Jonathan Kamens 86 47 in Elk: "Watching my wife struggle to ..."

Watching my wife struggle to do something on a banking app that I did on the same app with no trouble just a few days ago, I am once again reminded how difficult it is for people who don't grok computers to function in the modern world.
I am also reminded that I personally am incapable of empathizing with people who don't grok computers. "What's the matter with you?" I think to myself. "Why can't you do this simple thing?" I can't seem to truly internalize that it's not simple for them.

August 17, 2025 at 12:58:29 PM

I used to think if I didn't help my wife with IT stuff, she'd figure things out on her own. I eventually figured out nope, she would do what so many people do: find inefficient, suboptimal ways to do things so as to avoid needing to interact with computers. But increasingly, that's not even an option: it's the computer or nothing.
My wife isn't stupid or dumb or incompetent. She's smart and talented. She just thinks differently. Lots of people do. They are being left behind.

This thread is me posting through it instead of going to therapy to do something about the immense frustration I feel every time I try to help my wife with anything computer-related.

Seriously, the issue in this thread is why I think

are a ticking time bomb. Most people don't understand how they work, or that they're linked to a single device, or that they need to maintain a backup login method. Websites that support passkeys don't do enough to communicate and enforce good habits. If we continue down the passkey path, people losing access is going to be a much bigger problem in the future, and we're not ready for it.

I suppose it's a bit ironic that I'm posting this thread in the fediverse, where the percentage of people who don't grok computers is far, far lower than IRL.

This thread is also about infosec practitioners who insist on telling random infosec-naive people that they should be using a VPN all the time, when the user experience of using a VPN is absolute shit because of how many websites randomly block people who are on a VPN, often lying to them about why they're doing it.

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I see from the replies that I need to expand on what I mean here because people are asking the same questions / raising the same objections over and over. One 500-character post is not really enough to get into all the intricacies, so it's going to take a few posts for me to explain what I was getting at.
I am not saying passkeys are less secure than passwords. They are much more secure in the normal workflow. A vast improvement. I share the hope that they will eventually replace passwords.
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