Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are asking the question, is digitization making everything worse? So there's a great scene, and I don't want to be too blue, but there is this great scene in the movie Office Space where Michael Bolton who has my favourite name in the movie, his name is Michael Bolton, but he's trying to use the fax machine; it's like a constant running gag in the movie and he yells out and he says, “PC LOAD LETTER?!, what the "F" does that mean?” And that's the reason for the thumbnail. It's just an example. Now that I know that's kind of from the more analog world and I know if there are any young ones watching this video, they will probably say, "what's a fax machine?"  but the point of it is I love in Office Space how they show this exact phenomenon I'm going to talk about which is how all of these conveniences and all this tech, all it really does is just add to your general level of frustration that you deal with every day. 

I thought of making this video after actually reading three comments on a prior video we made pertaining to E-Visas. First comment was: “What is an E-Visa, never heard of it, I thought I heard it all.” And then the next person said: "Technology making life worse for ordinary people.

Then somebody else said: "Not for you."  I don't know. Comment sections are sometimes interesting. My staff actually spends more time in them then I do but yeah, I thought that, "technology making life worse for ordinary people." – Yeah, I mean that's all I've been seeing this last year, especially since the rollout of bringing in all this OECD nonsense, and the World Economic Forum meeting with then Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and what did we get? We just got, "oh now you have to have Biometrics associated with your banking”, all kinds of just extra layers.

Now we have E-Visas, which as I have discussed in other videos, have proven to be more cumbersome to deal with than in the past. It's just a kind of never-ending spiraling, frustration, feedback loop, compounding with non-accountability from the bureaucracies that you are dealing with because they use these sort of digital front ends as like I don't know, a screen to hide behind basically. It's just, I'm not seeing the benefits coming out of this. 

That said, while I'm making this video, I think it's important to point out, we just hit 40,000 subscribers on this channel actually. Within about a day of me making this video. So I wanted to thank everybody that is a subscriber. Thank you very much. I never in a million years thought that this channel would have subscribers like this. If you can go back and watch the original videos, I'm just a guy that had the equivalent of public access television and just started making videos that I thought could be useful for expats. Obviously, there is a promotional element, but also for expats and folks wanting to go to America, but yeah, I can't believe it; 40,000 subs. 

While I'm talking my game I guess, it might be worth pointing out my better half and I set up a restaurant here in downtown Bangkok. It is American Diner style food, breakfast anytime as the name implies, Pancake Palace. We also not only have American breakfast, we also have a good English breakfast on the menu and we also now have some tacos. So if you feel like tacos, we have got tacos. We've also got chilli bowls, buffalo wings, cheeseburgers, hamburgers, all kinds of good American Diner style food. Grilled cheese sandwiches, if you're interested again check us out. Come on down Pancake Palace, links are in the description below. 

Circling back to the main point of this video I guess, I don't just mean to rant to just rant, but again that comment, "just technology making life worse for ordinary people", that seems to be just the running theme of all of this especially in a government context, and I'm not just singling out Thailand. The US system, especially in Immigration, everything that has been digitized, I can remember the system before the digital conversion, it worked better. You could deal with somebody. You called up somebody and said, "hey what's going on with this case?" "Oh we have got an issue with this." "Well, what do you need?" "Okay. I'll give you that."  "Cool."  Moving on. Now you have got to go through the system, and it's not even dealing with the system, it is you have to learn how to access it and each different component piece of the US Immigration process has a different digital interface that you have to deal with, with a different passcode that has a different key code login - blah, blah, blah. Again I have compared it, I have called it Neo-Soviet; I still stand by that assessment. That being said, we will be dealing with it for a while and will keep keeping you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.