Economic Technological Dys/Utopia

You walk into a fast food restaurant. You do not speak to any staff but enter your order into a touchscreen machine. You pay the machine, which spits out a receipt with a queue number. You collect your food from the counter when your number appears on the screens. You sit down, you clear your own tray when finished and you leave. You make zero contact with the workers working there.

Sounds familiar? That is how it works mostly now at fast food outlets. We can still see the staff working behind the counter. But really, there could have been a big wall to prevent us seeing them, with the food just slipped through a slot in that wall and it would make nary a difference. Robots could be working behind the scenes for all we care. In fact, if the system could be speeded up, I suspect many would actually prefer the workers to be robots or be indifferent. How can the customer not be indifferent since he is being acclimatised to receiving goods instantly or at least rapidly? That after all is the promise of fast food, for it to be fast. To the customers, their interest would be the price of the food they are purchasing and how fast they receive it. In such a setting, there is no service received from a waiting staff and hence no service charge or tip paid, working out to a lower price, or so goes the business model.

Since the food is commoditised, meaning a burger at outlet A is meant to be exactly the same price, quality and taste as a burger from outlet B, there is no finesse expected of the cooks. It is a production line meant to produce a commodity. What is a commodity? A clean example of a commodity is gold. 1 gram of gold be it from the mine in Indonesia which is processed in France or 1 gram of gold from Australia and processed in Germany are exactly equivalent in quality and hence value. A commodity is something that is fungible, i.e. the same quantity of it is equivalent regardless of who produces them. The burger made by cook X in outlet A is meant to be precisely the same as the burger made by cook Y in outlet B. Hence the cook is completely replaceable since it is not the cook’s skill that makes one burger better and distinguishable. It has been reduced to a process completely replicable across the world. When something is simply reduced to a process, it means that a machine can also do the job.

“Since the worker has sunk to the level of a machine, he can be confronted by the machine as a competitor,” wrote Karl Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Does it seem that we have moved even more rapidly in that direction since his time over 170 years ago. But you ask: why haven’t the workers at such fast food outlets been replaced by machines then?

Could it be that using machines to do the work might cost more than human beings for now? What happens when machines achieve cost parity with salaried human labour? Wages for such work have a ceiling because at one point, it will become cheaper to use machines to do the work. We already have the technology, it just hasn’t gotten cheap enough to be deployed in such a setting. If the cost of machines fall as technology improves and economies of scale are reaped from a scaling up in their use, then the wages of such workers are likewise going to face downward pressure, in line with Marx’s axiom. At the extreme, the cost of machines that produce an equivalent amount of output as a waged worker may fall lower than the cost of the subsistence of the life of that worker. Workers will then be displaced wholesale since they can no longer accept even lower real wages and with a flood of unemployed workers, this further depress their wages, all in accordance with the law of demand and supply, except this time, the commodity is labour. [First manuscript, Wages of Labour, Marx]

The consumers’ sympathy are not necessarily with the workers, even though the consumers mostly are themselves workers of some sort. The consumers’ interest lies in faster service and cheaper products. If robots, foreign factories and foreign workers can give it to them, more power to them. Instead of shops, purchasing behaviour have shifted to online marketplaces. One browse for the desired product on a screen, compare across different websites offering that specific item, choose the lowest price and click order, paying electronically. The product appears on one’s doorstep some time later, be it several hours or days. Sometimes the delivery person rings the bell and departs before you can open the door, contactless delivery made the norm during the covid pandemic. Who even gives much thought to the human labour involved in the process, starting from the design of the product, the mining of the raw materials, the production on the factory floor, the shipping workers at the warehouses and finally the delivery person?

It is hardly a surprise the online virtualised mode has become the preferred method of shopping. When you visit a real physical shop, you first have to make your way there, which cost time and money. You are then greeted with goods all in boxes, which you are unable to test anyway if it happens not to be already on display. Even if you wish to, surely you’d feel a bit uncomfortable to ask the salesperson to unbox several competing products for you to test. A simple price check online might show you a better price at the shop though more often than not, it is more expensive there since the shop has to pay costly rentals for its space and salaries for its salespeople.

These salespeople may have hardly any knowledge of the products since how can one have knowledge of every product in such a massive inventory of products? You sometimes doubt their intentions also, as they push certain products which are not the one you had already researched online and just went to the shop to look at before you purchase it for less online. Do they get a special commission on those goods? After a while, you wonder why you even bother going to a shop at all. With a limited shop space, they can only stock a limited set of goods. Sometimes the specific product you want is not even in the shop. Either it is sold out, it hasn’t arrived in the shop or it isn’t even available in your country. Once again, you can only go online to purchase it making you wonder why you even exhausted yourself making the trip to a shop.

Still on retail, at many supermarkets, their checkouts have shifted to self-checkout. You enter, pick the produce yourself, scan it yourself, bag it yourself, pay to a machine and then leave. The manned checkout still exist though sometimes the queue can be long since there are now fewer of them. It seems almost as if the supermarkets are training their customers to be the (unpaid) workers to do it all themselves. We have gotten quite used to this, compared to perhaps 30 years ago when you gave your shopping list to a store clerk who would then go collect your goods for you, bag them for you and then check you out. In fact, today, often you have to bring your own bag or pay for their bags. Once again, the online ordering and delivery option is enticing.

Final example. Ever called a service hotline only to feel as if the person you are speaking to is working from a script of which they are not permitted to deviate from? Or find yourself informing that person of what you have already read from their company’s website but they cannot tell you a single thing more or help you for your specific enquiry of which the information was not available from the website which was the very reason for your call?

It is hard not to make this video a tirade against the workers, though that is not the intent of this video. I am simply making observations based on the current state of affairs. Besides, solidarity from consumers and customers may be hard to find. Consumers might in fact enjoy the smoothness of the shopping process when one does not have to encounter a human worker. Online platforms have in many ways taken the lead in consumer goods and services, and brick-and-mortar shops are rapidly following their cue in the drive for lower costs and hence increased profits. Collectivisation can only drive up labour costs, providing yet another competitive disadvantage against machines.

Workers are still needed to fulfil the orders at the backend, for instance in the warehouse, but who knows for how long, before machines can do it faster and cheaper. For now, workers at shop fronts can add value to the process by being more knowledgeable, more helpful, more courteous and more enthused but instead the opposite is happening. The commissions salespeople earn are decreasing due to less purchases at the store due to the shift online. It is increasingly hard to deal with knowledgeable customers who have researched their desired product online before coming to the shop. After all, the customer only wants one thing while the worker has the entire shop inventory to know about. This customer, with their knowledge can be very demanding.

Sometimes, the workers are training the very machines which are going to put them out of a job. It is a vicious spiral downwards. The workers themselves are consumers so it isn’t as if they are unaware of how the marketplace is shifting. They are the first to feel the brunt of it. The outlook for such work is dismal. Soon, such work may cease to exist and with that the need for such workers. They embody the dualism of worker/consumer but yet they are helpless in their negation of the worker in their role as consumer, due to their being enmeshed in consumeristic-capitalism. The issue is systemic. There is no class war. The working class has been entirely captured by the capitalist class, who makes the branded goods they love and the technology they play on. In fact they admire the leaders of capital to the point of idolisation.

Screens are the new opium of the people. Swiping and scrolling through the so-called social media might seem productive, connective and even informative when it is instead stupefying and mentally polluting, all the while training the data-machines so they target your consumerist habits more effectively. Yet who can look away from the Medusa-like glare of our devices? Instead of creating a direct connection with others, we are connecting with and through the mediation of machines, lengthening the distance we seek to bridge. Instead of enlightenment, we are force-feeding ourselves with toxicity.

The relentless march of technology propelled by the grim profit motive of capitalism in undermining the humanistic dimensions of life and work feels inevitable. Do you find my examples familiar? As I had said, I am simply observing the current state of play. It and the subsequent phases might simply be the waystages towards a technological utopia where AI robot slaves will free all of humanity from the drudgery of work. Unfortunately, the generations of workers caught in these waystages may suffer in ways familiar yet unprecedented in the history of humanity, making Marx seem almost too optimistic when he spoke about alienated labour since soon, there may be not just alienation but a complete redundance for labour. Et tu, capitalism?