Digital (quote unquote) Progression

I decided today that I would like to try and see some gigs later in the year, and decided I would watch the Arch Enemy and Eluveitie show at the Hammersmith Apollo.

So, I went to buy the ticket online, and, after the £1.50 processing fee was added onto the existing price of the ticket...

It said that delivery was only via Eventim.App.

And, somehow, that the delivery fee was £2.50.

Two problems. One, I don't have a smartphone that I can do that sort of thing on - my phone doesn't have a lot of the dependencies installed that make modern day apps work, and it suits me well generally. I don't want to lug my smartphone around with me everywhere. I don't want to have an app for everything I do. I want a good old-fashioned paper ticket.

Two, somehow, they've decided that, even though you can only get your ticket via the app, that (which is, I note, just the transfer of the odd few bytes) costs £2.50 to do, somehow.

It's amazing for the company. They get to save themselves the cost of... e-mailing tickets (itself not substantial) and letting people print them out as they please, and in return they get £2.50 free.

Well, it sucks then if I can't see the gig. I really would have liked it.

I'll email the help desk and see if it's possible to book it any other way, but it's just a shame.

People just say oh get with the times, and all that, but essentially it is the addition of something completely extraneous for no benefit. For instance, the telephone, when first invented, actually offered a good benefit. Previously it was not possible to talk to people at a distance; then, it was. Modern day "technological progress" appears to be a lot of taking things that were already possible (like booking tickets to shows - a thing that has been possible for several thousands of years now), and adding more requirements and dependencies (in this case, a device costing several hundreds of pounds, plus a particular configuration of software) to it, making it less reliable (apparently the app has reliability issues - I have never once had a "reliability issue" with a piece of paper that has the ticket printed on it) all to be able to ... provide tickets to a show. I don't want to "get with the times" when "the times" is evidently inferior to what came before.

When evaluating modern technology, I think it's important to try to distinguish between things that repackage existing possibilities in a shiny way, and those that genuinely improve the quality of life. I think they are fewer and fewer nowadays, but they must still be out there.