Is it Really So Much Better Now?

Thoughts on the machines and food delivery, while stuck in a McDonald's (Again),

The weather for walking has not been good!

(I will finally be in Duluth from Wednesday the 4th until Saturday. If you are around, come to Roscoe’s Pioneer Bar Thursday evening from 7-11 and say hello!)

I’m writing this from the same McDonald’s I wrote my last piece from because my flight to Duluth was canceled.

I did get on the plane, which left the gate, then sat on the tarmac for an hour waiting to get de-iced, then sat another hour waiting to take off, then waited another hour to find a gate to return to because of bad weather, then waited another hour in the airport for a new departure time, before being told it was canceled and that I might be able to get a seat on the next evening’s flight, which given every seat was taken on my non-flight flight I really doubted I would, I gave up and rebooked to leave this Wednesday.

Boarding the flight to nowhere

It was a long frustrating day made more comical when my commuter train back to South Chicago was stopped between stations for two hours because the train ahead hit a car at a crossing (no injuries thankfully) and didn’t get back to my room until close to midnight, without having eaten anything all day because I won’t pay twenty bucks for a cold mushy airport kiosk sandwich, no matter how hungry I am.

I spent my post-cancellation hours trying to talk to a human at United, any human, to make sure I got a refund, as well as to rebook at an appropriate rate, but failed to do that because the app kept sending me to an AI text help line, and wait times for a human voice were absurd.

The whole annoying experience, of confusion, fighting the app, getting texts from a computer, getting error screens as often as not, was especially warranted, in a you really jinked yourself way, because that morning I'd confidently proclaimed flying was as good as it's ever been.

I’d been karma-ed, although in a way that I’d acknowledged as the major flaw with our current system.

Here is my tweet:

I’ve been flying internationally and locally for fifty-five years and it has never been safer, as convenient, and inexpensive as now. A lot of what gets thrown into the “it all currently sucks” label is that a lot more people are doing it, including the plebes, so everything is more crowded.

The process all works rather smoothly though, until it doesn’t, and when things do go wrong, the “personal connective tissue” is lost, and the process immediately becomes far more frustrating, inhuman, and maddening.

Because of how staffing works (crew time limits, distant online centralized support, overstretched logistics because skimping on costs), you get passed from person to person, each rather helpful, but nobody with the full information on what you went through.

So you’re left in a maddening digital ping-pong game against apps and voices in some call center somewhere, when all you want is some physical person who knows exactly what is going on and can give you some sense of competence.

In the last few months I’ve been arguing modern life, especially technology, is actually great, although it has flaws, and so to put some meat on the bone this loss of “personal connective tissue” is one of the primary, and fixable, flaws.

I addressed this before, when I had my last bad flight. To quote myself, again (sorry),

… we passengers were herded from crew to crew to another incoming crew like disoriented sheep … placed into the hands of next crew … who have little knowledge about what happened before.

The memory of what you have endured is gone. The only recourse to that memory in the system is the bureaucratic (go to the app or phone line) and everyone hates that because it is unresponsive, and the person on the other end rarely has more information than what is in a spreadsheet.

This bureaucratization isn’t unique to air travel. When I posted about this after my flight, I received responses saying they felt the same way about modern medicine, where you are passed from doctor to doctor. Which might make sense for costs, and even perhaps effectiveness (I doubt that, but I’m open to be convinced), but makes one of the most stressful times in someone’s life somehow even more clinical and dehumanizing.

So much of the modern world makes you feel like a widget on a conveyor belt, as our fetishization of efficiency has begun to corrode our souls.

When people rage against the machines, this is a lot of what they are frustrated with. That you are a commodity in a network of apps, phone holds, and confusing websites. We have offshored the personal, and people, a deeply social animal, aren’t built for that.

I have been thinking about this expanding sterility after a blood test discovered I had an elevated PSA and needed a prostate biopsy. That test, done in a fluorescent-lit lab in a shopping mall that I had to schedule myself online at the instructions of a doctor, was the start of a process that processed me, efficiently, but with little warmth. Each person I dealt with — doctor, blood technician, nurse, health care administrator, another doctor, intake administrator, more nurses, anesthesiologist, pharmacist, outtake administrator, and then finally the doctor again — was helpful and thoughtful, but my time with each was limited, and it was clear I was another number to be dealt with, stamped, then moved along.

I encounter that same dehumanizing efficiency every morning, as I did today, when I order my two McDonald’s lattes from their app, a clunky process of tiny words on tiny screens that irritates and stresses me no matter how many times I do it, because of all the pop-up questions (no I don’t want a hash-brown with that, yes I’m sure I have the correct location) and because I’m doing clunky data entry work for them that used to be done face to face, and with a little moment of warmth.

That I don’t have to do it that way, but still choose to because I appreciate arriving with my order already filled, is perhaps why I think modern life is better than not, but I’m not oblivious to the downside, and I understand those with different temperaments can come to a different conclusion.

We have a culture of hyper efficiency and efficiency isn’t the only metric of a fulfilling life. While you can choose to opt out from a lot of it, certainly from ordering food online, you can’t so easily, or at all, from other essential parts of life — like medicine, work, education, and even finding a partner in life.

Cultures, even those with many choices, can be suffocating because it is the water we swim in and swimming against the current is harder done than said. Yes you can go your own way, but that can be exhausting, isolating, and consequently come with a different emptiness.

This growing “corrosion of the soul” isn’t simply a result of increasing technology, but of how we have chosen to use technology, which isn’t only to replace dangerous and repetitive work, but to also try and replace human interaction. To reduce them down to programmed rules that can be done by a machine. That is a mistake, because while machines might be far better than humans at interacting with and transforming nature (plowing fields, erecting buildings, digging for metals, etc.) they are not better at interacting with other humans.

They are unable to replicate the nuance of face-to-face interactions with scripted procedure. Algorithms, no matter how many branches they have, don’t have the flexibility that a fully socialized human has — they don’t come with that sixth sense of knowing when someone’s pleas reveal a deeper concern, or someone’s momentary anger isn’t reflective of who they are but of the situation they find themselves in. Computers might be great for a highly scripted process like flying a plane, but not for the impossible-to-script process of comforting a person.

The un-scriptable part of what makes a human is what people think of colloquially as the soul, and it is why apps, computers, spreadsheets and AI, can never replace humans when it comes to dealing with other humans, although we might try to make them. It is why so many feel trapped by the machines, rather than freed by them from the hard drudgery of life, because we are trying to make machines do something they shouldn’t be doing. You can’t, and shouldn’t, efficiency away the human touch.

It is in Weber’s language, disenchanting, and I agree with the critics of modernity that a fulfilling life requires enchantment.

Nowhere is this trade off clearer than at the end of life. The machines have certainly extended lifespans, and reduced physical pain, and everyone should be grateful for that. Yet the idea of your final moments here on earth being consoled by a computer, or a grief app trying to replicate a person, rather than a physical person, is abhorrent.

At the rate we are going as society, attempting to reduce costs while maximizing approved scripts (by the therapeutic industry and health care bureaucrats) the science fiction scenario where your last breaths are spent not around physical people, but rather a simulacra of past family and friends—imbued with software mimicking emotions—isn’t as far-fetched as it once might have seemed, and is justifiably terrifying. An end-of-life app, which walks you through a series of questions, before suggesting you take a dose of pentobarbital (delivered to you within the hour) to kill yourself and end your suffering is no longer an absurd parody from a dark dystopian book, but a non-trivial possibility.

Computers simply can’t be trained to navigate the impossible-to-code nuances of emotional comfort. Even attempting to describe what a human brings to that scenario versus a computer illustrates the problem, because the differences stretch the ability of words.¹. Almost everyone is rightfully disgusted at the notion, but trying to articulate exactly why is close to impossible. There is so much you can’t capture about humans, and how we interact, and what we value, and how we process the world, with spoken language (that which is beyond the material), and so it is even more so with programmed machines.

There is something beyond us, and in us, that we know but can’t describe, and that is central to who we are.

Thankfully modern life still has a lot of soul and enchantment left in it. By the end of my five hours trying to fly to Duluth, I’d made five friends who wanted to show me around their town whenever I eventually make it there (this Wednesday hopefully).

The bar I wrote about last week, and where I spent some of my evenings killing time since, still has that. Killing time though is unfair, because I met a lot of people, witnessed some unique moments (the gaseous guy obsessed with darts was not one of the more enchanting ones).

The McDonald’s I’m writing this from has it as well — such as the elderly gentleman, half Black half Choctaw, next to me waiting for his car to be fixed, who calls me Mr. Chris while telling me how great life is because he has been gifted five children, ten grandchildren, and entry into the Muslim faith, and decades of clean living, thanks to an epiphany in a South Chicago bar one distant Christmas Eve, the details of which he can, and does, recount in flowery and precise language.

Or the staff — I don't order from them at the counter, but I know almost every one of them anyway. Humans still seek connection even when their jobs don't require it, even when efficiency says it's unnecessary.

That is why I write so often about McDonald’s, and about poverty. Both are great illustrations that the human soul is impossible to destroy. McDonald’s because it shows community is immune to whatever is thrown at it, existing in spades even in restaurants originally designed to be about efficiency, and poverty because it highlights that the soul isn’t about material wealth

It is why I will always be an optimist, because the machines can never destroy the soul, no matter how hard we try. Humans are resilient, and enchantment is like the carpet too big for the room. You might try and push the bump down in one part of the room, but it will always pop up somewhere else.

Food Delivery Culture versus Eating Out

A recent New York Times article caused a fuss online, mostly from people my age confused, upset, and even outraged by how much money Americans now spend on food delivery.

It set off a flurry of debate about why so many economically struggling Americans would spend so much of their salary for the luxury of having someone drive food to your door, when it is much less expensive (and healthier) to cook your own meal.

The answers ranged from it being due to simple idiocy (and that is the polite version of what was said), an educational deficit in cooking and economics, to it being an understandable choice given people’s time constraints and what they value.

I tend to fall in the middle—cooking, and nutrition, are skills a lot of younger Americans haven't learned, and if you have gotten to the age of twenty-five without them, learning becomes immensely intimidating, expensive, and initially unappealing.

My first six months living alone (at fifteen—long story) I was dependent on Campbell’s Chunky Beef soup (uncut by water) poured over egg noodles, a cache of spaghetti sauce in coffee cans my mom had left in the freezer for me, TV dinners (with the lemon muffin that always maintained a frozen center), and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It was not the best entry into culinary self-sufficiency.

With delivery now ubiquitous, it is easier to keep delaying learning how to cook and never climb the steep and close to inedible educational curve.

My other contribution to this debate is having traveled extensively in Asia, and seen how often people in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Indonesia, eat out, rather than cook, so much so that their kitchens are usually very small, relative to the U.S., even adjusting for home size².

That is because there is an abundance of inexpensive and delightful street food/casual dining establishments (carts, izakayas, takeaways, food courts, night markets, etc.), that make it a rational, and healthy, choice.

They have the infrastructure to support this abundance — mixed-use zoning allows all sorts of shops everywhere, including in the ground floor of people's homes, health codes are less onerous so the barrier to entry to selling food is lower, far less red tape in general to opening a restaurant, higher density, better public transport.

So most everyone has tons of inexpensive options within several blocks.

This includes family-run restaurants, where the mom/dad cooks, the dad/mom manages, and the ten-year-old daughter is the waitress. This model limits employee costs, while allowing the entire family to build capital. While you still see this approach in a lot smaller immigrant-run U.S. restaurants (Mexican most notably), the idea of having a beer served by an eight-year-old isn’t something I think the authorities would look very kindly on.

We don’t have that plethora of nearby choices to eat out in the U.S., so the remaining options for many younger people is to finally learn how to cook (hard), drive to the strip mall X miles away (tiresome), or DoorDash it (expensive).

Why don’t we have the infrastructure to support a greater abundance of prepared food? That is a deeper issue I’ve addressed before, particularly in regards to the differences between the U.S. and Europe, but it basically comes down to our culture of independence.

We want our privacy, so our policy emphasizes the centrality of the individual home, rather than on thriving public spaces, and so our home ownership model is the democratization of the English lord’s mansion, where everyone has their own mini-mansion.

One of the things you do in your mini-mansion to highlight your success is eat home cooked meals.

That last part, eating a home cooked meal, is changing and the transition has been clunky, and rather than address other issues (limiting red tape, increasing density, less strict food safety requirements, implementing mixed zoning) we have outsourced it to a car-centric delivery model.

Which fits perfectly with our democratized mini-mansion model of home ownership — with DoorDash guys reeking of weed, dressed in basketball shorts and printed tees, zooming in their souped-up Accord to bring you your food, rather than full time servants dressed to the nines.

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PS: I promise I’ll get back on the road, and more conventional walking the world posts soon. If this cold weather ever lets up, but certainly by March 1st, when I leave for six weeks in Asia, including Seoul, Qingdao (China), Taiwan (walking South eastern coast), Okinawa, and maybe a few more places.

Until then, stay warm!

1. My analogy is physics and the many-body problem. We are great at describing through math two physical bodies interacting, but not three, four, five, and certainly not 10,000. Those are not solvable. So we switch to statistical physics, which is very powerful in a predictive sense, but leaves a lot unsaid and much swept under the carpet because it is not understood, and can never be.

2. You still get an immense amount of delivery (especially in newer Chinese cities because they have pivoted to having far less mixed use zoning and the CCP sees the old model as representing a poor unclean past they want to move beyond), but again, eating out is still pretty common!