Where True Dialogue Begins
MY mother stood at the entrance of a kopitiam last week, staring at a laminated card on the table. No menu. Just a QR code, stark and expectant. She looked at me – not helpless, mind you, just annoyed in that specific way that says she’s been patient with this nonsense for long enough.
‘Why can’t they just give me a menu?’ she asked. Fair question.
Here’s a woman who survived the Japanese occupation as a child, weathered the transition from Brooke rule to Crown Colony to Malaysia, raised four children through economic booms and busts, and managed household finances for forty years without ever missing a payment. But apparently, she’s now expected to fumble with a smartphone – one that updates its interface every six months – just to order kolo mee.
The young waiter, pleasant enough, said: ‘Auntie, just scan with your phone lah.’
She scanned. Nothing happened. Tried again. Still nothing. Her frustration was rising. I could see it in the set of her jaw. Behind us, a couple in their twenties had already browsed the menu, ordered, paid. All within seconds. Efficient. Seamless. Modern.
We left and went somewhere else. Somewhere with actual menus. Somewhere that didn’t require a smartphone, mobile data, and sufficient battery life just to see what’s available.
Later, she said something that’s been sitting with me: ‘I’m not stupid. The system is.’
She’s right.
The Question Nobody’s Asking
Everyone keeps asking: ‘Why can’t older people adapt to technology?’
But nobody’s asking: ‘Why did we build technology that requires constant adaptation just to access basic services?’
There’s a question beneath the question. And we’ve been too busy upgrading our apps to notice it.
Padungan Then, Petanak Now
Let me take you back to 1970s Kuching. You wake at dawn – not to an iPhone alarm, but to the cannon at the Astana firing across the river. Yes, that actually happened. Rajah Charles Brooke’s tradition, maintained to remind workers to bathe before the day began. The city had rhythm. Shared rituals.
You walk to the wet market at Padungan. Not because it’s trendy, but because that’s where life happened. The fish auntie knows you. Knows your mother. Knows your mother prefers threadfin. She’s saved some for you. The vegetable uncle has fresh daun ubi. You touch the fish. Smell it. Haggle over price. Cash changes hands. Done.
You know what you’re buying. You know who caught it. You know their family.
Fast forward to today. Same market – relocated to Petanak now. You walk in. Pull out your smartphone. Check which e-wallet the vendor accepts. Boot up the app. Hope your data connection is stable. Hope the QR code scans properly in bright morning sunlight. Hope you’ve got sufficient battery. Hope the app hasn’t auto-updated overnight and broken your saved settings again.
The fish auntie? Still there. But the transaction isn’t with her anymore. It’s with a payment gateway. A merchant terminal. An algorithm. No conversation. No relationship. Just efficiency.
The question we’re asking: ‘Why can’t older people figure out these apps?’
The question we should be asking: ‘When did we replace social infrastructure with digital infrastructure – and who decided this was progress?’
The Banking Bus and the Broken Promise
In the 1970s, Maybank introduced banking buses. Buses fitted with tellers drove into rural Sarawak – to longhouses, rubber estates, kampungs. The bank came to you.
Then the push for standardisation replaced buses with fixed branches. The service no longer came to the person; the person had to come to the service.
Then came digital-first. The burden of adaptation shifted entirely onto the user. The 73-year-old grandmother who managed a passbook for fifty years is now stranded without a smartphone and a data plan.
We once solved for inclusion by taking services to people. Now, we demand people become technologically proficient. Which system was truly more inclusive?
From Trust to Transactions
1970s Kuching had what economists now politely call ‘relational banking’. Your local Chinese merchant knew your family. Knew your character. Credit wasn’t based on a score computed by an algorithm in some distant server farm. It was based on knowing you.
If your family hit hard times, the shopkeeper extended credit. Not because of collateral or credit scores. Because he knew you’d pay when you could. Because reputation mattered. Because communities held each other up.
Today? We’ve got more choices than ever. Online shopping. Next-day delivery. Algorithm-based recommendations that know what you want before you do. But zero relationships. You’re not a customer anymore. You’re a data point. A target demographic. A conversion metric on someone’s quarterly report.
Your grandfather’s shopkeeper knew when you were struggling and extended grace.
Does Shopee?
The Pattern Nobody’s Noticing
Look at the timeline:
1955: OCBC became the first foreign bank in Sarawak. It adapted to Sarawak. Not the other way around.
1970: Banking buses. Services came to people.
1981: Malaysia’s first ATM at Maybank Ampang Park. A tool that added convenience without removing human service. You could still walk into a branch. Still talk to a teller. The ATM was an option, not a mandate.
For over a century, services adapted to humans.
Then suddenly – around 2010 – we flipped the script. Now humans must adapt to services. And if you can’t keep up? That’s your problem. Your failure. Your obsolescence.
The Stoic Question
Marcus Aurelius wrote: ‘If it’s not right, don’t do it. If it’s not true, don’t say it.’
So let me ask: Is it true that apps are more convenient for a 67-year-old who never needed them for 67 years? Or is it convenient for corporations to eliminate staff, reduce overheads, and shift the burden of adaptation onto customers while calling it “digital transformation”?
Is it right to design systems that exclude the generation that built them?
The Dao teaches that the best technology, like the best government, should be invisible. Wu wei — effortless action. You shouldn’t notice it because it simply works.
But we’ve created the opposite: technology that demands constant attention – updates, passwords, two-factor authentication, notifications, error messages, troubleshooting, customer-support chatbots that can’t actually help.
This isn’t wu wei. This is friction disguised as progress.
The Real Question
Your grandmother’s generation successfully navigated more structural change than any in history: from Brooke rule to digital revolution, from pre-electricity longhouses to e-wallets.
So the question isn’t: ‘Why can’t Boomers use apps?’
The question is: ‘Why did we build a world that excludes the generation that built it?’
Progress or Profit?
We’re not advancing. We’re creating problems that require expensive solutions we can profit from.
Nobody asked for QR code menus. Restaurants wanted to cut costs – eliminate printed menus, reduce staff – and told us it’s about “hygiene” and “convenience”.
Nobody asked for mandatory banking apps. Banks wanted to close branches and eliminate tellers. So they did, and called it “innovation”.
Nobody asked for everything to become a subscription. Companies wanted recurring revenue.
The question beneath every question: Who benefits?
What Now?
Next time someone asks, ‘Why can’t older people figure this out?’ – stop them.
Ask instead: ‘Why should they have to?’
Your mother, who managed a household for forty years without a smartphone, has nothing to apologise for. It’s the system that requires her to scan a QR code just to see a menu that needs fixing.
The real digital divide isn’t between those who can and can’t use technology.
It’s between those who’ve stopped questioning it – and those who refuse to.
The Practice: This week, before you update another app, pause. Ask: Who does this actually serve? Not who it claims to serve, but who it truly serves.
That small question – that moment of resistance – is where dignity lives.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
