Convenience is the final commodity.
In the human race’s ever accelerating death spiral to the bottom of the chip bag, convenience is the final thing, the last remaining shiny bauble yet to be gift wrapped and hand delivered to your prefrontal cortex without ever leaving your bed.
The success of services like Uber Eats which currently is scuttling a restaurant culture in a postcode near you, hinges on the convenience it offers, charging you a premium to outsource your own laziness to a poorly paid ‘gig economy’ worker all for the comfort of not having to get off the couch, mid binge, 3 weeks into your unending Netflix lobotomy.
None of this is particularly surprising to anyone with eyes but the true, full cost of these hand held creature comforts are predictably glossed over by both the companies, selling on you this laziness rebranded as luxury lifestyle, and the consumers themselves, largely oblivious to the externalised costs of such activities from the mountains of packaging waste, to the emissions of the vehicles used to deliver the goods, right on down to the Dickensian working conditions of the delivery drivers. All these tiny bundles of joy are now everyone’s problem.
The same luxury logic applies to services like Spotify that hand deliver the convenience of a curated musical experience, charging you a few dollars a month for the privilege whilst paying the artists who actually create the music itself, a dollar amount so low that only a quantum physicist could describe the number. One need only extrapolate the economics of this injustice to arrive in a world where the only music available is that of the Spotify Machine Learning Ensemble or the Coca Cola Choir. The hollowing out of the middle class of artists, in favour enriching a boardroom full of vulture capitalists is a future barely worth imagining.
The basic idea that everyone with an iPhone can live like a director of the Dutch East India Company with a shed full of servants, hand delivering their every hors d’oeuvre, from food to entertainment to art, whilst simultaneously sweeping the mess under the rug is beyond unsustainable. It is suicide.
The dark irony of this chronic moral mis-calibration is that services that swap the use of your brain for the use of your wallet will eventually end up costing you life as your outsourced apocalypse takes hold and Disney’s WALL-e starts looking less like a loveable kids story and more like a chilling tale of the future from the planet of junk.
One need only glance at the rampant facial hair posing as a beard on Karl Marx to come face to face with the urgent danger of unchecked exponential growth.
It’s time to get a razor and make some changes.