I’ve been sold a lie. Not the lie about festive cheer or goodwill to all men – I never bought that, even in my youngest, freshest, brightest-eyed, cleanest-livered days – but the one about the internet, about technology making life easier.
Christmas brings home the inconvenience of convenience. Online shopping, for example, promises so much and fails, often quite literally, to deliver. There are the constant drags on the supposed frictionless experience to be negotiated.
It was, I think – nay, almost seem to remember – better in the earliest days, before the companies and UR-companies that now effectively own us worked out quite how much data they could squeeze from us or how much of the whole shopping process they could outsource back to consumers once ensnared.
Now there is the signing up to discounts, remembering whether you have an account or need to register as a guest, the auto-filling that never quite auto-fills correctly, the “customer service” chatbot willing but oh-so-unable to answer your specific question in the bottom right hand corner, the tracking of parcels and the chasing of companies that lose them, the printing of return labels yourself, not being allowed to return items instore if you bought it online, the four stage security questions, the bombardment thereafter with marketing drivel and feedback requests forever after, each one a tiny tug on your attention, a little juicing of your guilt and/or anger glands, a microscopic drain on your resources.
And then there are all the idiosyncratic glitches along the way. I’m currently trying to buy two satin shirts from a well-known retailer and it lets me get to the very final stage before stating erroneously that the phone numbers attached to my billing and shipping addresses do not match. There is literally nothing I can do about this. How did we get to a place where this can be a thing that can be said about a purchase?
Then there is the fact that presents bought online are, in the main, crap presents. They are fine if you are a naturally good gifter – the kind of person who can look at another, read their essential nature and translate it into the tangible form of the perfect book, print, artisanal foodstuff or esoteric tchotchke.
But if you are like me, you need to be in a bricks and mortar shop looking at actual things and hoping one of them makes you think, “Oo, X would like that!”. Or if that thing is beyond the budget’s reach, finding something else that makes you think, “Oo, X would like that enough!”.
But convenience, even if only the supposed kind, is a terrible lure. Your phone is distilled convenience. Every contact you need is in there, you have access to virtually the entirety of human knowledge, a plethora of applications that could and should boost our productivity, efficiency, mental and physical health, organisational capacity and global fraternisation and unity to levels that would make our forefathers rub their eyes and anachronistically quote that Arthur C Clarke thing about advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic.
And yet. We all know how constant availability, global fraternisation via social media and access to knowledge without understanding has worked out for us all, for our sanity and for our productivity goals.
Much as I hate to join the ranks of people advocating for digital detoxes (mainly because they so often advocate for other detoxes too and talk about things like chlorophyll oxygenating the blood or water being a superfood, and this is even more enraging than not being able to complete the simple sodding purchase of two satin shirts on a well-established retailer’s website), I can feel a New Year’s resolution coming ineluctably on. The case for minimising technology in our lives, for binning our smartphones and returning to the dumbo Nokias of yore is too strong to be resisted for much longer.
The promise of convenience that technology made turns out not just to be hollow but actively destructive – of the smooth running of our lives and of our minds. There is no need to go the full Amish hog. The washing machine remains a liberating force. The kettle, the microwave – they can stay. Although… the latter is instrumental in the development and popularity of ultra-processed “convenience” food, which turns out to be more or less poisoning us so… yeah, I may need to think about that. And cars – are they really better than horses, when you factor in all the grim and grimy particles lodging in our brains and bodies and causing us no little inconvenience a bit further down the line?
No, I must stop. Binning the smartphone will do for now. Any more and I am in danger of becoming a shill for Big Chlorophyll by 2026. Resolution made. I’ve just got to buy these shirts first.