Last month I had to opportunity to visit the United States of America. I always feel very European when I am there. I met some wonderful people, had fantastic hosts, and enjoyed my time with an excellent group of other international guests. I also went to a ball game which I didn’t understand (see picture), but my inner anthropologist had a field day.
When I left, I had many questions and that is a good thing. For me, asking questions is a way of trying to make sense of my own experience. Part of the process is an internal reflection. But there is also the thing out there, which triggers some of these questions. And the thing out there is ‘america‘. It poses the question: how on earth is it possible to find so much goodness and ugliness, grace and excess, such joy and depravation, all in one place? I can’t answer this question here, but I can tell you where this question emerged.
Smooth consumer experience
A light switch is a thing. You push a button and there is light (or it goes off.) You do something and something happens. Unless you don’t, because it is actually a sensor under your bed which controls the floor level lighting guiding you to the bath room at night. So convenient. This invisible automatic light switch is my symbol of America.
The phantom switch reveals a frictionless culture, the culture of the smooth consumer experience. Anything that reminds us of effort, work, labour, and the natural friction of bodies interacting with other objects is taken out of the experience.
Hold on, is switching on the light because you need to pee in the middle of the night an ‘experience’? No it is not, but it can be turned into one if you make it effortless. It creates a situation in which I stepped out of bed in the middle of the night and found my way in an unknown place without any effort.
What kind of experience is this disembodied and disengaged non-activity of me, in which I don’t even think about the electricity I consume, because light is ‘just there’. Why should I want to be disembodied this way? And how can I value the light, if it requires no effort, not even the flip of a light switch? Or do ‘they’ think I can’t figure out which way to go when I need to?
Somewhere along the line, ‘serving the customer’ flipped over into treating them as a child. Somewhere along the line, hospitality became an industry featuring excessive handholding of ‘consumers’ who can’t bothered which trivialities such as finding a light switch.