Aren't You Tired of This Yet?

A few years ago, there was a television commercial I couldn't stop thinking about. Maybe you saw it on one of the various streaming services we all pay for. Which totally makes sense, because of course I want to pay someone to show me advertisements some one else paid them to air. Remember how streaming services were going to be amazing, better and cheaper than cable? Glad we all bought into that and kept buying into it just so the Ellisons could buy everything, including all of the entertainment industry and at least one Hawaiian island, and trap us all in this hell together.

Anyway, the ad was for a Google product called Google Shopping, a product I do not use. The premise of Google Shopping seemed pretty straightforward: You search for a thing to buy online, compare and track prices from different stores, and then when the price is finally right for you, you buy it. It's one of those products that are positioned as super helpful, solving a real problem for all us normie non-rich folks looking to save money, when really it's solving a bunch of problems the industry itself has created—price inflation and market control via the world's largest retailer, a constant sense of overwhelm and distraction thanks to all the other tech companies, a general sense that we are trapped in a late capitalist strip mall where even your 12-year-old niece is marketing lip gloss for free to her peers. These are the problems the tech industry is best at solving. Soon they will offer a solution that solves the problems caused by using AI, just as soon as they figure out how to get AI to help them solve it.

Anyway, there were a number of commercials for Google Shopping. One showed a guy watching a famous athlete wearing a stylish outfit and carrying a covetable bag; he image searched the bag and bought it thanks to Google Shopping. Another showed a college kid crushing on a girl in his friend group. The girl’s headphones were crummy so he found new headphones online, tracked the right pair until they were on sale, then bought and gave them to her, allowing them to enjoy one another's company in true Gen Z style: Sitting side-by-side and not interacting.

But neither of those were the ad I couldn't stop thinking about.

For me, it was the one with the toaster oven, set to The Human Beinz's version of “Nobody But Me,” as song released in 1967. I've pasted the ad below, but let me describe it for you: There’s a dad in a beautiful, if casual and homey, kitchen. He puts something in an old toaster oven, but one of the knobs falls off. His kids try to defrost and bake a frozen pizza in the toaster oven, but it stays so frozen they can bang it on the garbage can; one kid yells “Daaaaaaaaad!” His wife has something already in the toaster oven, which catches fire. Dad runs in with a panicked expression as she’s fanning the smoke from the now-open toaster oven, and she gives him a sigh and an unambiguously annoyed look.

Jesus, dad. How could you let your family down like this?

Dad nods, knowing both that it’s time and that there’s only one solution: A Google search. Dad looks up “shop toaster oven deals,” because a toaster oven emergency doesn’t mean we can’t also be price conscious. Voilà, a selection of choices including one nice Breville that is 20% off. A click of the button and suddenly there’s dad, pulling a perfectly reheated frozen pizza out of the oven for his kids, walking through the kitchen in the background. Triumphant, dad struts toward the viewer and heads off camera, finally the hero in his own home again.

A colorful, cheerful, silly commercial; a play on all the colorful, cheerful, silly commercials that have come before it, except this time that old trope of mom coming to save the day in the kitchen is turned on its head. It’s so innocuous, so dumb! And yet here I am writing about it, because I found—and still find—it utterly depressing.

There are multiple reasons for this. First is the most obvious: Capitalism. Yes, I know, capitalism wants us to keep spending. Capitalism has turned once-reliable appliances into junk that need replacing every three years. Capitalism is playing with the trope so you feel in on the joke and feel better about using the product. Capitalism (or maybe some of you think it’s some other -isms) is out here telling dad that what really makes him a hero is getting his shit together and buying a toaster oven.

Then of course there are distraction and fatigue. How often do I go online to do something I want to do, maybe see something I want to read or watch, and then immediately get distracted by some dumb garbage that is, more often than not, selling me something? Judging by the amount of unnecessary shit in my house, pretty frequently! As I have mentioned before, I am a marketer's dream. All you have to do is mention something, say it's cool, say that a lot of people want it, and suddenly there I am, thinking about buying it when five minutes ago I didn't even know it existed. My hard-earned, late-in-life self-awareness (it's called growth!) has been a bulwark of sorts against this never-ending tide of stuff washing upon my shores, sure. But I am a mere mortal! I cannot resist every time!

Plus I am tired. I am so tired of learning about a new thing I need, a new thing that will really change my life, the one that will do the trick. The other day I was cleaning out a closet and I found my Kate McLeod Body Stone that I absolutely had to have a few years ago when everyone told me I had to have it. It's an extremely nice product! I have used it four times. So when I'm on social media, or reading someone's newsletter, or farting around on the web, and I see lymphatic drainage brushes and red-light therapy masks, or the new loafers that are so totally different from the old loafers, or a pillow to put on your face (for gentle pressure) that costs :checks notes: $209, or a sweatshirt that costs $600, do you know what I think? I think: This has to stop. I can't be the only one who's exhausted, and who finds all this so relentlessly hollow. As much as I wish I could go to some of these unbelievable resorts that influencers go to for free—and I do!!! please if you run a fancy resort, gift me a trip! I will take it! I have no pride or shame!!—I also think "is this all you're doing with your life? Is this all that matters to you? Don't you feel so empty?"

Because you know what that Google Shopping toaster ad made me think about most of all? Diminishment. Human beings (or Human Being) and diminishment.

Guys, how did we get here? How did the internet, the wide open, vast landscape of human potential and of social reinvention end up here, where we're tracking the price of toasters? These are rhetorical questions. I know how we ended up here. I'm simply sad about it. We had this unfathomably incredible continent laid out before us, populated with existing communities guardians of digital land, and much like great swaths of America, we steamrolled right over those and built suburbs, Las Vegas, and roadside strip malls filled with celebrity avatars and GenAI bots telling people to kill themselves.

Humans are rife with frailty, which is what sets us apart from bots and GenAI. They have their weaknesses, but frailty is not among them. Nor is distraction. We are so easily distracted. Our horizons shrink so quickly, without us even noticing. Oh wow, I can connect with people who share my interests and learn to build communities with them? That is so cool... wait this toaster is ON SALE? How often we’ve been tricked into buying the toaster at the expense of something greater. We complain and fret about the algorithm and AI, and we'll complain about whatever new technological behemoth threatens to crush us next year. But that’s fixating on the technology, just like the tech industry itself does. There is something deeper – maybe even deeper than capitalism! – that keeps us obsessed with technology, makes us willing to subjugate ourselves when it's pressed upon us relentlessly, even as we know it threatens our own existence. It’s not simply that an algorithm chooses for us, it’s that someone is driven to build it and the rest of us can’t stay away from it.

I think, when it comes down to it, that it’s because there is only one thing the tech industry cannot solve, and this is the human condition, in all its complexities. It can disrupt the human condition, so it does so over and over. It can worsen it, or (very rarely) help improve it. It can connect people, but it can’t solve some the deepest, most fundamental problems human beings have. And I think that’s why Google, the world’s most powerful search engine and one of the world’s most powerful companies, wants to distract you with a new toaster or a cool bag you saw a football player carrying. It wants you to forget, momentarily, that you have those other bigger, realer, fundamentally insoluble problems, the ones humans have had since time immemorial and will always have. Somehow we have to make peace with this. Humans always been awful, easily swayed and distracted, drawn to terrible things, willing to do pretty awful things to one another. But humans have also shown themselves to be capable of great beauty and kindness, resilience and sacrifice. How do we come to terms with this contraction and make the best of it? Not using technology, that's for sure.

Until next Wednesday.

Lx