The Vanishing of the Agora

There's a story in the NYTimes this morning about new ways retailers and payment companies are dreaming up zipless shopping:  read an ad, point, click, and one of those hunky brownshirts will show up at your door with it.  Or meet you in a parking lot at a precisely appointed time.

Great.  Last night, after being at my desk for almost the whole day -- save for a brief trip in the morning to a LabCorp phleb lab for some bloodwork where I got very pleasant service from a couple of nice young African-American women, one of them of near runway quality loveliness -- I went out to my neighborhood RiteAid to pick up some prescriptions and some dental and shaving stuff.  I could have saved my time and asked Mary to do it for me, there could have been noniminally more highly value-additive functions for me to perform at home.

Thing is:  I wanted to go to the store. To see people. And, when I got there, the eccentric guy with the funky moustache and the half gloves took good care of me, even made a joke about how many prescriptions people my age sometimes pick up.

The fact is, as more and more stuff gets delivered to our homes, we go out and rub shoulders with other people (or, as we used to say in the theory world -- The Other), less and less. Which makes us narrower and narrower as souls.

Marketers bemoan this fact. It becomes more difficult to sell things to us as we venture out less, and in more predictable ways. And this is true of politics and the marketplaces of ideas as well, as gerrymandering gets more and more extreme, it's harder and harder to communicate diversely with a diverse group, and less and less necessary to think in terms of crossing boundaries.

Do you remember when Bruce Springsteen sang about "57 Channels and Nothing On," and we all nodded our heads at the absurdity of it?  Well, how many channels are there now?

The big boxes are the great levellers.  WalMart, Target, CostCo, IKEA, each of them appeals to segments, but they are pretty broad segments.  For many reasons, I'm not a fan of WalMart, and yet the experience of going to WalMart is important, because America is there.  I think Whitman would like it.  But Bezos has it squarely in his sights.