I always knew the 2024 US presidential elections would come down to grocery store self check outs.
I don't know that you can make that case particularly, but I do feel there's a rift opening rather wider between two sides in the digital debate.
One side, which is well represented here, is the side that views human interaction in the economy as something that ought be replaced, whenever possible (or at least convenient), by machines. The automated checkouts, cell phone first payment/restaurant menus/etc (or those table kiosk... things, that try to get you to order on them, then pay to play games on them, then pay on them, all without having to interact with a human), food delivery "apps" - basically, the world in which the technically advanced elites on their smartphones are served by the unseen workers actually making these things work. I see it as the simulation of the desired "machine future" (well predicted by the 1909 short story The Machine Stops) in which humans do not have to interact with other humans at all - and until we can fake that, well, the human machinery serving us ought stay as invisible and unnoticed as possible. One could, and some have, easily drawn parallels to the institution of slavery, in which they were to be not seen, not heard, but keep everything running. Doing it with digital technology instead does not change the attitudes of "I am to be served with minimum disruption" that our digital-first systems seem to promote.
The other side, which I am certainly more embedded in, is rejecting this and trying to get back to far more regular in person human interaction - and sees the value in interacting with actual people, not intermediated online versions of their best selves, on a regular basis. To recognize that humans are messy, and to create the space and time to do this. To do life with each other, in many ways, at a point where it is in a sense quite real to say that our children are being raised in a community, that we are (mostly) rejecting the digital intermediation, or putting it in the place where it is used to facilitate in person interactions that are the priority, etc. It requires much time, but I find it far, far more worthwhile, having rejected the previously discussed approach (and I was there for most of two decades - I have in the past very much gone for the digital first approach, I have simply measured it honestly and found it massively lacking).
I see the discussion about cashiers as simply one facet of this opening rift. But the internet will not see it. It manifests mostly in "dead internet theory" in which fewer and fewer people are bothering to post and interact online, as more and more people simply opt out of it.
This is absolutely wild, to me. Most political parties throughout history can roughly be divided into two camps: the party for the many and the party for the entrenched & powerful. And the U.S., today, is no different. And it blows my mind to think that anyone can look at the Republican Party and think "Yep. That's the people's party. Because... I feel like people who vote Democratic like automated checkout machines". What?
Let's remind ourselves of some of the highest priority items Republicans have been advocating for these past few years:
1. Letting the expanded Child Tax Credit expire, causing the rate of childhood poverty to double
2. Overturning Roe v. Wade, which especially harms poorer women without the means to leave states with medieval abortion laws
3. Loosening Child Labor laws, to allow children as young as 14 to work night shifts
4. Raising the retirement age above 70 and cutting medicare
5. More tax cuts for corporations and the 1%
6. Cut climate initiatives, like $7.8B from the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and $1.4 billion intended to tackle environmental health impacts in poor communities. An absolute gift to the oil/gas industry.
7. Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement
8. Literal insurrection, and a continued push by many states to disregard votes when convenient [1]. The built-in minority-rule advantage the Republican Party already enjoys isn't enough.
9. Expanding oil drilling on public lands
Wow, truly nothing is safe from inane culture war tribalism being pasted over the top. And of course, anyone who describes such a divide is conveniently against the side that likes slavery or hates babies or whatever.
How else would you describe the comfortable remote-ness of those who were able to smugly isolated entirely during the Covid pandemic lockdowns, on the labor of those who didn't have the capability? Their deliveries and everything else were not being done by robots, they were being done by humans who were deemed "essential" - you can draw whatever parallels you want, but I've simply picked the obvious, overtly, not regularly spoken of variety that's evident to quite a few people outside of particular bubbles.
Maybe, just maybe, dividing the world into "us vs them" and painting "them" as evil is kind of the whole problem to begin with.
Sorry, is my opinion on modern consumer tech showing through? Yes, I think "offloading everything to poorly paid gig workers who don't get any benefits or anything else" is rather hostile, and we ought not be doing that.
But I also recognize that a split is happening. I see it in daily life. So to deny that it's happening, and to not talk about it, is just as much a problem.
And, yes, it's absolutely a spectrum. But there is a divergence happening.
Ah, yes. Those smug coastal elites, hiding in their ivory towers while the lowly minions did all their chores. I'm sorry, but I think you're falling for straight up propaganda here. Again, the Republican Party exists for one reason: to further enrich the rich. This is necessarily going to be an unpopular thing to do, so they play little culture war games to distract and convince enough saps to vote against their own interest by trying to convince you your peers are your real enemy.
I lived in NYC during the height of the pandemic. My wife was an essential worker, as were many of my friends. Every evening when the hospital shift rotated, the entire city would burst into cheering, and thanking these people for everything they were doing. Non-contact, especially during this time, wasn't some "smug" thing, it was the pinnacle of respect! To not further risk infecting people who were otherwise less able to limit their exposure risk. This retconning of history is pretty vile, and I think you're down a really absurd path here, to be honest.
[1]
https://dlcc.org/press/arizona-gop-pushes-new-bill-to-override-popular-vote-in-presidential-election
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