I am Account Number
I am Account No. 327-94-33AT, and I would like a word with your computer.
Frustration with computers may be familiar to us now, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s it reached a new level.
The general public was aware that computers, or “mainframes,” were impacting their lives, but they had little recourse and no access to their own information within computerized systems. Which isn’t far removed from the present, actually, considering search engines, social media, and AI.
It’s interesting that the man wielding the sledgehammer doesn’t give his name – he’s simply a number in the eyes of the computer.
The cartoon is from the book (with accompanying CDs of image files), The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, by Robert Mankoff and David Remnick, 2004.