The other evening, following a long and wide-ranging discussion that at times bordered dangerously on argument, Alli and I came to the unified decision that we would, after all, watch Season 2 of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. (We’re both good negotiators, but she’s better.) The agreement was hard-earned, but the next step seemed easy enough: Alli turned on our Roku Smart TV, opened the Disney+ app, and navigated, via a couple of quick clicks, to the prominent option to buy a monthly Disney+ subscription. We were already logged into the app and had previously let our subscription expire; we figured we’d just re-up it for a month to watch the show.
“Would you like to re-subscribe to Disney+?” asked the screen. Alli clicked the button to signify yes.
To her surprise—she’d expected to be taken right through to the Disney+ streaming catalogue—Alli found herself faced with two additional large white buttons. This set prompted her to choose between a standard Disney+ subscription that included ads and a costlier Disney+ subscription, from which all ads were removed, that should’ve been called Disney+ Plus but was instead called Disney+ Premium. After a shorter and slightly calmer discussion (during which we determined that an extra $7, while obviously kind of a ripoff, was probably still worth the removal of five ad breaks from a half-hour program), Alli clicked the button to select Disney+ Premium.
Imagine her consternation when, at this late stage, she found herself confronted with a third set of buttons. “Choose your membership plan,” suggested the screen in what seemed a vaguely threatening tone. At this point, there were two perfectly understandable options to choose from: an annual plan that cost $189.89 for 365 days, and a monthly plan that cost $18.99 for 30 days. But no longer were the buttons white—now they were different shades of blue, one a mesmerizing, deep-sea navy, the other a sort of shimmering aquamarine.
I saw the movement of Alli’s finger on the remote before I had time to scream.
She clicked the remote, assuming that the monthly plan was selected, while I gurgled like a gagged prisoner who knows they’re too late to warn the hero from springing the trap. “Congratulations!” the screen told us smugly. “You’ve subscribed to the Disney+ Premium Annual Plan.” I checked our PNC banking app. Sure enough, we’d immediately been charged $201.40—the full price of the annual plan plus tax, or, as I like to think of it, Disney+ Plus plus. We had initially wanted (and been prompted) to pay $13. We’d ended up paying more than 15 times that.
We wanted a refund. Getting one, it turned out, was an incredibly complicated process, roughly on the same intellectual plane as the project of decoding the human genome. I won’t give you the play-by-play of this part, but the short version is that our purchase was difficult to reverse, since we’d made it through our Roku TV account via an Apple Pay method that was tied to an ancient email address in order to access our Disney+ profile, itself tied to yet another old email account. Santiago, the divinely patient customer support representative who was assigned to our troublesome case, spent an eternity guiding us through the untangling of these many, thick-knotted strings.
Two hours after our ten-second purchase, we got our money back.
Convenience is a fundamental dogma of modern life.
At its essence, convenience is ease—the removal of pain and effort without the forfeit of results. It’s an assumed right that’s promised by our technoreligion, and often, it’s exactly what our technology delivers. We can push a few buttons and be entertained. We can, with media or medicine, remove some of our pain. We can get what we want without much work. We can watch lavishly produced, poorly acted TV shows from our couch, then order Pad Thai and complain if it’s not delivered in 30 minutes. We can have almost anything, almost without thinking, with mostly frictionless ease.
But there is a tradeoff. Underneath our life of convenience, something groans in the deep. It only makes sense: To remove the friction between objects, you have to remove them from each other. When you create this separation, you open a gap that must be filled. We have filled it with machines.
We often mistake convenience for simplicity. Its true consequence is complexity. Ordering a pair of shoes on Amazon appears simple; fulfilling an Amazon order is anything but. Underneath the thin film of our push-button screens is a vast, whirring world of meshed machines that no single person can fully trace out, much less fully control. Most of the time, we float on its surface, content to let the current carry us where it will. But every so often, when we determine we’d like to paddle in a different direction—to avoid, for instance, paying a $201.40 charge for a year of Disney+ Premium—we get a sense of the real tumult moving beneath us. There are five different accounts involved in buying a single streaming subscription; there are billions and billions of wires beneath each takeout order.
This is convenience: That you have more access than ever to material surplus with less control than ever over its production, that you are both closer to wealth and farther back from its source. Your entertainment, your food, your relationships—all of it is available to you whenever you want it, but only if it’s represented and mediated by technology. You can hold your phone an inch from your face, but separating your face from YouTube is a pulsing, intricate, and massive web of interconnected parts, people, wires, and algorithms, all twined together and finely dialed down to the atom so that the right thing reaches your eyes at the right time. Between you and Pad Thai takeout are unknown acres of factory farms and delivery trucks, dead animals you’ll never see and logistics systems you wouldn’t understand if you did. You don’t need to understand; you only need to click a button.
If all of this makes you anxious, you’re in company with Wendell Berry, who thinks the reaction is a healthy one. Modern man, he writes in The Unsettling of America, “ought to be anxious, because he is helpless. That he is dependent upon so many specialists, the beneficiary of so much expert help, can only mean that he is a captive, a potential victim.” For Berry, peace comes not by relying on our machines, but by mainly abandoning them. He recommends living as simply as possible, which happens to be terribly inconvenient.
Unsurprisingly, he’s in the small minority. Most of us have embraced the great promise of the technoreligion and our God-given right of convenience. We can bear with the occasional rattle from the machine behind the curtain because our lives are getting easier all the time.
Still, an easy life is only one side of it. Ease without accomplishment is meaningless. We don’t just want the removal of pain and friction; we want more and better results, too. We want to have our cake and eat it, too.
We want power.
Marshall McLuhan knew this well. He viewed all technology as some extension of human capability—basically, as a means to more power. Cars, to his thinking, are an extension of our ability to walk and run; telephones are an extension of our ability to hear; computers are an extension of our ability to think. I generally agree with him. The point that strikes me as most interesting in his analysis (and most relevant to the ideas of this essay) is his spatial metaphor of extension.
It carries echoes of earlier eras: Archimedes supposedly boasted that all he needed to move the world was a good fulcrum and a long-enough lever. The realities of physics aside, it’s funny to picture the sheer distance his claim suggests; I’m no classical physicist, but I’d imagine that, in order to get the world to budge, you’d need a lever that would put you somewhere out past Pluto. If McLuhan is right, and technology extends human capacity—pushes it further out past our puny physical bodies—then with levers as with all technology: Power increases with separation.
This is only an analogy, of course. But it’s interesting how easily spatial metaphors attach themselves to the concept of power. A more powerful bomb is one with a bigger blast radius—where the explosion goes farther from its source. A more powerful car covers a greater distance more quickly. A tyrant is more powerful depending on how far above his subjects he is. Power, in essence, is the ability to accomplish an effect, and the rule seems to be that it grows in proportion to distance. Put simply, the longer a lever, the more powerful it is, and the farther you are from what’s on the other end.
More power grants us the ability to accomplish greater and greater effects, while simultaneously removing us farther and further from the objects upon which we’re acting. It’s this distance that makes terrible things not only easy to accomplish, but easy to stomach. It’s why we’re fine wasting trillions of gallons of water to generate AI videos of dead celebrities. It’s why we order clothes produced in sweatshops and complain about the quality of the fabric. It’s not that we don’t care about the world; it’s that we’re too far away to see it.
Once you see this principle of power, it’s easy to see it in technology. Distance is the rule of the day. Friends become faces on a screen. Miles become nothing; we have, in practice, removed whole swaths of the earth between one airport and the next. We’ve cut ourselves off from the weather with our wonderful air conditioning and heating units. We’ve cordoned our exercise out of normal life and into tightly packed, brightly lit boxes, where we can run without moving and pick things up without purpose. The motion of separation is the same in power and convenience because the two promises are sides of the same coin. As technology increases our power over reality—as it increasingly mediates our reality—it also separates us more and more from it. Then it fills the gap.
We are increasingly frictionless, increasingly isolated, increasingly powerful. We’ve withdrawn from reality, pulled ourselves farther and farther back from it, stretched it out like a rubber band. One day, the technoreligion promises, our tie to nature will snap altogether. We will extend our own consciousness out past the point where we can still look back and see it. Then we’ll really be free.
I imagine we’ll still be charged subscription plans, though.
