Is Convenience Killing Urban Life?
I’ve been writing about the Ultra-Processed Life that’s been normalized (or perhaps hyper-normalized), and the core dynamic at work is the disconnect between what I call the real world–tangible, contingent, requiring situational awareness and skills–and the disembodied nature of the digital, financial and consumption realms.
Real-world relationships of face-to-face meetings in tangible places are replaced with easily edited bloodless digital communications. Face-to-face financial transactions are replaced by keystrokes and clicks. Real food prepared by hand are replaced with ultra-processed convenience fare and snacks. The real world is replaced by a screen, and skills are replaced by clicking on buttons.
Filmmaker Adam Curtis described hypernormalization (the subject of his 2016 documentary) in this way:
‘HyperNormalisation’ is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russian historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union. What he said, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, was that in the 1980s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, know that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew that they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. And this historian, Alexei Yurchak, coined the phrase ‘HyperNormalisation’ to describe that feeling.
Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak
The difference between Hypernormalization and Ultra-Processed Life is we don’t think of Ultra-Processed Life as broken or dysfunctional; we’ve internalized the view that the conveniences of Ultra-Processed Life are Progress, and therefore the natural order of things: the more disembodied and processed things become, the greater our comfort and convenience.
Why bother with all the tedious work of going out into the real world to buy real food, bring it home and laboriously prepare a meal when we can click on a button and have a meal delivered to our door? We only have to pause our entertainment / game for a moment to collect the meal from the delivery person/drone, sit back down and resume our entertainment.
We’re not aware of what we’ve lost in this frictionless, bloodless, homogenized, commoditized series of transactions, the last one being shoveling the delivered food into our mouths in an automatic fashion, not much different from plugging in a digital device to recharge. If our digital devices expressed pleasure when being recharged (“ooh, this is yummy!”), the analogy would be complete.
In a hypernormalized world, we’re aware it’s all artifice, but we’re powerless to change any of it.
In an Ultra-Processed World, we’re not aware of its artificial, synthetic nature, and so we surrender our agency (i.e. ability to control the direction of our life) not as a conscious choice or act of will but by default, as the comfort and convenience are so compellingly attractive that to question this surrender doesn’t occur to us.
We’re on automatic, effectively programmed to optimize our comfort and convenience via commoditized transactions because it’s so much easier than navigating the real world.
A new book–The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City—considers the consequences of this commoditization of convenience on urban life and the hollowing out of cities.
The Guardian (UK) published an interview with the author Alexis Madrigal that encapsulates many of the book’s themes: The future happens in Oakland first. That’s a cautionary tale for global cities.
Madrigal ties together both ends of the global supply chains: the way that port / hub cities have been transformed (often at the expense of low-income neighborhoods adjacent to ports and highways) to distribute the immense flow of global trade to our doors, and how this delivery network threatens the lifeblood of cities–residents leaving the safety and comfort of their homes to engage urban life.
Consider Madrigal’s response to the interviewer’s question:
Interviewer: You write in the book that you’re worried that the logistical supply-chain systems that have long governed global shipping are increasingly coming home — and that on-demand ordering threatens to replace the city itself as a way of organizing commerce. How concerned are you that cities themselves might become an outmoded technology?
Madrigal: “I think the San Francisco Bay Area is already kind of living in that future in a lot of ways. It’s not the ‘doom loop’, which has these particular features related to the pandemic. This is more like one of those tidal forces: every business is getting a little harder to run. Oakland just got voted the best restaurant city in America, and I know a lot of restaurateurs in Oakland, and they can barely keep the doors open. People don’t come in. They order from a ghost kitchen. It’s so hard to get people to be out and living city life. I am genuinely troubled by it.”
Put another way: Hungry Ghosts order Ghost Meals from Ghost Kitchens.
For me, this hollowing out of cities and urban life is not an abstraction. The downtown of the city I lived and worked in for decades, Berkeley, California, is now a literal ghost town of boarded up commercial buildings. (You can find videos of it online.) It’s as if the residents and businesses were evaporated by a cruel weapon.
I don’t yet know if Madrigal discusses this in the book, but there is more than convenience at work: if residents no longer feel safe out on the streets, can’t find parking, and are wary of public transport, then engaging in urban life is far less appealing.
From the small business perspective, over-regulation, high fees and onerous rent make business not just harder but impossible. Those attempting it must indenture themselves to keep the business afloat, and as a result they inevitably burn out from overwork and stress; even seemingly successful small businesses close once the owners can no longer work insane hours.
In contrast, the global supply chain of delivery to your door is lightly taxed, largely unburdened by local regulations, and free to optimize the low-wage, low-overhead 1099 gig-economy labor force and the just-in-time global distribution system.
In other words, the legacy tax and regulatory systems don’t apply to the delivery-to-your-door network even as they crush small local businesses which are the lifeblood of urban life.
Since cities tax residents, businesses and buildings within their borders to raise the revenue needed to fund city services, the delivery network skirts these taxes via the 1099 gig-economy labor force and locating distribution centers in the low-tax exurbs.
This arrangement was not approved by voters or even put on a ballot. Global market forces and legacy structures incentivized this replacement of small-scale urban life with commoditized deliveries and transactions without any conscious grasp of the dynamics at work.
The feedback loop is pernicious. As cities’ tax revenues plummet, they cut back on public safety / police, leaving residents feeling less safe on the streets and thus more prone to ordering in and seeking personalized digital entertainment. As small businesses close, tax revenues fall further, city services are slashed, and the hollowing out of civic and urban life accelerates.
What we accept as Progress as individuals–convenience–is Anti-Progress as residents of a social order.
CHS NOTE: I understand some readers object to paywalled posts, so please note that my weekday posts are free and I reserve my weekend Musings Report for subscribers. Hopefully this mix makes sense in light of the fact that writing is my only paid work/job. Who knows, something here may be actionable and change your life in some useful way. I am grateful for your readership and blessed by your financial support.