Small bites: You're lonely because they took all the people away

I once had a conversation with a librarian that has stuck with me ever since. I don't know whether it's factually true, but the point of the story is definitely true.

We were talking about the loss of that nostalgic feeling of getting your books stamped by the librarian in order to borrow them, and the pleasant feeling that you get when you can see how many people have also read that same book before you on the library ticket. This led to the librarian telling me that the council had brought in the library kiosk machines that allow people to self-serve their loans and returns, because they thought it would make taking out books more efficient and convenient for people. But it hadn't gone to plan.

After the kiosks were introduced, they told me, library foot traffic plummeted. It turned out that a lot of people going to the library were going because they wanted everyday human interaction. Lonely people would borrow a book and return it the next day just so they had an excuse to talk to someone. People wanted to talk to their librarians about the books they read, or which ones their librarians would recommend they read next. They wanted the book stamp and the feeling of social connection that comes with seeing the date stamps from all the other people that had sat with the same book you'd chosen in their hands too. What they didn't want was a clinical and frustrating checkout-like experience with a faceless touchscreen machine.

In trying to improve efficiency, they had ruined libraries as social spaces.

Now did this really happen? I have no idea. But I did say the point was true, and it is. Just think about all the ways these types of automation have actually functioned in society. Self-service checkouts, taxi apps, customer service chatbots and robot phone lines, templated automatic letters, car parking, fuel stations, online banking, dating apps, music streaming services, online shopping, food order apps and kiosks...and so on and so on. All of these "efficiencies" are about removing human to human interaction from your daily life in favour of a faster, colder, robot.

In the name of efficiency all those small everyday moments in your life where you might have had a quick natter or a bit of small talk with a stranger, or might have left the house to venture into spaces full of other people, have been eroded into almost nothing. The pandemic proved we could work from home more flexibly, reduce carbon emissions overnight, and that minimum wage service workers were not being paid according to their critical social value. But it also proved that human life can be lived for the majority of people without ever needing to leave the house, and that living this way was absolutely miserable.

Now we are raising generations where they barely get face to face time with their own teachers in school, where chatbots plan their lessons and do their homework, where "being social" is being online and performing for a camera. The young people that weren't locked indoors during critical social and developmental milestones, are increasingly being raised by bots and machines, their every moment with family and friends carefully curated to look aesthetic online.

When they venture into the world, the third spaces that still exist are bereft of life. There's little human interaction left to be had in them. Libraries where you never see a librarian, cafés where everyone sits on their laptops or smartphones in silence. Every demand on their wallets, their time, their livelihoods and futures, forces the use of the non-human option. The high street is expensive but shopping online is cheap.  Going out requires living in a city or owning a car, both expensive options, and the rising cost of fuel is eating into justifications for using cars for non-essential trips. A night out at pubs/bars/clubs costs a small fortune if you still have any left in your area that haven't closed down.

How do you meet people when you can't find people?

Through this lens the push for "efficiency" and "value" and "convenience" has just been a way of pushing people out of the equation. The social fabric that should foster community, has had all the human socialisation torn out of it. If there is no such thing as community any more, it's because people are unable to, well, commune. If highly convenient food tends to be hyper processed junk for the body, highly convenient substitutions for human workers are junk for the soul and society.

Billionaires like Eric Schmidt may claim that they didn't realise the consequences of their actions when they pushed their ideas into our lives and subsumed our world into their world-view, but you don't have to look hard to realise their truth. This will of theirs to exterminate human labour has been fundamental to every action and decision they have ever made. They are billionaires precisely because they removed people in favour of efficient, automated technology.

They want you to be lonely, because they would rather you didn't even exist. You are their meal ticket, but also their competition for access to excessive money, power, and resource. Just look at the "AI" bubble, a circle jerk of billionaires fluffing each other with incestuous investments while vomiting sound bites about how their precious AI delusions will put people out of work. All while doing their best to ensure that if they go down before they make humanity obsolete, we all get dragged down with them. We'll probably be made to bail them out when they fail too, but why should we accept this? They are not inevitable. There are other options on the table.

There's no reason why we can't realign ourselves, and our spaces, to put the humans back in the centre of society. From the very beginning these now super rich men have always been fundamentally anti-human. Want an alternative future? Let's bring the people back.