We Are All Slowly Being Driven Mad

My wristwatch was manufactured in 1945 by the Elgin company in Illinois for the US Army Air Force. I know that because it says so on the back. It has no battery, no software or electronic screen. At 80 years old it manages the remarkable feat of working all day every day, requiring only to be wound up in the morning, which takes about five seconds. I have used it all round the world from Australia to the United States on protracted hikes in high temperatures. It has never failed.

None of this, of course, would once have excited the slightest interest. It only seems remarkable now because we are surrounded by unprecedented levels of unpredictability and unreliability. Yet this has crept up on us slowly and insidiously and it is, I would contend, driving us all slowly crazy.

The other day my 80 year-old neighbour came round with her smartwatch. She’d bought it, she said “in case I have a fall, and then I can call for help”. Great idea, except that the reason she’d come round was because Bluetooth had disconnected from her phone and she couldn’t get it to reconnect.

She was frustrated and upset, even scared. I’ve never dealt with a smartwatch before, but I told her to restart the watch which succeeded in reconnecting the two devices. She was overcome with relief, but I could see the stress she had suffered. However, the whole idea is false security. In the rural area we live the mobile phone signal is very erratic anyway.

Two days later, she was back. She’s bought a new printer. She wants to be able to print from her laptop, tablet and phone. Why, I asked, would you want such a complicated system which, even if I can get it working, will inevitably fall down later?

Well, she did want just that, so I headed round only to discover first of all that she was in a state because her flashy smart TV had spontaneously disconnected from her new internet service. Why wouldn’t it? That required another reboot. As for the printer, its set-up seemed to consist entirely of trying to make her sign-up for a direct debit subscription printer ink service. I managed to circumvent all this and connected it to the Wi-Fi, after which it all worked.

Is this all sounding familiar? The fact is that whereas once learning a skill or how to operate a piece of equipment was useful knowledge that could last for years, even a lifetime, we are now bombarded with apps and programs, most of which are completely different from one another and which change without warning. It is impossible to learn one and sit back. Even worse, they often suddenly stop working.

Even worse still, more and more household devices now come dependent on being operated from a phone app. We, the customers, are having to buy the interfaces and fork out for endless subscriptions.

The whole edifice looks like a massive conspiracy. My wife takes care of the village church. It has an alarm which cost £10,000 a few years ago, paid for by a grant. However, it relies on the 3G signal which has, of course, now been withdrawn. A letter arrived from the alarm company informing her of this and kindly offering to supply – at vast expense to buy and install – a 4G-capable replacement and then signing up for a monthly subscription in excess of £150. In fact there are substantially cheaper replacements, but that’s not the point, is it?

The 4G signal will also probably be gone within a decade or so. Indeed, recently in certain parts of California while touring I noticed that where there wasn’t a 5G signal there was no 4G signal, and if there was 4G it was too weak to carry data. And if it can’t carry data, you can’t make voice call. Back in the day there were payphones everywhere, like gas stations, but they’ve all been removed. Trust me, I know this only too well when I managed to reach a gas station in Florida with a deflating tyre only to discover I couldn’t call the rental company. One of the employees lent me his phone – an act of kindness that without I would have been well and truly stuffed. Yet five years ago it would not have been necessary.

If all this stuff worked, it wouldn’t be so bad, but not only is it unreliable, it’s also the greatest gift to entrepreneurs since time began because they can remotely disable features in your possessions (those are the ones you’ve paid for) and eventually render them completely non-functional. Today there is scarcely any device or appliance you can buy which isn’t susceptible to this.

Since about 2015 cars are especially vulnerable to software-forced obsolescence. Forget the degrading battery in an EV. That isn’t what’ll kill the ‘I wanted to do the right thing’ EV buyer. It’ll be when they wake up one day to find their car is just a metal box containing a battery.

And what about Making Tax Digital? Over the next three years, hundreds of thousands of sole traders and landlords will be sentenced to a potential nightmare of reporting five times online annually – using commercial cloud software (subscription, of course) to store their income and expenses, linked to their bank accounts – to HMRC on pain of automated penalties. What could possibly go wrong? Just everything. And it will. The whole teetering baroque edifice depends on every one of those traders having a secure and reliable internet connection, to say nothing of also having reliable computers and phones, all working and updated and paid for. Incidentally, don’t assume they can dump it all on accountants. It seems many accountants won’t touch MTD clients unless they’ve already done the electronic recording for themselves.

Specific instances aside, what are psychological effects of living in a world where we are totally, terrifyingly dependent on electronic devices and processes that exist in a constant state of flux? They are vulnerable to hardware failure. So was a Ford Cortina, but at least you get your tools out and fix it. Try doing that with a smartphone. They cannot operate without software that is as ephemeral as a fart in a hurricane.

Our entire existence hangs on a thread and our every day experiences are coloured by living on the edge. What will go wrong next? Will my employer be the victim of a cyberattack? Will the phone that I rely on suddenly stop working, or will the app suddenly announce it has to be updated? Even parking a car has become traumatic, the clock ticking while you fumble to read the QR code to download yet another app (assuming it isn’t a fraudster’s QR code) in the dark and rain and then enter your payment details. My solution is that I don’t go anywhere that depends on doing this.

Last summer I noticed my phone suddenly slow down and lose the 5G/4G signal. Then the Wi-Fi connection wouldn’t work. I discovered that a phone system update in the background, which I hadn’t started, had stalled. Nothing would fix it. Even a hard reset failed and then it wouldn’t start at all. I was thousands of miles from home. Luckily, I had a spare phone – carried around ever since I met an Italian in Wyoming whose phone had bust, and he couldn’t find a US phone that would work with his SIM. In went my SIM and the old phone fired up. But how absurd that I have to carry two phones around with me permanently now?

I like to think I’m fairly tech-savvy. I can sometimes apply my 1970s experience to electronics. I once repaired a 486 processor with the clipped-off ends of a staple. But whereas I once felt in control of my environment I know I’m not anymore. Not only is the equipment we have been obliged to make our lives dependent on chronically unreliable – and unreliable like an iceberg that looms unexpectedly out of the dark to sink you – but we are also being locked into endless subscriptions, the money dripping endlessly out of our banks to pay for all this.

One of the great paradoxes is that we ought to feel safer and more secure than human beings have ever done. Instead, we are bombarded with reasons to feel on edge the whole time, one click away from despair and terror. We have maniacs and hacks falling over themselves to tell us the world is about to end, that the flu will have killed us all by the end of next week, and that the country is about to collapse. We have devices in every room and every pocket which might work or might not work, where the absence of an internet connection can paralyse us and even place us at risk of death. The reliance on the internet for landline phone calls or a mobile phone signal is an existential threat to each and every one of us.  

This has crept up on us over the last two decades. In a century the world will be an entirely different place and none of this equipment will exist any longer. What will have replaced it? I’m not sure how much longer people will put up with all this. Will the 22nd century be a world in which everyone has to throw away their devices every five to 10 years, or will a new age of reliability and longevity have replaced it?

Or will we have gone back to the old days? After all, in the Age of Cyberattacks and Flat Batteries, the man with the horse and cart is king.

Not so long back I was walking in a state park outside St George, Utah. We met a large American family and chatted to them. One of their daughters, aged about nine, proudly showed me her smartwatch. “Look,” she said, “if I press this button, the picture disappears and the time appears”, demonstrating the electronic analogue face that shimmered into view. “Look at mine,” I replied, “it has the time on it all the time.”

“Wow,” she said, hugely impressed, “neat!”

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer, with numerous books to his name, mainly on the ancient world. His latest is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys (Abacus 2025).