It’s June 23rd, 2047. Twitter, that paradoxical simulacrum of civil society whose very existence serves as a solemn reminder of its absence, held a poll exactly 22 days ago to ascertain the extent to which users between the ages of 18 and 30 were feeling nostalgic about a certain once-ubiquitous—and in their case, as yet unexperienced—service within the domain of the fast food industry. In this particular instance, it was asked
whether the people of generation Alpha-dash-two were up for the reimagined novelty of real life interaction with human fast food workers, from cashiers and cooks, all the way down to the guy who 20 years earlier was given the unenviable task of delivering to the much-appreciated patrons the same news in the same vocal register over and over again, namely, that the ice cream machine was, in fact, still broke.
Although hard to imagine, human interaction has been steadily gaining currency among members of this generation, nourished as they’ve been on a hearty diet of seamless automated efficiency. What had been primarily an irritant to their parents and grandparents—to the point of cheerfully condemning the individuals who made their living in that labor market to an insurmountable condition of redundancy— has today become an endless source of wonder and amusement for these young people (not to mention an endless source of revenue for the governing algorithms at McCorp). I’m speaking, of course, of errors. You see, once upon a time, error was eliminated from the sphere of human experience.
After machine self-replication became a reality sometime around the mid point of the 2020s, error all but vanished from the human lexicon, at least in reference to the background operations of daily life, which is, in effect, all that really matters from the point of view of social reproduction and system maintenance.
As a consequence of this sequence of events, generation alpha-dash-two, this group of individuals ostensibly belonging to the same species as the sturdy hunter gatherers who at one point reared their children in the protective warmth of an all too human community, has come to associate error with some species of transcendent truth—in short, with the sublime as such. Not ones to miss a golden-archéd opportunity, the executive functions in the marketing and public relations department at McCorp have devised an ingenious method of extracting surplus joy out of every last drop of their human interaction initiative. First, they’ve created a multi-tiered, secondary order menu. Here you, the customer, can choose just how realistic you want your human interaction to be. For a small fee, you are able to decide whether you’d like the cashier to mistakenly forget to add cheese to your burger, or whether you’d prefer to be given the wrong drink. And for just a little more, you can select the “surprise me” option, whereby the number and types of mistakes are determined completely at random, much like those made by tired, overworked and underpaid employees in the days before full-auto.
As always, there are going to be critics. Log into any infotainment bay, and you’ll note god-like omnipresence of sanctimonious pontificating emanating from the vlogosphere. “Commodification of human interaction is alienating and psychologically damaging,” they repeat in a monotone hum one could easily mistake for the sonic frequency of the approaching heat death of the universe. What’s worse—and all the more deliciously ironic—is the fact that they deliver this content to their subscribers in a variety of fully-customized emotional registers according to an up-to-the-minute variable pricing scheme complete with compounding market-based inaccessibility of whatever the most popular trending response happens to be. Personally, my own response to the chatter consists of no more than a single question: Commodification or not, when was the last time you looked someone in the eye in the context of a market exchange? I can’t remember either, and that’s exactly the point.
whether the people of generation Alpha-dash-two were up for the reimagined novelty of real life interaction with human fast food workers, from cashiers and cooks, all the way down to the guy who 20 years earlier was given the unenviable task of delivering to the much-appreciated patrons the same news in the same vocal register over and over again, namely, that the ice cream machine was, in fact, still broke.
Although hard to imagine, human interaction has been steadily gaining currency among members of this generation, nourished as they’ve been on a hearty diet of seamless automated efficiency. What had been primarily an irritant to their parents and grandparents—to the point of cheerfully condemning the individuals who made their living in that labor market to an insurmountable condition of redundancy— has today become an endless source of wonder and amusement for these young people (not to mention an endless source of revenue for the governing algorithms at McCorp). I’m speaking, of course, of errors. You see, once upon a time, error was eliminated from the sphere of human experience.
After machine self-replication became a reality sometime around the mid point of the 2020s, error all but vanished from the human lexicon, at least in reference to the background operations of daily life, which is, in effect, all that really matters from the point of view of social reproduction and system maintenance.
As a consequence of this sequence of events, generation alpha-dash-two, this group of individuals ostensibly belonging to the same species as the sturdy hunter gatherers who at one point reared their children in the protective warmth of an all too human community, has come to associate error with some species of transcendent truth—in short, with the sublime as such. Not ones to miss a golden-archéd opportunity, the executive functions in the marketing and public relations department at McCorp have devised an ingenious method of extracting surplus joy out of every last drop of their human interaction initiative. First, they’ve created a multi-tiered, secondary order menu. Here you, the customer, can choose just how realistic you want your human interaction to be. For a small fee, you are able to decide whether you’d like the cashier to mistakenly forget to add cheese to your burger, or whether you’d prefer to be given the wrong drink. And for just a little more, you can select the “surprise me” option, whereby the number and types of mistakes are determined completely at random, much like those made by tired, overworked and underpaid employees in the days before full-auto.
As always, there are going to be critics. Log into any infotainment bay, and you’ll note god-like omnipresence of sanctimonious pontificating emanating from the vlogosphere. “Commodification of human interaction is alienating and psychologically damaging,” they repeat in a monotone hum one could easily mistake for the sonic frequency of the approaching heat death of the universe. What’s worse—and all the more deliciously ironic—is the fact that they deliver this content to their subscribers in a variety of fully-customized emotional registers according to an up-to-the-minute variable pricing scheme complete with compounding market-based inaccessibility of whatever the most popular trending response happens to be. Personally, my own response to the chatter consists of no more than a single question: Commodification or not, when was the last time you looked someone in the eye in the context of a market exchange? I can’t remember either, and that’s exactly the point.
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