What people call "tribalism" I would re-frame as class structuralism. People might segregate themselves by class via Whole Foods vs Walmart, but that doesn't mean people are striking up conversations within-class or between-classes. That doesn't seem very "tribal" versus what American Christians have; rather it seems loosely coherent.
And again, I would ask whether a commercial space is really the best place going forward. I am struck by the number of places a young person wouldn't feel like going without a credit card.
Being in line at the DMV is probably the best example I can think of this.
I'm usually waiting for a while, and chatting with whomever is next to me. Not unusual to be an interesting conversation with someone I'd have never otherwise spoken to (and probably vice versa).
While I somewhat agree with you, I still think that by taking away the need for millions of people to have lots of little banal interactions, we're also erasing the possibility, on a society-wide scale, of more meaningful interactions that sometimes spring from those trivial little conversations.
I live in San Francisco.
I didn't know YC published HN's demographics. Do you have a link?
Unless the wealthier, more connected, more educated readership of Hacker News strongly bucks every trend suggested by their demographics, it's pretty safe to say we mostly live in urban areas.
[1]https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-w... [2]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33....
The preferred option is to do a little reading of your own beforehand, and to share whatever it is you know that makes you think the obvious answer might not be right.
You still have people in checkout lines on their phones or parents giving their kids a phone with YouTube or a mobile game to distract them. The older folk, as you might expect, tend to strike up conversation and bump into those they don't know.
I worked retail a few years in this town (which is finally coming to an end) and the few times I can remember strangers striking up a conversation with me were mainly them spreading misinformation.
A few years back, one elderly man swore black and blue that "they" were canning all of the "irradiated fish" from the Fukushima fallout and selling it to unsuspecting customers. Another lady told me the story of a man who just happened to be stumbling around "a major Chinese city" and peering into a factory window only to see that "the Chinese" were turning cardboard into cookies and selling them to us unsuspecting Westerners.
By no means are the above stories an indicator of country folk but let's just say I have my reasons for not jumping at the chance to talk with strangers. Half the time it's just an excuse for them to offload their stories onto me rather than actually being a two way conversation anyway.
EDIT: I just mentioned the overall feel of the discussions to my dad as he's the sort to strike up conversation with anyone. Having presented both sides of the discussion, he instantly discarded one side as "wrong" without actually weighing up any of the points. While it's anecdotal, it's no wonder I'm somewhat the opposite. Each conversation turns into a debate to win rather than a discussion.
Given "equal and opposite reaction[s]", I wonder if tribalism is inevitable? Did we ever actually defuse this kind of stuff in society or was it just hidden away due to geography eg; distance between rural and urban areas?
Even if this slight increase in social interaction did anything ("cash or credit?" -- "Credit, ma'am"), that's as ridiculous as fixing race conditions with sleep() calls (hehe, race conditions).
But to answer your comment: the comment was not about the chit-chat with the cashier, but other people in the line.
Today it's no longer nerdy to listen to music, everyone has earbuds in and your newspaper and magazines are all easily accessible on tiny little screens which use a lot less paper.
Are cashiers not paid?
Good?
I'm an introvert. I don't value random, superficial interactions with people I'll never talk to again. In fact, they cause me anxiety & I dislike them.
I do value the time with a select group of people.
And by reducing the time I spend in the supermarket it allows more of the human interaction I do value.
My social group has a wide assortment of views, from Muslim to Catholic to Athiest, to #TrumpTrain2020 to #NotMyPresident.
I've never witnessed nor heard of people having meaningful discussion with the checkout clerk. I've never seen nor heard of someone, after that brief interaction, saying "You know, you're right. I'll reconsider my position on the person of the opposing political party."
The statement marketplaces may have been true when we in the barter system, but it certainly hasn't been president in modern society for sometime. And I say that as someone who grew up in a town of 2,000 in the 70s and has lived in a large urban area for the last 20.
If you shop at Whole Foods, Target, Trader Joe's, Kroger, etc. this has never been true for you, unless by social interaction you mean handing your card to the cashier or asking someone a question. Even in my local, family owned grocery store I don't see this "marketplace" attitude. I doubt it exists anywhere outside of small communities nowadays in the US. Most people work 8 hours a day and hang out at home or in bars/coffee shops; we don't really want to hang out in a marketplace.
Note that I don't disagree with your overall point... I just don't think this is a good example.
I miss the person who used to work at the Staples who always lit up my day when I needed to buy paper.
My small local corner store is different, but then again they won't be replaced by an app anytime soon, exactly for that reason.
I think you’re dramatising what is a natural step as shopping evolves with technology. If you value social interaction you can always spend more time with friends you appreciate, go to public spaces, head to the bar. The supermarket has hardly ever been a source of good times anyway.
But... what if I want that? What if I don't want to be coerced into social interaction, every day, just so I get get my basic physical needs met? What if I want to engage with society and humans on my terms, rather than on yours?
Who gets to decide? I welcome this because it gives me another choice. It moves me one step further away from the coerced-social-interaction experient you envision as heavenly and towards a world where I get to make one more of the choices that matters to me.
In fact, who is to say that the present typical amount of social interaction is optimal or even generally desirable? It's a function of our society and its tech today, it didn't come up on stone tablets from the heaven.
But, consider. If letting people talk to one another - or not - as they choose rather than as some would-be society-engineer decides leads to social collapse, what will actually be lost? Is so fragile a system really worth preserving? I submit that it may not be.
Personally, I don't require that computers mediate all human interaction. I do rather like having a choice, though.
If you work from home, get Amazon deliveries, go to school online, etc... what will you do and what storefronts do you need? Are bars, restaurants and barbers enough?
One of my favorite anecdotes that makes me think... has our whole society evolved incorrectly?
"In 18th-century America, colonial society and Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial; the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many whites were defecting to live in the Native American one."[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluen...
Turns out that when you relieve people of the burdens of things they have to do (like grocery shopping, which is oftentimes tedious and boring), they now have more time and energy to do things they want to do. Instead of forced interactions at the grocery store, they'll go to a park and talk to people they actually want to talk to. Instead of spending an entire day going to Costco and shoving their way through the crowds, they visit a boutique store and stop for coffee at a local cafe.
Some of the comments in this thread are quite curious. Bemoaning the death of tedious chores and banal small-talk like these are things the general public actually enjoys doing rather than merely tolerates out of necessity.
I don't think that's true at all, except maybe in the sense that rich urban centers are crowded with inherited-wealthy young adults.
> visit a boutique store
Exactly. See above.
> stop for coffee at a local cafe.
Cafes are crowded because people don't like to be alone, even when they are doing an essentially alone activity (whatever is on the laptop everyone is sitting there with).
Funny thing about the truth is that it doesn't matter if you think it's true or not. It's still true. I make a living traveling for work, and I make a hobby of finding out small downtown areas and visiting them, and there's never a shortage in basically any thriving region of people out and about doing things they want to be doing.
You can point to some dying towns and say "look, these guys closed the business so that disproves your point" but forever in the history of forever, towns have been growing and towns have been shrinking. As one place wins, another necessarily loses.
Visit the Lake Michigan beach in Saugatuck MI, walk the riverwalk in Little Rock AR, head down Broad Street in Lake Geneva WI, grab a beer at Reclamation Brewing Company in Butler PA and tell me people don't socialize anymore. Grab some wings at Chase's in Norcross GA and tell me you'd rather talk about the weather with a stranger at Walmart than eat great food and have a real conversation with Chase's mom on the patio in the cool Georgia night air.
Small talk at Whole Foods isn't socializing. You want people to talk to? Go to where you want to be, and there will be people who want to be there too, and guess what, you already have a conversation starter.
The point the parent was making is that these bustling public areas you're seeing are primarily made up of affluent young people, and are not actually representative of how the majority of society lives.
You have offered no counterpoint to that at all, and yet still chose to start your comment with a rude dismissal.
What's rude is people saying "Amazon is killing all social interaction" while not stopping to wonder why all of their social interaction is small talk at a Walmart. That's the problem. Again, like I've said over and over and over and over and everyone ignores to nitpick, that's not social interaction. That's small talk. I have no idea why you're treating standing in a checkout lane like it's the Roman Forum.
But of course you don't see the people who are at home or in the suburbs (shudder). Loneliness and solitude seem to be growing as well. Maybe worst in Japan, but the problem also exists worldwide.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/11/asia/japanese-millennials-hiki...
The real lamentation is that the lack of interaction is perhaps less of a "choice" and more of a necessity for many people. Casual socialization is becoming a privilege reserved for the people who can afford to indulge. Everyone else is too busy getting by, and will choose the path of least interaction because they can't afford the inefficiency. Economic pressure over generations may make introverts of us all.
If you mean "the coffee shop" (there's a long history there) or "the pub" (a longer history, in the western tradition there) sure, I agree. I'm not saying randos approach me all the time when I'm in those sorts of places, but it happens. It doesn't happen at the grocery store hardly at all.
It happens a lot more often in the ride sharing services than even the pub; Yesterday I took my Saturday afternoon ride to Fry's for sandwiches, (The Fry's Sunnyvale Cafe is passable. Not bad. Not as good as the dedicated food places on Murphy, say, but it is super nostalgic for me, so it's something of a weekend tradition.) and while nobody talked to me in the Fry's cafe (I mean, aside from the procurement of food. I have met other interesting people there in the past.) the driver actually apologized to me because he spent most of the ride there speaking with another rider in a foreign language, which was mostly interesting in that he seemed to think that I had some expectation of being included in conversation as he drove. But yeah, I talk to the drivers often, a lot more than talking to strangers in retail spaces.
I guess what I'm saying is that social spaces need space for idling. Sitting in the back of the car does this, as does serving food or drink. Buying groceries, I think, does not.
Compare this to our existing society: most of the people that you're expected - in fact, required (at work etc) - to interact with, are strangers. Most of our communication protocols deal with various aspects of that.
With this kind tech, we retreat back to our comfy bubbles of familiar people that we've known for a long time, and away from the strangers.
Even more so, technology for not having to interact with cashiers ever already exists: the self-checkout system. If I walk into a chain store like Meijer, people will be piled up at the self-checkout even if there is a completely free human cashier waiting for customers!
But even so, people are not checking out to socialize. Even what they do say isn't so substantial. Things move too fast, there's too many customers and too little time. How often do you remember the name of your cashier? How often are they still working there a year later?
Amazon's store actually represents a potential departure because as they say, they introduce humans in ways they think will improve the customer experience. Quote:
>“We’ve just put associates on different kinds of tasks where we think it adds to the customer experience,” Ms. Puerini said.
So there are people. And those people, with their hopefully less hectic roles, are almost certain to interact with customers in ways that will be more meaningful than the overworked cashier with a line of 10 carts and a full bladder. And perhaps, if the job doesn't suck (unlike many of Amazon's jobs, unfortunately,) they might actually stick around to become a normal you can interact with.
Of course, that's completely just conjecture. I actually believe Amazon's store will be around the same as any other in terms of the social value you get out of it, which is to say minimal at best. If people actually had meaningful value to get out of visiting marketplaces in modern times, they'd look forward to it instead of looking for how to eliminate it.
Today, retail is a near-zero-skill job that's manned by people who are either young or uneducated. When I worked retail between high school and college, I remember there being a glaring mix of people like me who were transitioning through it and lifers who'd been there for a decade or more. And you could see it in the interactions with customers. When dealing with the younger employees, customers often adopted an avuncular style that's used when dealing with people of the same class but different generation. But when I'd see people talk to the lifers, the interactions were more mechanical and less personal. It was almost as if customers felt that there wasn't any shared context and so a conversation that went beyond the immediate transaction was pointless.
I contrast this with my experiences going to farmer's markets. There, vendors are viewed much more as equals. They're largely respected and often own their own business. It's much more common to see people having conversations that feel like they're between equals than it is to see those conversations at a traditional supermarket.
I'd say there's going to be even _more_ opportunities for social interactions at grocery stores like Amazon Go.
To your point, though, the "marketplace" you're talking about is the ambiguity between the consumer and the worker, aka Marx's point about the commodity fetish. That's something that's existed since the late 1800's, though. I don't think that's going away anytime soon.
Although I can see something similar to a farmer's market run in the same format as Amazon Go. I haven't thought through all the edge cases yet, but it feels like a solvable problem.
In fact, I can't think of any staff I interact with less than a cashier at a convenience/grocery/big-box store. Except maybe toll workers, a job that is already becoming automated.
The place I interact with people the most is at a farmer's market by a large margin
I will admit though - Whole Foods and Trader Joes' employees are some of the nicest and down to earth people I've ever met. They definitely add to the experience of shopping.
But it appears that Amazon still has those type of people that will roam the store - just not cashiers. And they are probably a lot more grumpy and treated like crap, 'cuz Amazon.
Every time I shop at my favorite store, I encounter InstaCart employees more than regular shoppers.
So your comment checks that box perfectly. Whining about the death of tradition is basically the "free" square in Hacker News Bingo.
Still, though, I think Amazon's automation of the retail experience is helping to create a society where there is even less real social interaction, and I think it's a factor (if even a small one currently) in the increasing tribalism in American society.
Throughout history, "the marketplace" had been one of the major centers of interpersonal interaction, and these days for many people it's possibly to completely avoid ever having to go to the store. I'm not sure that's a great thing.