, neither accepting not rejecting your card details.

You cancel and try the payment via Apple Pay instead. The same thing happens.

"Wow. Some programmer at ASDA is in hot water", you think to yourself, as you head to Sainsbury's site instead with a tired sigh. Why does everything not work so frequently these days?

Only, Sainsbury's site does the same thing. Fuck. Your heart sinks. Must be a bank problem.

You load up your banking app, and click on the chatbot which is what passes for customer help these days. "Online payments not working", you type, tersely. You jump the usual hoops -- no, the card isn't expired, yes, you're using your correct CV2 number.

"Please wait while we check the source of the issue," the bot relents. Then: "hold on, this is taking longer than usual." And: "thank you for your patience while we continue to check the source of the issue". You leave the app open, and make yourself the second cup of tea of the day, wondering what you can put together for dinner with what little you've got in. Tuna pasta bake it is.

The chatbot stops responding. You reload the app, ask to chat to a human instead. "We are experiencing an unusual load", it informs you. "We will aim to message you back within six hours."

Capitalism has broken. It cut too greedily, and too deep. Bots are programming, bots are manning the help desks. Nary a human to be seen, to be accountable. The system has chugged to a halt.
1/4

You turn to the socials, and learn it's not just you. It started overnight-- a few scattered payments started to stall, and then more and more frequently. At a certain critical point, the entire system ground to a halt as it tried to cope with endless timeouts and retries.

"Why every payment system is affected", reads an article posted by your techy friend Jen. It's some arcane verification module deep within Google. "That's bizarre", reads the first comment. "I don't even have an Android phone!"

Ah, but everything is interlinked, these days. So many steps, so many parties desperate to get a finger in every pie. Once upon a time it was a customer, a merchant, each party's bank, and a single intermediary managing it. Now nobody can tell how many steps a transaction's going to go through.

"You'd have thought if there was anything capitalism wouldn't break, it'd be taking money off people," another comment reads. "Shut up and take my money"; the meme with Fry from Futurama.

Ah. But it has. Capitalism breaks everything, eventually, even capitalism.
2/4

"A fix is imminent", the press release from Google says; "we've got our best programmers on it."

And they have. But the programmers in question have never touched this system before. It was vibe-coded on the cheap by a contracting company which has since dissolved. All the function names look helpful, but do something slightly different to what they claim.

A simple rollback to the previous version of the code was the first suggestion, of course. But the last deployment was a month and a half ago. It was working fine, until it wasn't.

"We could just rip this whole module out," someone suggests. But it needs to correctly encode the TLA details in the WTF wrapper, otherwise everything five steps down will break. And none of this is documented anywhere.

Do they continue trying to trace the source of the problem, or do they just rewrite the whole damn thing? Tensions are rising. Management is throwing a fit, obviously, and the programmers are not immune to the affects of the outage themselves. They have friends and family-- some of them vulnerable-- who are starting to worry about how long they'll have to go without vital goods and services.
3/4

Capitalism is tearing itself apart, with stunning speed. Many businesses close down early. Some try to stay open, taking paper money for payments, recording transactions manually. But there's a shortage of cash to go around-- ATMs hold such a small float these days that they're cleared out in short order, and who has more than fifty quid stashed away in an envelope for emergencies?

Prices begin to skyrocket, and it's barely past noon before the first reports of looting begin.

You decide not to go into work this afternoon. Because yes, you can just about scrape together enough physical change for the bus, but can you trust that public transport is going to still be running by the time you need to go home?

You consider of the paycheck that your work issues every month, incrementing figures in your bank account. Figures which today are rendered abstract and useless, without any way to turn them into actual currency. It's all a mirage, you think giddily, all of it.

You start to wonder what you might barter, and to whom, for tomorrow's dinner.
4/4

Ellen (hiatus)5d ago

@Tattie I can’t tell if this is a live/subtoot or a hypothetical...

@Starry1086 sorry, oops, I guess I'm pulling a bit of a War of the Worlds here.
It's near future speculative fiction. 😅

@Starry1086 however Debenhams did just decline my transaction, which inspired the whole thing...

Ellen (hiatus)5d ago

@Tattie Aha…makes sense. Good luck with the purchases…

Vic 🇪🇺4d ago

@Tattie @Starry1086 *eyelid twitches* fiction, yeah, right *starts sweating*

Danny Garside 5d ago

@Tattie
I thoroughly enjoyed this - thank you!

You might enjoy this story: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/11/anyway-the-wind-blows/ by @Edent

Anyway, the wind blows

Finding the root cause of an incident will always come to a dead-end at some point. We can use various investigatory techniques to ascertain why a part failed or who installed it incorrectly, but that doesn't get to the heart of the systemic failures which led us here today. This has been a time-consuming (and some would say futile) effort, but I believe this sort of analysis is vital. Here is …

Terence Eden’s Blog

@Tattie @dalias Maybe those folks stockpilling food cans, frozen food & dry beans had a point.

@lispi314 I make sure to always have a few days worth of beans, tuna, pasta, just in case.
Started when Brexit rolled around, and the world has continued to feel low- to high-level unsafe since then.
@dalias

@Tattie @dalias I'd already been doing it mostly out of laziness (grocery shopping is a chore), but the pandemic very neatly switched that from "lazy preference" to "safety requirement".

Efi (nap pet) 🦊💤4d ago

@Tattie considering the recent mass power outage here, and how nobody went looting, nobody went hungry and public transport workers doubled down on their duties to get as many people home as the gas they had allowed... this hits oblique, grazing, not quite, looting and chaos is what the cpitalists expect because they can only think about the immediate gains

@Tattie this is so accurate I first thought it was a recounting of an experience x3

Electropict 5d ago

This has been my month. Can't make any online payments now above £20 because no payment method I've used hitherto will work without confirmation phone messages and it seems BT's new digital phone line now blocks them all. The BT box also rejected our DECT phones last week and I can no longer reinstate them by logging in to it. Apparently to manage your BT landline now you need a *mobile* phone (or pad?) capable of running a BT app.

Guess who's not going to be a BT customer soon...🙄

@electropict I'm sorry to hear it!
I was stunned a few months ago when my mobile phone went on the blink and I found myself cut off from any ability to pay for things-- I couldn't order a new mobile phone apart from anything else! I had to get my late wife's mobile phone up and running in order to fix the problem.

@Tattie The funny thing is that anyone dealing with frequent power outages will have already complained about the removal of card imprinters and other manual transaction methods.

That train crash was a long time coming.