Then came the deeper cuts: childhood address, children’s names, a list of every company I’d ever been “associated with.” Chase was assembling a forensic autobiography before allowing a simple wire transfer that was supposed to take twenty minutes.
Eventually, the agent cleared me. My cancelled transaction was reinstated. I thanked him, even though he’d just interviewed me like a mid-level defector.
Two hours later, the phone rang again. Same department. Different agent. Same script. Same transaction. And then it happened again a few hours later.
By evening, I expected them to ask where I got the radioactive watch hands for the high school cloud chamber I had built for a science fair project. The absurdity became its own fascination, so I did what you do in 2025 when the world stops making sense: I started digging.
BBB. CFPB’s Consumer Complaint Database. The complaints were everywhere—tens of thousands of them. People describing exactly what I was experiencing: repeated calls, interrogations across time zones, and transactions canceled over and over. It wasn’t a glitch. It was a symptom of the same verification theater creeping into everything else.
And Chase was only one room in a much larger maze that was affecting all of us.
The first code arrives before the Keurig finishes brewing. Six digits, “expires in 10 minutes.” Anna glances at it, types it into her laptop, and the page refreshes into a demand for another code. Her phone buzzes. The TV in the living room informs her that her device is no longer part of the approved Netflix “Household,” a polite way of saying her television does not believe she lives where she lives. She calls her brother; he reads her the code—and then gets his own location check. By the time they’re done, the coffee is cold.
Security isn’t the threat. The performance of security is.
Anna hasn’t been hacked. Nothing is compromised. She just wants to watch a show and pay a bill. What began as a simple second factor has expanded into a branching maze of doubts—codes, confirmations, CAPTCHAs, browser hygiene tests—each one treating her like a shoplifter in her own digital life.
CAPTCHAs ask her to distinguish crosswalks that blur into parking lots¹, or identify traffic lights half-obscured behind algorithmic graffiti². The images look like they were curated by algorithms for algorithms: distorted fragments of Street View trained on a version of the world no human recognizes. No one mentions the private humiliation of failing a test designed to distinguish you from a robot.
And the more tightly identity is policed through screens, the stranger the consequences become. A longtime user of a major social platform recently lost access to her entire digital life—photos, messages, work documents—not because she was hacked, but because she failed the site’s identity test. The answers she gave were correct, but not the answers she had given fifteen years earlier. The algorithm trusted its memory of her more than the person herself.
And where screens fail, voices take over.
David hits his breaking point when his bank cancels a $6 corner-store purchase and calls him back “for his protection.” There’s a click, then a voice trying to pronounce his name.
“Hello sir, am I speaking with… Day-veed… Dee-veed… Deevid Jons?”