A recent supermarket run provided an eerie portent of a future in which the real world breaks down while the digital world takes on the veneer of a solution.
The grocery store may not inspire thoughts of dystopia in everyone. But recent trips to my D.C.-area supermarket have provided a glimpse of a possible bleak future.
The Covid-19 experience accelerated many ongoing trends toward digitization and mediation and away from the physical and the interpersonal. Many of these trends persisted in some form after that experience went extinct, as Christine Rosen, AEI fellow and National Review and Commentary contributor, made clear in her recent book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.
One such trend is stores’ removing the human element of their service. Rosen writes about the cosmetic company Clinique, a pioneer in making its makeup counters as free of human interlocutors, and hence interactions, as possible. “Carry a Clinique browsing basket and we’ll leave you alone. Promise.” Its “Clinical Reality” service went even further during Covid, allowing customers to take pictures of themselves and get product recommendations without having to go brick-and-mortar.
D.C. has had two versions of this kind of shopping play out for grocery stores. The superficially utopian-seeming version was the Amazon Fresh store, where you could walk in, pick out what you wanted, and leave, not just without interacting with a human, but without so much as even swiping a credit card. I never went in one; they are now defunct.
The more dystopian version, however, is probably here to stay, and I experience it regularly at my local grocery store. Many stores in the Beltway have responded to the rise in shoplifting by placing products behind locked glass doors. Getting what you want requires alerting an employee, who will then retrieve the desired product. This in itself is a depressing concession to the reality of a breakdown in law and order. From a Luddite’s perspective, though, it still offers benefits by involving human interaction.
But at least one chain of stores has gotten around the pesky human element. My recent discovery is that you can now use an app to unlock some of these items yourself at its locations. Just give your number to a prototypically HAL-looking console, accept the assurance that “your phone number will be used solely for the purpose of processing this merchandise” and “will not be used for any other purpose,” and you’ll receive the access code momentarily. What’s to stop you from getting other things, or someone else from getting in when you have the door open, is unclear to me.
Also unclear: how this method knew to trust me, or could prevent criminals — who, like everyone else these days, surely have, or can procure, smartphones — from unlocking the doors and taking advantage of a five-finger discount. Rosen, with whom I discussed this experience, offered an unsettling theory: The process of generating my access code actually tapped into a wealth of digital information about me attached to my phone number, information that allowed the app, run by the company IndyMe, to trust me. Perhaps, having just completed a book on the takeover of modern life by technology, she is just conditioned to being paranoid about such things. But perhaps not.
Regardless, the combination of a breakdown in civic order, a response to said breakdown that takes for granted that it will not be undone, and a response to the response that accelerates the digitization of human life is enough to induce some measure of despair about the future.
Other evidence about the last trend, especially, abounds. Sticking to D.C.: Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney has noted that both Nationals Park and the Washington Zoo now force customers to have tickets on their phones. By far the most ridiculous example is one I spotted while running around D.C.: port-o-potties that require an app for use. Maybe they’re clean; I wouldn’t know, as I’m one of those nutjobs who runs without a phone. So I’ll never be able to use one. And I think I’d refuse on principle now anyway.
It’s all more than enough to make me sympathetic to the diagnosis offered by Claire Morell and Brad Littlejohn in a recent National Affairs essay:
Society is dangerously near the point — and indeed for people in certain contexts and careers, has passed the point — where individuals no longer have any meaningful choice but to buy a smartphone to participate in the everyday activities of life.
It’s even enough to make me ponder with interest some of the steps Littlejohn and Morell advocate governments take to ensure that the digital does not totally swamp the physical.
Maybe you’re lucky enough to live in a place that, unlike D.C., has not been forced by its failures in reality to resort to technological workarounds that only accelerate our atomization. But it’s unlikely that you have escaped entirely from technology that “has transformed many human experiences not by banning them, but by making certain kinds of embodied experiences, such as face-to-face communication and other unmediated pleasures, less and less relevant to daily life,” as Rosen puts it.
One thing that makes resisting this so challenging is that many of these changes don’t just seem convenient — they are. Going about my day today, I took advantage of several. Perhaps my belief that some technology has its place makes me a hypocrite. But I still believe in drawing lines. And I still think that the friction inherent in reality is important. If you agree with Rosen, Morell, Littlejohn, and me that the physical and the interpersonal still matter, then you might have to be more intentional about preserving them than you expect. Otherwise, a digital dystopia that begins in the grocery store won’t end there.