To my astonishment, this orange contraption appeared in a quiet street in Bristol the other day.
What I think about it:
Not very long ago (possibly during COVID lockdowns?) I wasn’t overjoyed when masses of under-paid men* began hurtling about the streets and pavements of European cities on bikes and scooters, carrying soft cube-shaped* boxes on their backs - but this new wheeled object is not an improvement. At least there was human interchange with the cube-people - and you could give the poor fellows a decent tip when they turned up at your door.
This machine, which presumably seeks to replace them, must have used up masses of energy in its construction (in China, I’m guessing, therefore possibly its construction was carried out by Uighur slaves). It probably also caused masses of soil and water pollution while being made - and almost certainly continues to burn up fuel of some kind in its operation as well (a lot of energy is needed for a machine to be able to think well enough to go where it’s sent, without a human to drive it). And I bet it is not free of rare earths, with all that they entail (child labour springs to mind, plus the scarcity their name implies).
The suggestion painted along the box’s metal side is that we should “just eat” and the plan is to remove obstacles to doing that. In an age of over-eating, is this not unwise? Even if it isn’t, is the pleasure of eating food delivered in plastic boxes really greater than the pleasure of food made at home, having exercised the uniquely human ability to plan and prepare a meal, (not to mention the business of shopping for the ingredients, with all the small experiences you have along the way - think Vonnegut’s post office outing).
This glorified wheelie-bin cuts out one more person-to-person interaction in daily life. Its introduction is fuelled by greed - not just the greed for food, but the greed for profit that is also behind the drive to get rid of people on tills in supermarkets, enlisting customers to do that work themselves, and the removal of staff to take your money at boomgates on European motorways, which relies on the computerised system working smoothly (you should see the chaos when it doesn’t) and the disappearance of bank branches where you can talk to a human being - and so on and so on.
People somewhere far away, whose names we may never know and whose faces will almost certainly never be revealed to us, are dedicating their energies to devising ways to make more and more money by depriving others of work and the chance to feel worthwhile and part of a community. I hate it.
What do you think?
*interestingly, there does seem to be a females-need-not-apply element to this new, (potentially fleeting) field of employment
*if we can say ‘tubular’, why can we not say ‘cubular’?
The underpaid men are still out on cycles and motor scooters, sometimes in cars, delivering food. There were disruptions last year when Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) found them good material for chase videos and deportations. But I still see them regularly. And it seems to me that back before the pandemic I would see a guy training a delivery robot at 16th and P Streets NW.
ReplyDelete"Cubic" has been in use for a long time. There is a young "influencer", his main product apparently inordinate vanity, who goes by the name "Clavicular". I prefer to think of him as "Carbuncular", after the young man in The Waste Land.
Inordinate vanity is surely the sine qua non of influencers - but how on earth did clavicular stray into your line of vision?
ReplyDeleteClavicular appears in the New York Times lighter sections maybe twice a month these days.
DeleteI must have a look. I subscribe to the NYT but maybe haven't gone deep into the non-news sections. There is so much to worry about in the main sections - especially at the moment - that I.rarely get further.
ReplyDeleteWhether they're delivered by a robot or a dodgy-looking man on a bike, I don't like takeaways. The chicken tikka masala that looked so alluring in the Taj Mahal restaurant invariably seems garish, greasy and lukewarm in the comfort of one's own home. Perhaps a robot delivery service can at least keep them hot until they arrive.
ReplyDeleteI hate them too. I wonder when they first became such a commonly known thing that they got the name 'takeaway'. There is probably an entire sociological shift that created them.
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