Amazon has claimed its drone delivery service will be ready to go “within months”. Walmart is launching a “deliver groceries to your fridge” service. We say please and thank you to Alexa and Siri and sexual relationships are initiated via app. Nowadays, there is hardly any reason to leave home, or interact with anyone, in person.
This vision of a consumer that sits alone in their home, clicks on their desires, tunes into entertainment and reclines in their easy chair to wait for all their wishes to be granted may seem as contemporary as it gets. But it was the premise of E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops – which was published in 1909.
The eerily prescient tale opens with Vashti, a woman who doesn’t leave her underground home. She doesn’t need to. No one leaves their little cells to venture out in to a post-apocalyptic world. They don’t have to: all needs are met by an omnipotent ‘Machine’. Communication with others is done via instant messaging and video conferencing. In any case, people have no inclination to meet up; they only want to share ideas. And the Machine knows what you want, without you having to ask…
It doesn’t feel so far removed from Amazon’s promise that, with its new “Prime Air delivery drone”, consumers will be able to go from click to delivery in 30 minutes. The convenience of such almost-instant gratification will be irresistible.
Meanwhile, Walmart is rolling out a beta version of their in-home delivery service – a direct rival to Amazon Fresh and Fresh Direct. Instead of boxes of food being left on doorsteps, the shopping will actually be delivered to your kitchen. Your fridge and cupboards will be stocked by Walmart employees, with the help of body cams on the drivers and special security locks on homes. They will even pick up returns for you if you leave them on your kitchen counter. You can wave at them from your reclining easy chair, if you can stand to look up from your screen to have a brief, real-life interaction with a stranger.
So often in our culture we avoid each other. We avoid taking the lift for fear we will encounter another person; we keep our air pods in-ear in the supermarket queue, or use self-checkout. Living in New York City, the most populated city in America, it is possible to go for whole days without speaking to another human being. We keep our eyes on our screens, recorded voices in our ears.
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SubscribePollution is already massively down with fewer planes and cars making journeys.