The only problem is, these things make me feel more like a trained monkey. Ok, existentially speaking, as an educated human I technically am a trained monkey, but being reminded of that by a security protocol is oddly dehumanising. It also at times makes me feel a little less than educated as I'm totally useless at these kind of puzzles - sometimes they're easy enough, you get a number and some "real" word like "Birthday" to identify... those are nice and friendly and give me a sense of empowerment (for no real reason). But other times you get some nasty distorted-wave text filled with weird punctuation marks and I sit there thinking no monkey (trained or untrained) could figure this thing out. It's nice that they provide the little recycle-thingy that lets you choose another challenge instead, but even that's strangely demeaning, because if you fail to prove your humanity, should you really get a second chance? Real life doesn't work that way, why should computers?
Exactly! Back when boys would be boys, the game used to be Truth or Dare in order to divorce little Sally-Ann from her well-buttoned blouse. That was fine - healthy even - as the rules were clear and the result a reward. That's the perfect test of one's trained-monkey-ness, and Ivan Petrovich Pavlov's little drooling dogs would be proud that I learned my lesson well. (Little Sally-Ann's mum, on the other hand, perhaps wouldn't be so proud, but that's more of a debate about whether God listens more to drooling dogs than to mothers.)Wikipedia wrote:It is sometimes described as a reverse Turing test, because it is administered by a machine and targeted to a human.
And then as the boys got older, we used to somehow have to prove our manhood to our peers by doing everything humanly possible to score with as many girls as possible while our fall-back prom-date was fussing with her well-sprayed hair in the loo. I'm sure there was some logic behind it at the time, but considering most honest lads would just end up lying to their mates about how "successful" they were anyway, I fail to see how that made me a man.
Don't get me wrong, I failed as much as I succeeded back in those days (oh fine, in all honesty I failed more than I succeeded, but who's keeping score anymore?) yet it's the principle of the thing I'm contemplating now.
At least back then we were trying to prove something tangible. Given the tyranny of the Captcha, I'm sitting here now proving my humanity more or less by trial and error - type it in, did it work? No? Try another one - did it work - yay! I win - I mean, how the heck has it come to this? Shouldn't my humanity require a little more than a suspiciously dyslexic reading test to be verified? Instead it just makes me feel used and humiliated and not particularly proud of being human. Rather, I suppose, like little Sally-Ann feels now, were she to look back upon those days herself.
So, I wonder, is the purpose of a Captcha only superficially a security mechanism, masking deeper within a more profound purpose (as a reverse-reverse-Turing test?) can it actually make us question our humanity and our role in the greater scheme of things? Or is it really a test of our maturity, wherein the games we played in our innocence were themselves so demeaning that now we have to pay the piper and just type nonsense strings, like the demented monkeys in old age we really are?
I wonder.
I bet they were invented by little Sally-Ann as a really weird form of psychological revenge.
Wikipedia wrote:It is an acronym based on the word "capture" and standing for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".
