From the look on the guy’s face, I was probably the 50th person to be so annoying. There we were in our local DVD shop, a little cave, lovingly curated, where you could rent a Kubrick or a Kurosawa or, God help you, Sex and and the City 2. It was full of bin liners and empty shelves. It was closing down.
“Oh, this is so sad,” I said to the man who ran it. “We love this place.”
My 14-year-old is film mad and going through her version of the canon, from Fight Club to Heathers. However, what had my love of this shop really amounted to? We are no longer regulars, as we download most films at home these days. My heart might have been in the right place, but my wallet was not.
Illustration: Yusha
Everything in the shop was being sold off for ￡0.50 (US$0.78). What is the actual value of a Billy Wilder film? ￡0.50. Or Howard Hawks? ￡0.50. Or look, here’s Bridesmaids? ￡0.50. The Godfather Part II? ￡0.50. A Matter of Life and Death? ￡0.50.
Life-changing movies, pinnacles of cinema, now cost less than a bag of artificially sweetened popcorn. The most spectacular of dreams at knock-off prices. Such is modern life. Genius is easy to locate, but the ways in which it is delivered have changed so fast that obsolete versions of them are worthless.
Downloads have killed DVDs just as DVDs killed videos, and many of us now have shelves of unusable collections of music, movies and homemade films of our children growing up that we would have to reformat to watch. So we never do. Few get misty-eyed about silver discs, now unreadable. The affection for vinyl endures, the very smell of it; or old cassettes because of their physicality. Remember unsquiggling them with a pencil and the endless hours compiling mix tapes for friends? These were labors of love that took longer to make than to play.
Yet my nostalgia is itself counterfeit. The small record shops and bookshops that I would like to see continue to exist, I rarely visit.
“I shop, therefore I am” has now become: “I shop online, therefore I am a hypocrite.”
I love a wheeze-inducing, dusty old bookshop but, too often, I need something fast. I can get it on Kindle in half an hour. Just yesterday, Amazon Prime was offering me all sorts of deals, mostly involving more remote controls that I will not be able to work, in an effort to whip up another Black Friday — another imported holiday of mass consumption.
The piles of CDs missing cases or labels that I cannot quite throw away lie in my house gathering dust, along with all the other things that were the future once. A fax machine is a fossil. Anyone older than 35 has already amassed a collection of “techno relics.” These inanimate objects remind us that we move with the times.
However, what of the people whose skills now also belong to another age? When the skilled working class lost jobs, not simply through technology but via the undercutting of wages through globalization, the middle classes were not sympathetic, simply boasting of how their eastern European builders were doing such a cheap loft extension. When manufacturing was destroyed, it was seen as inevitable. Now that automation is hitting all kinds of middle-class jobs, there are howls of anguish. Jobs in law, medicine and accounting are going.
We might laugh at talking automated teller machines given names such as Sally or Jake. However, will we laugh when there are no more medical receptionists and you just key your details into a computer? No staff in our train stations? No cashiers because we pay on our smartphones ? Everything is cheaper — of course it is, when you factor out humans and their ridiculous demands for toilet breaks and a living wage — which is what we like, surely?
The end of job security has an upside, too. Technology enables us to produce as well as consume. We can rent our homes out on Airbnb. We can all become minicab drivers via Uber. This digital workforce chooses it own hours but works them for huge, tax-avoiding companies. However, is Uber cheaper and more convenient than black cabs or minicabs? Yes.
Still, the old notion that automation would lead to a world where we did not have to work so much appears misguided. Instead, those with jobs are working longer hours with no security, while others have been made redundant and are flailing. The value of the social has plummeted. We are super-connected, but there is no more small-talk in shops, at the bank, when choosing a film to watch.
The female robot voice reminds me of this as I daydream at the supermarket self-checkout and wish I had gone to the DVD shop more — and now those people do not have jobs.
“Unexpected item in the bagging area,” it intones, but I cannot work out what it is.
Except this unexpected item has no price and no barcode.
It is loss.
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