Optimizing to Nowhere

Why the future bothers us so

The other day, I was in my mother’s apartment trying to watch television. The remote could not change the channel. The television was stuck on the USA Network—a Fast and Furious movie was playing—and I could not watch anything else. The volume, for reasons entirely unclear, did work. I could turn the television on and off and increase or decrease the volume but perform no other actions. Spectrum, the cable provider, wasn’t terribly helpful, giving instructions about “reprogramming” the remote that wouldn’t end up making any difference. At one point, I asked if it was possible to change the channel on the cable box and immediately knew, as I eyed the television, that was the wrong question to ask. This was a smart TV. There was no way to change the channel without a remote. Spectrum said they would mail a new remote to my mother’s apartment. It occurred to me, as a child growing up in this apartment, it was actually much easier to watch television in the 1990s and 2000s. Back then, I pointed the remote and the screen turned on. The remote only failed if the battery died. If, for some reason, the remote had dead batteries and I couldn’t replace them, I could wander up to the box and keep pressing buttons until I got to the station I wanted. Calling up the cable company to fix a remote would have been absurd.

A few days later, I realized I could not print out the basketball tickets I bought to see Caitlin Clark’s first WNBA game at the Barclays Center. These tickets were purchased through Ticketmaster. Using the fast-decaying Google search, I saw that Ticketmaster offered a print-at-home option. I’m not elderly, but I prefer physical tickets—I hate toggling through my phone to show an email barcode and I hate, if I’m sitting in seats that are good enough, to have to again flash my phone at the usher as I try to carry snacks with me. And what if my phone dies? Or I lose it? Tying my entry into a sporting event to the feasibility of my smartphone, beyond being classist—smartphones are expensive, after all—is irritating. The physical ticket wasn’t a technology that needed to be upended or optimized; it worked quite well. A decade ago, it was possible to have the best of all worlds, emailed tickets and physical tickets, but an increasing number of professional leagues do not allow you to print tickets at all—or if they do, they make the process unwieldy enough to be effectively impossible. The agent I spoke to with Ticketmaster told me, flat out, it was not possible to print tickets to see the Indiana Fever play the New York Liberty. I wanted to print because the barcode was not loading on my phone. Finally, the agent sent me another email, and this time the barcode worked. I had lost precious time trying to get to the arena. These roadblocks exist to deter scalpers. Sports leagues want in on all the action and they want to extract as much profit from resales as they can while allowing Ticketmaster to bury the consumer with junk fees.

The final technological innovation, inside the Barclays Center, seemed to serve little purpose other than puzzling customers and theoretically allowing the arena to hire fewer human beings. At the concessions line, I could not pass up my soda and hot dog to an employee to be rung up. I had to place my items onto a metallic, square-shaped tray and wait for a computer to scan them. The items had to be aligned just so in order for each one to be properly registered. The process took longer than a human punching keys at a cash register. Only two employees worked the concession stand, meanwhile, struggling to keep up with the growing line.

All of these anecdotes exist in isolation but they are not terribly uncommon anymore. Sometime in the last decade, technology did not accelerate so much as veer sideways. The old twentieth century complaint was that all of this tech would make our lives too convenient, too insulated, cutting humanity off from the fleshy struggles of life. We would lose, for example, the ability to build with our bare hands, letting machines ape craftsmanship instead. The decline of radio and the birth of television would, on some level, shrink the human mind’s capacity to imagine. But it was hard, truly, to argue against this kind of progress: electricity, the automobile, the airplane, even mass entertainments. Nineteenth century society inculcated a lusty self-reliance, but the twentieth brought increased lifespans and the global village. The pace of change, for someone born at the end of the nineteenth century, is still difficult to fathom. A childhood spent on farmland without indoor plumbing could lead to, at retirement, jet-setting across the Earth. Think of the difference between 1905 and 1975. Or even the stretch between 1930 and 1970, when the world of silent films and cross-country train trips gave way to color television, New Hollywood, and supersonic airplanes.

We are running out of great leap forwards. This is not a tragedy; modern society can only industrialize so many times and there are natural limits to most kinds of technology. The frontier has been settled. We dream of space and might get to Mars one day, but we long for space, in part, because so much of the planet has been conquered and we are fast spoiling it. There may be innovations coming in the arena of combating climate change—clouds that deflect light are no longer science fiction—and there are always medical breakthroughs to be had when it comes to fighting disease. Lifespans, so lengthened in the last century, may yet increase again. Computing power accelerates. The smartphone wasn’t for sale until 2007 and look how it has consumed life now, for better and often worse. The new fad is artificial intelligence—if I’m dismissive, I can at least acknowledge there will be changes in how work and research are performed, with a new round of automation on the horizon. AI could alter the very nature of the internet. Google search, certainly, is already AI-inflected, with error-prone summaries replacing the ready availability of more reliable news links. (On the medicine front, Google AI does seem to be making genuine progress.)

Whatever AI does, however, will not match the impact that indoor plumbing, electricity, and penicillin had on modern society. Tech utopians may argue otherwise, but they will be wrong. And developers in adjacent fields may find that, absent further breakthroughs, they can only tinker with—and perhaps degrade—what already exists. This is optimizing to nowhere. The smartphone cannot innovate meaningfully anymore; we have crystal clear photographs, internet access, and GPS. New iPhone models offer less and less. Social media and search, done innovating, have entered their monetization and decline phases. Facebook and Instagram are more frustrating to use. Google coughs up spam-laden search results. Twitter/X is less functional than it once was, its centrality to the discourse gone as it suppresses the sharing of outside links. Much of this occurs because companies prioritize profits over the consumer experience. In one sense, this isn’t shocking—capitalists have been desperate to make money for a long time—but some of it feels unsettlingly new. Twentieth century capitalism cared greatly about convenience. Products were pitched to ease everyday life, to reduce friction. Sending an email is easier than stuffing an envelope. A dishwasher beats the mundanity of physically washing dishes. Air-conditioning permits indoor temperature control, allowing for new comfort. The innovators of these products, or those who successfully dominated the markets, made inordinate amounts of money while easing our burdens. There was a symbiosis between profit and convenience. That, in my own experience, seems to no longer be true. I thought about this, two years ago, when I went to California and encountered a hostility to physical cash. Forcing all financial transactions onto credit and debit cards disadvantages the unbanked poor while also allowing for the extraction of extra fees and casual private sector surveillance. Tapping a card, usually, is easier than handing over cash, but not always—not especially when a scanner won’t cooperate or the cost of the item makes passing over a few dollar bills much simpler. In earlier times, the emphasis was on choice: cash or card, the customer was always right. The new optimization, it seems, cannot be so enlightened.