City Of The Future

It was shocking. Didn’t expect it at all. Though the signs have been there all along. I’m talking about dystopia. Nightmare city. The triumph of late-stage capitalism with more than a soupçon of AI dolloped into the mix. I wonder, in fact, if AI and capitalism have merged in some spectacularly demonic way. The singularity is here, and its progeny is singularly bleak. 

Yesterday afternoon R and I decided to drive downtown Seattle and see the new Guy Ritchie movie The Gentlemen. We parked in the underground parking lot at Pacific Place and walked a half block to the Regal Meridian.

The last time we went downtown to see a movie and parked at Pacific Place Seattle’s streets and department stores were thriving. This time, we saw a lot of empty retail stores and far fewer pedestrians. Pacific Place was crowded and vibrant. All the restaurants and retail stores were doing a brisk business. Now, most of them are closed. Barnes and Noble is gone, and so are J.Crew and Bose. AT&T was still there, and the movie theater, but apart from them, it was a ghost town. Even the coffee shop was gone. The entire interior was being remodeled. There were sheets of plywood to walk on. 

There was now a bank of machines to pay for parking. There used to be an enclosed interior space where you paid for parking and people – most of them from East Africa, Ethiopia, Etruria and Somalia – dealt with the public. I always thought of Rimbaud when I paid for my parking there, his time in Harar when Ethiopia and the surrounding region was known as Abyssinia. The women at the windows were always quiet and dignified and occasionally I could hear traces of Oromo or Amharic. Where would all those people find jobs now?

We discovered the same situation at the Meridian: there were no more people at the box office dispensing tickets, just another bank of machines. The machine we tried interacting with stubbornly refused our cards. Fortunately, there was an attendant available to help us, a friendly young woman whose position would no doubt disappear once the public had become fully accustomed to interacting with machines instead of people. 

In the future, when the dust settles and the remodeling is completed, people will be rendered obsolete. Simple interactions involving the dispensation of tickets and such will strictly be the province of machines. Human interaction will become even more rare than it already is. Conversation is all but extinct. But will it matter? With most of the retail gone, there’s really no reason to go downtown at all. I don’t know where people go now to find jewelry and clothing. People no longer read, so it’s unlikely anyone will miss (if they even notice) the absence of Barnes and Noble.

We arrived early for the movie. We sat in comfortable chairs in the lobby and looked down at the few people walking on the sidewalks of Seventh Avenue and Pine. One man in particular caught our attention. He was a nicely dressed, well-groomed man pushing a grocery cart. He stopped to bend over and pick up a cigarette butt. He didn’t appear homeless at all. I don’t know how he managed to keep his appearance so presentable in such dire circumstances.

I keep wondering, what is Pacific Place for now? It didn’t seem to be designed for a public at all. It looked like it was morphing into some luxurious space outside the sphere of the broadly commercial and was now repurposed to cater to the ultra-rich, though exactly in what capacity I can’t be sure. I strongly suspect the property’s chief value was now the province of hedge fund investment firms and that extreme amounts of money based on convoluted mathematical formulas was the force behind its transformation.

We had to choose our seats before the movie. I told the young woman who was helping us that I did not like choosing my seats that way because I liked the freedom to move if someone sat next to me with a toddler or began to talk and check their cellphone during the movie. But that’s the setup now: you choose your seat and if you move that’s fine, but if you’re in the seat someone else has chosen, you’ll have to move again. It’s an unnecessary and stupid complication.

The seats were comfortable, but there was an entire table attached. The table swing out so you could sit down, then pull back in so that people could get by without crashing into it. Who needs an entire table for viewing a movie? Was someone going to be serving dinner during the movie the way they do on a passenger jet?

Ads began appearing – loud, obstreperous, and grotesque. The worst was a video game inviting audience members to interact with their smartphones. Seriously?!? Isn’t the theater supposed to be discouraging the use of smartphones? I know these were just ads, but once somebody’s got their smartphone out and started a mode of interactive play, what is going to induce them to put it back in their pocket or purse when the movie starts? It’s another anxiety layered on top of all the other anxieties.

So welcome. Welcome to the city of the future. All machinery, all metal and plastic, touchscreens and buttons with nothing human to mar the perfection of monetary exchange.