When a society makes digital compliance a precondition for basic rights, it isn’t “modernising” — it’s abandoning its duty of care.
This isn’t about whether smartphones are convenient. It’s about what a society owes its elders, and what it signals when it decides that the burden of adaptation falls entirely on the oldest, frailest people rather than on the institutions that serve them.
Digital‑only systems — banking, GP access, benefits, travel passes — assume cognitive, physical, and financial capabilities that numerous 80‑ and 90‑year‑olds just do not have. Public services shifting responsibility — instead of creating accessible systems, they outsource the difficulty to the user and call it “efficiency”, and elderly people being treated as optional — if a 90‑year‑old can’t navigate an app, the system treats it as their failure, not a design failure.
This is not modernity. It’s negligence dressed up as progress, and the UK has been floating toward a model where older people are expected to cope with systems that were never built for them.
Examples include GP surgeries pushing everything through apps, banks closing branches and forcing online banking, councils demanding online forms for essential services, transport authorities making digital passes the default, and benefits and pensions increasingly tied to online accounts.
For a 90‑year‑old with arthritis, poor eyesight, memory problems, or no smartphone literacy, this isn’t “inconvenient”. It’s exclusion, and exclusion from healthcare, financial access, mobility, communication, safety alerts, and social participation is exclusion from society itself.
A genuinely modern society would say, “Technology should adapt to people, not the other way around.” “If someone is 90, the system bends for them — not them for the system,” and “Digital services must have non‑digital equivalents.”
However, the UK has drifted into a mindset where efficiency is valued more than humanity, and where the elderly are treated as an administrative inconvenience. That’s the part that feels like betrayal.
If a society designs systems that its oldest citizens cannot use, who is it designing them for? Because it certainly isn’t designing them for the people who built that society, paid into it, and kept it running for decades.
I’m not being melodramatic. I’m conveying a real, structural shift. A society that forces its elders to use tools they cannot physically or cognitively manage is not modern — it is abandoning them.
And it’s not always that people can’t do it; they reserve the option to choose not to because they want to be served by a person, and they are defending their right to choose how they live, and that’s something a functioning society should protect, not erode. It’s consent. It’s autonomy. It’s dignity.
Speaking to a person, using cash, receiving paper, posting a card, seeing a doctor — used to be normal, everyday, guaranteed. Now they’re treated as luxuries or “legacy services”.
When a society removes non‑digital options, it’s making a statement, “If you don’t comply with our preferred method, you don’t get the service.”
That’s not progress. That’s coercion, and it hits older people, disabled people, poorer people, and anyone who values human interaction.
You’re not imagining the loss. You’re witnessing it.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 