Essay
I wake up at night because I want a snack.
I call the car to take me to the nearest grocery store. It’s close but not close enough to justify a walk at night. No biggie, since the algorithm down-charges folks between 12am-3am.
I get in the car and it greets me. No one is there to greet me. I miss the days of the humans struggling to make small talk. The awkward moments of talking to a stranger you will never know, and never see again. But you do it because it feels weird not to. You force yourself to connect, even for those fleeting moments. I don’t know, I miss that.
The car ride is set to the “Silent” option, but since I didn’t pay the premium subscription service, there are ads that play at every stoplight. It gets quite annoying but you eventually learn to tune out the noise.
The car comes to a stop in front of the grocery store. As I leave, someone else gets in the car. They barely wait for me to step out or acknowledge my presence. There’s no smile or acknowledgment and definitely no waiting and holding the door. It’s all just…cold. The car speeds away ferociously, uncaring about its temporary protection of my vessel.
I walk into the grocery store, the overhead lights burning into my brain and removing any traces of sleepiness I had. I navigate to the snacks section. No, listen to me. It’s not a random section I made up that I label as “snacks,” an idiosyncratic generation to instantiate the relationship between myself and a foreign place. I literally mean a section labeled Snacks that the grocery store created due to high customer demand for those specific products. They know that because the algorithms for the app that grants entry in the grocery store told them. They also, through the app, track all your movements within the grocery store, and figure out the highest-traffic areas (for you and in general), where things will subconsciously catch your eye even if you literally aren’t looking. I feel as if they track me outside the grocery store, too, but I cannot prove it.
They are out of my favourite snacks. It’s literally impossible since this is a really popular brand. They must have some in the back. But there are no human workers walking around at this grocery store. It’s all automated, a 24/7 convenience that provides anyone at any time the day (with the app) access to fresh food. Since there are no humans, they can keep the store open for longer, and push more product, and make more money.
Okay but now who do I talk to? How do I get my snacks? I’m not going for the recommended options the app is pushing me. It sees that I’ve gone to my regular section, not seen the product I’ve always bought, and calculated I’m frustrated so it chose to push similar items. No thanks, fuck that! I want what I want.
I press the Contact Us button that joins the ever-increasing queue to speak with a worker. I just wanted my snack, man. Now I have to struggle with all this social interaction. Where’s the convenience in this? I’m looking around at everyone else shopping while I wait. The dazed zombies with the same idea as me, executing it with a similar drone. They want no part of me, or the store, or themselves in some way. They are fulfilling the mechanisms of the Machine (and they don’t even know it). Fools.
Someone responds. Finally, the hunger pangs are becoming ferocious. They ask how I’m doing, if I am enjoying the service. They thank me for my eight months on the platform, my 65 trips taken. The numbers unnerves me but I push the feeling away because I just want to get my snack. So that is what I tell the person. Well, I don’t really know if it’s a person. They sometimes switch out the person and the bot. They just keep the wait times because it gives an illusion of getting to an actual human. You will honestly never know if you are having a conversation with a Being or a bot. They say that it’s because their technology is “that good” but I always found it strange that deception was something to make better.
They tell me that there is a human in the back that will bring out the snack I want. Strange, but great. They solved my problem. I close out the app and it asks me to rate the service out of 10. I close my phone because I don’t want to.
I am trying to stay off my device and just wait for my snack. Where is it? What is taking so long? I look at the time. Three minutes have passed. Is that too long or not long at all? I don’t know. I haven’t had non-near-instantaneous service in months. The friction of this interaction feels so sterilizing. I am forced to observe like a camera. I see store properly for the first time. The chaos of the perfected aisles and layout. Designed to harvest and extract. I see the plastic city we’ve created and suffered from. I see the shrinking organic section. I always wondered why it was shrinking. Was it because no one was buying it because they were addicted to everything else or because no one had the money to buy it? I also found it funny that we paid more for foods that killed us slower. That our life force has become commoditized.
I hear some rummaging, a shuffling of feet that didn’t resemble one of the other drones around me. A shorter fellow came out, holding my snack. He walked straight towards me, and in an almost perfected motion, without breaking eye contact, gave me my item, smiled, and walked away. Before he turned around, he winked at me. It was so smooth, his entire ordeal and aura. Like he had practiced this a thousand times before. A movie character.
I can still remember his eyes. Blue and dull. For the moments he looked at me, they seemed to light up just a little bit. His face had a bunch of wrinkles, so he couldn’t have been anything below 40. He reminded me of Joe Pesci.
I just stared at him walking away. Thinking about the interaction. He chose to have that moment with me. He knew that the cameras were watching and so he couldn’t make small talk, otherwise he would be taking away from his other duties and might have been fined. He also knew that they were watching his smile, eye contact, and other body language markers to make sure that their bottom line didn’t get touched. If any of those things he did resulted in me not buying my item or coming back (an algorithm would be making that decision), then he probably would be fired.
So I walked out of the store, snack secured. The app automatically paid for me, and applied a 13 cent discount for the inconvenience of having to wait eight minutes. So they think my time is worth that much? Or that little. I wonder if they also took the 13 cents out of that guys paycheque.
I stood outside on the corner, waiting for my car to take me home. I realized I never said thank you to him. Who am I? Who are we? We didn’t say one word to each other, and for what? Because corporate interests dictated the terms of our interaction? Since when did we care so much about that? Since when did we put these non-biological, non-sentient forms over one another? Why? For money? For status? What does that give us if we lose ourselves in the process?
The car came and I walked up. In the backseat window, I saw someone shuffling to get their things, and in a moment of intuition, I grabbed the handle and pulled it open—for them. It was a girl, and she seemed offended and rolled her eyes. When I didn’t get inside right away, she looked back and smirked at me. I smiled back. The car began to play the routine chime of “Please exit the vehicle for the next customer” when you’re taking too long. As she got out, she made eye contact with me for a second before saying a low, “Thanks man!” and walking away.
The car took me home and I walked inside my unlocked apartment since the buildings app knew when to unlock the door as it tracked my phone’s proximity. I shut the door and it locked as I walked inside the living room. Back to automation existence, I guess.
Finally, I ripped open my snack. I engorged myself for a few minutes, and then put the bag down and walked to the bathroom. I looked in the mirror. For the first time in a while, I really paid attention to myself. I saw my eyes, my own wrinkles, and my own smile. I felt alive for the first time. I stopped being on auto-pilot and began to feel the friction of existence. It was uncomfortable but it felt good, like getting into a pool. It’s cold and it sucks until your body gets used to it. Because it’s not a foreign thing. It’s just a temporary change of state. And it’s good for us. It’s good for me. For the first time in a while, I remembered who I was; what I was. I smiled, at myself, and then I began to practice my wink.