"If you can interact with the thing you are investigating in such a way that you can determine . . . that it is questioning you back, then you have something real."*
1
Imagine you are not from Mars and most days you still have your wits about you. You enter an establishment and suddenly you have no idea. Where are you? Why are you here? What is this place? Nothing clicks. Nothing makes sense. Mind a blank. Another one of those damn moments, hey?
Before the next logical step gains traction across your mind's slippery surface, or you can read the menu on the wall--number, item, price in three columns across, three rows down--a greeting promises to save your sorry face. Without your giving a hint of bewilder--'cause you've really done this many times before--you see the smile behind the counter as it begins to ask all the right questions in binary if distant fashion. You think, I can manage this.
Smile: "Burger or cheeseburger?"
"Cheeseburger."
"Everything on that [or not]?"
"Hmm. Everything."
"Lettuce and tomato?"
This is a binary question?
"Hmm. Yes."
"Mustard and ketchup?"
Let's break this one down.
"Mustard, yes. No ketchup."
"Soda, shake?"
Must be a variation of the classic binary form.
"Shake."
"Flavor?"
Clever answer needed.
"What have you got?"
"Chocolate or vanilla."
"Vanilla."
"Small, medium, or large?"
I'm getting the hang of this. Choose one of three. No brainer.
"Small, thanks."
Whew. I have my wits about me. I am hungry!
"Would you like fries with that?"
Fortunately, the smile behind the counter has been helpful, but appears as if from plastic planet unknown and apparently has limited wits. But no matter, right?
Now listen. Yes, senior moments do happen to people of all ages. Notwithstanding other challenges, most people can usually tell when they are on Earth in a burger joint in the US. Pretty difficult to lose a sense of the chapter you are reading and the page you are on in the circulinear plot that goes from hunger to not and then back again daily several times with almost clock-like regularity. The world is a friendly place, and should be, yes. But do you need help surviving daily routines in a landscape filled with chained commercial choices? a life filled with certainties about what to do and how to handle--the ordinary?
Given full knowledge and awareness of self and context, when asked if you'd like fries with that, you can politely think to yourself: If I had wanted fries, I would have ordered them. No, thanks, I know this is a burger place, I wanted a burger and shake. I told you what I wanted. I've ordered.
"No. That's it."
But do you understand what I have ordered?
She repeats for confirmation, as if commanding mission control, life or death in the balance. But she doesn't deliver her lines with that much critical mission intensity. Hmm. More like ho-hum.
"Yep, you got it."
You pay, get your food, eat it, probably too fast, leave, reach your car in the parking lot, get behind the wheel, and feel as if you have just ingested a heavy stone from some asteroid.
2
I am experienced shopper for food. Food has been an important staple my whole life. As far back as I can remember. I am pretty sure that before I can even remember, it must have been so.
I used to go with my mother to the Food Mart. She would hunt and gather what our family needed. I may have helped or just messed around. She paid and someone would help her load the paper bags into the back of the station wagon. I think I learned the grocery store routine and how to find things pretty early on. Like learning to speak my native tongue well enough to understand and be understood day in and day out now, come to think of it, for many, many years.. Came pretty naturally without lessons and teachers, and mostly without tests of my intelligence and training sessions for workaday survival skills.
During my single years and multiple marriages, I have shopped for food, mostly at Safeway, there being few other choices from the early 60s on in my part of the woods. Today I am regularly asked in the checkout line at this store if I found everything I was looking for. Huh?
I must be from Mars. So when did grocery shopping become other than a normal hunt-and-gather situation with the usual, nicely ordered and labeled dead flora and fauna to pick from? Because I am older, do I look lost or more stupid? unqualified to find what I am looking for and have been able to find for over fifty years? Has the stock become so replete and diversified that most of what I want is hidden from view?
Oh, they are asking the same questions of most everyone. Why didn't they ask the kids ahead of me in line? I guess they assume nowadays that all generations above three feet five need guidance if not direct aid. And I just thought those three employees on the aisle with the noodles and tomato sauce were demented, or illiterate,** when they asked if I was finding what I was looking for. What was I missing? What else was there to find besides spaghetti fixin's? Maybe this is the never land of the much, much more?
"How do you wish to pay for that?"
"Oh, sorry. Bit of a senior moment."
3
Buying a car from a dealer has always been a trip. For many years now the line has been, either early or late in the game, "What can I do to earn your business?"
Like I am going to be the employer and he is going to get paid by me for doing something I want to employ him for. This is to formalize a labor relationship I didn't bargain for. After all, I just want some transportation. And now I have to supervise this wannabe wage-earner? Do I have to withhold something so I don't get into trouble with the SS admin and IRS? Do I automatically contribute to his health plan and retirement, or can he opt not to have these? Surely he will want both.
I bought a new car a few years ago. I told the salesman what I wanted exactly: Simplest, least expensive model X you've got. He was young, and after getting my answer to electric windows or not, got the message. Not fully trained or automated, I guessed.
At the end after I had bought the car and was about to get in and drive away, he said I had not given him the chance to tell me all the great features the car had. I let him have his ten minutes. I drove away.
He is a goner. The next guy will get that spiel up front, and off to another planet we'll travel to the programming of?
4
Who is it who writes these scripts? What kind of supervisor makes each employee say the same thing? Are teachers educating kids or just training them? Is consumer culture and the products on offer so obscure that we have to be led from deciding why we are in a given place to what to buy, concluding the quest finally with the question of whether we got what we were looking for? Not only that, do we need to be told by the warning on the cup that the coffee is hot, in the restroom that it is hygienic to wash your hands before leaving, in the theater to turn your cell phone off--it will disturb others trying to listen to the music and the hear words spoken by the actors on the screen?
Plodding, frickin' didacticism re the self evident, hey?
Forget senior demure for a moment, which is not pointing out the bleeding obvious to the robot in front of you, the one with the inert matter between its anthropomorphized ears. If you still have your wits about you, regardless of your age, for fun, hack the program.
Ask the girl behind the counter if she had been told to ask if you wanted fries with that. See what she says. Her answer might be something like, "Yes, we are told to say that." I whoa myself each time I hear this and consider what it might mean--like maybe there is indeed a big brother behind the scenes somewhere. Is he watching some monitor that uses that camera up in the corner? Plus, how will she and her children cope in the world she is creating?
Ask the cheeky checkout clerk at the grocery store with the ever-growing database of names and purchase preferences, since s/he now knows your name and you are fast friends, looking forward to seeing each other again, perhaps during your next GSSE (grocery store shopping experience): "I can see your name is Paul on your nametag. But what is your last name? I am filling up a database myself of [insert adjective] clerks I should know in the shops so I can [insert verb] them on the street. Oh, and by the way, what is the first and last names of your manager here? I need that information too."
The car guy is more of a challenge. After all you shouldn't have to talk to these guys too often. And with the Internet, maybe you don't have to talk with them at all. But if you find yourself found on the car lot darting between the chunky bits in stock so as not to be seen, and you are approached by the guy who has been stalking you since you set your tentative big toe on the property with the intent of not having to deal with a salesman at all--you just wanted to look--you'll need something to crack the Truman Show stratosphere. Prepare your hack ahead of time. Certainty of its use can almost be guaranteed.
"How can I earn your business?"
"I need a car. You're hired to find it around here somewhere for me. But there will be no stock options or health insurance."
If he says no problem, that they don't offer him those benefits here anyway, you've probably cracked the stratosphere. But my guess is he won't.
On second thought. You'd better not. There is surely a sign somewhere that demure is the prefer, and social hacking is illegal and likely to cause unrest, or at least disrupt the orderly flow of commerce.
Is the gene pool now in constant and unrecoverable entropy, sliding down or backwards? Are we under some mandate to make a replica of a plastic utopia some bright person dreamed up? Who is ordering this universe and has invaded US? Can someone answer me other than, "Yes, we are told to say that," which actually doesn't even follow from my question?
Okay, okay. Remember, demure. Damn moments, hey? So scratch that last question.
_____
* Don Ihde in a November 14, 2000 interview. http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/dihde/articles/ihde_interview.htmlIncluded here to connect this writing to noematics. There are at least four variations of the demure.
** Language is at the heart of what is experienced and how. Thus this note that more and more, the continuous is being used for the simple present or past tenses in American English.
