There’s an app for that: The punchline of our age. We have outsourced our most basic needs to the gleaming oblongs in our pockets. Whatever you need to do, eat, get, fix or have sex with, let your smartphone take the slack. Every desire is on demand.
However, is it true? To put our brave new world through its paces, I am spending an entire day living exclusively through on-demand mobile service apps to see what our lives might be like in the near-future. Spoiler: quite weird.
At 7am I am woken by a 60-second phone call from a stranger, Dylan — in the US, judging by his accent. This is Wakie, a community of people who act as each other’s alarm clocks.
Illustration: Yusha
“I’m actually Canadian,” Dylan says. “Wake up.”
“Sorry,” I reply. “I don’t mean I’m sorry you’re from Canada,” I add groggily.
Mild awkwardness is a great wake-up call, and 30 seconds later I am out of bed.
First, let’s get work off the table. I browse People Per Hour, a skills shop in which you can commission experienced freelancers, or “hourlies,” at knock-down rates.
“Can you write my article for me?” I type. In short, yes. In addition to photographers, graphic designers and coders, there are writers who will research and write 600-word articles for between ￡10 and ￡20 (US$15-30). As a writer, I know this is too cheap; I feel faint stirrings of ethical unease. I commission some background research from Kuru, a philosophy, politics and economics graduate and copywriter, and move on.
I need a new home for the day. Many startups initially run services from central London before expanding, so that is where I should be. On Airbnb’s app I choose a luxurious-looking studio flat in Bloomsbury that will be my base of operations. I request an Uber, and I am away. All too easy.
Ah yes, Uber. Where it all started. Marketed as “everyone’s private driver,” it offers a marriage of convenience and elitism at an affordable price. It is an unbeatable package — it is a market leader, with a business valued at US$40 billion. Yet Uber is also a market leader in controversy. Taxi drivers are up in arms about its monopoly, it is dogged by reports of sexual harassment by drivers and last year a senior executive suggested snooping on users’ private records to conduct smear-retaliations against journalists who publicly criticize it.
So that is not great.
My driver, Dikembe, is originally from the Republic of the Congo, and has lived here 20 years. He has been an Uber driver for a month, and it works for him. “Uber is good. It’s a platform. I’m my own boss, in partnership with them. I choose my hours; I get more jobs this way. I do have to clean the car every few days — everything is about keeping your ratings high. But it’s good.”
What is less good is my new home for the day. I had forgotten the closer you get to central London, the smaller acceptable living spaces become. I am in WC1, so the room feels roughly the same dimensions as my coffin. It is underground, too. The phone reception is terrible.
Time to talk grooming. I am looking at Priv, a beautician on-demand service. The app is very pink. Bodily intimacies are normalized within external settings, like a salon. What is it like to have a stranger come to your house and shave you? Or give you a massage, or menicure? “Masseur” and “menicure” are both words that make me feel funny, so I opt for a haircut.
An hour later Tania raps at the door and enters, a ball of energy. “I couldn’t find it! I walked in a big circle for 40 minutes. I don’t mind walking. I’m no girly girl, I can squat 100kg — but not for an hour, you know? You want a haircut, right?” Tania is, in her own words, “a crazy Brazilian” — which also sounds like a procedure you can get on the app.
Tania lays out her equipment. There is no chair in the room, so I sit on my suitcase while she snips away talkatively. Priv is a huge operation in the US, she tells me, and growing here.
“Having a beauty treatment in your home, it’s more pampering. People like that,” she tells me. Tania also does on-demand fitness classes and makeup sessions — one of her clients is Amy Willerton, a former Miss England. I share a hairdresser with Miss England.
I wonder what else is possible with this app stuff. Could I get a crown, I wonder. Can I have a lobster delivered to me? I am drunk on power and possibility, absolutely corrupted.
There is an app for that. Bizzby is a wide-ranging personnel service which sends “heroes” to your aid. A hero will fetch or do almost anything you want them to — a Sunday paper, a dreidel (a Jewish four-sided spinning top), a dog that speaks Aramaic... Maybe not that, but it is probably a matter of time. Within an hour, a Romanian named Lucia is at my door, asking what I need.
The room is getting quite crowded now.
“You want... a crown?” It does feel silly asking this in person rather than typing it.
“Just a toy one,” I say, reasonably.
This is Lucia’s first hero assignment. Luckily she finds rampant megalomania funny. “Most people need help moving house or arranging a wardrobe,” she says. “You’re silly.”
For my dinner, I use Jinn. It promises to have anything you want, from any restaurant or store, delivered to your door within an hour. I order a crustacean and chips from the restaurant Burger & Lobster. Lucia is still looking up crowns. Tania knows a place in Camden and tells her how to get there. “Or I have a carnival headdress in my house. Big feathers.”
My thoughts turn to domesticity. In all probability the future will be a nightmare world of resource scarcity and climate-change disasters, but also probably less housework. However, until we get robot butlers, apps such as Hassle let you book visits from a local cleaner, while door-to-door services like Laundrapp and Zipjet can take care of your washing. I need something quicker. I get back on Bizzby and request someone to do my ironing.
Tania leaves; Lucia returns. She has done brilliantly and we have a little coronation ceremony with me still sitting on my suitcase. It is like the madness of King George. A courier turns up halfway through with my lobster. I really am living the dream.
Zuhra from Bizzby arrives to what must look like a strip-lit, basement-based breakdown. Like the others, she checks in with her employer so they know where she is. I only have one shirt to iron. She laughs at me, which I am getting used to.
Zuhra is from Uzbekistan — I have never met anyone from Uzbekistan — and has a degree in psychology. She was due to open a summer camp in Ukraine, to teach children English, but then the region’s current conflict started. “So we couldn’t do it. Money doesn’t love me, but God loves me.”
I feel ashamed, sitting here in a crown, eating lobster, living off my phone. I put them aside and let the food go cold. Zuhra tells me about her life, how she set up a theater company, but the hard-hitting plays she was interested in did not find an audience. Zuhra enjoys her work, she says. “I like seeing different people every day.”
She looks at the room. “Have you been to prison?” she twinkles. “You’d find it interesting. Ha ha.”
After she leaves, I sit in my newly pressed shirt. It is time for the bit of the experiment I have been dreading. Is it possible to befriend a total stranger through an app and meet them for a drink? I am not allowed to have sex with any of these people, which actually makes this harder. “You don’t know me, but how about a friendly drink?” sounds way creepier than: “Wan2bone?”
Still, in I plunge. WhosHere, Omegle, Skout are all apps designed to help you chat with strangers. They are colorful, like an E numbers-induced migraine, with incomprehensible pop-up ads every few seconds. They hurt my eyes and offend my soul. I set up profiles and wait. On Skout I quickly start receiving alerts.
“Te pareces a Brus wilis” a woman in Spain writes to me, which I do not understand on a number of levels. December Ladyboy winks at me from Thailand.
I get a message from Exequiel, who seems the best bet.
“How are you?” he asks.
“I’m fine!” I type back excitably. “Heading out for a quick drink. Are you in town?”
“Yes,” he replies. “In the Philippines.”
It is evening and I am running out of time. I decide to hit the bar alone. I look for a venue which supports BarPass, an app which lets you order drinks in advance.
There are only about five options open, but the bar Holborn Grind is not too far away. I hop in an Uber and dip a cautious toe into dating apps to see if anyone is nearby.
I get a few matches on Tinder, but scattershot requests for an immediate drink, with the caveat that “sex is not on the table,” are not the caramel-dipped charm offensive you might imagine. What about Grindr? I am not gay, but I am voluntarily drinking in a bar called Grind. Maybe that counts? I am definitely not thinking straight, at any rate. BarPass is not working either. I walk up to the counter and ask them how to make it work, which sort of defeats the point. They have never heard of it.
I stare at corrugated torsos and good hair and single entendre usernames on Grindr. What the actual hell am I doing trying to pick up gay men to not have sex with? This is ludicrous. I am quite relieved it is hard to pick up human strangers. I decide to pack it in.
Leaving, I pass a group of friends loudly applauding a cocktail barman. I ask one of them, a 23-year-old photographer named Monwar, if he met any of them online.
“People should use their phones less,” he says. “You don’t really meet a person that way, you know?”
In the cab home I get chatting to my driver. Anwar is from Bangladesh and has been an Uber driver for three weeks. He is feeling the pinch of Uber’s rock-bottom prices. He makes ￡4 an hour. He would make a few more with Addison Lee, but they only take experienced drivers.
“I’m a family man and my daughter is disabled,” he says. “There’s no maximum limit on the hours I can work, as long as I’m not tired. But I don’t want to be on the road all the time.”
I feel weirdly tired, though I have had everything done for me all day. What has surprised me is how un-anonymous the impact of technology can be, enabling real encounters, putting faces to our service economy — Congo, Brazil, Romania, Ukraine, Bangladesh. However, capitalist technology emancipates in one direction: Greater convenience for one section of society entails inconvenience in another.
My phone vibrates. Kuru’s article has arrived. It is well researched and readable, and one section jumps out: “On-demand mobile service apps leverage smartphone technology, economies of scale and reduced financial risk to offer extremely competitive pricing. Who wins? ODMs win by standing to make great profits, while customers win by saving time and money. It is the freelance workers who often assume the burden of job insecurity in return for cheap labor.”
Being driven home, having ordered a takeaway that will arrive 10 minutes after I do, I realize the costs factored into an on-demand lifestyle are not just financial but human. Access to services might be more direct than ever, but we still have to get around our conscience. I am not sure there is an app for that.
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