It’s June 23rd, 2047. Twitter, that paradoxical simulacrum of a public sphere 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, though not yet experienced, service situated 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 exact same news in the exact same vocal register each and every time they asked; namely, that the ice cream machine was still, in fact, 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 cheering on, even welcoming, the insurmountable condition of skeletal redundancy thrust upon the people who once made their living in this particular labor market— has today become an endless source of wonder and amusement for these young people, never mind 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 in reference to the background operations of daily life, which are, in effect, all that really matter when it comes to social reproduction and system maintenance.
Anyway, as a consequence of this sequence of events, generation alpha-dash-two, these members of the same species as those sturdy hunter gatherers who at a point beyond the horizon of explicit history reared their children in the protective warmth of an all too human community, has come to associate the firsthand experience of error with some kind of intimation of transcendent truth—a glimpse, perhaps, of the sublime itself. Not ones to miss an iridian opportunity, the executive functions in the marketing and public relations server 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 in which you, the customer, can choose just how realistic you want your human interaction to be. For a small fee, you can 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 few bits 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.
Inevitably, you come across the usual swarm of critics, and this is especially the case when you’re dealing with something as rare as face to face human interaction. Log into any infotainment bay, and you’ll note god-like omnipresence of sanctimonious chatter emanating from the vlogosphere in perfectly spaced-out periodic waves. “Commodification of human interaction is alienating and psychologically damaging,” they repeat in a monotone hum one would be forgiven for mistakenly identifying as the first audible signs of the heat death of the universe. The only thing worth mentioning about all of this—mostly because of the delicious irony— is the fact that the punditariat deliver their unrelenting pontificating in a variety of fully-customized emotional registers according to an up-to-the-minute variable pricing scheme, producing artificial scarcity of their information through the fluctuating inaccessibility of whatever the most popular trending response happens to be at a given nanosecond. Besides the momentary chuckle, I personally don’t bother too much with the chatter, as there’s really only one question that deserves asking:
Commodification or not, when was the last time you looked someone in the eye in the context of real life market exchange? I can’t remember either, and that’s exactly the point.
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