You say “paranoid technophobic Luddite” like it’s a bad thing…

The other day I went into a Blockbuster with only one intention: to rent and enjoy the timeless satire Soapdish. When I couldn’t find it in the “alphabetized” comedy section, I went to consult the clerk, mistress of all blockbusting, keeper of the almighty computerized inventory. She rapidly typed in the title, and her mouth screwed up in chagrin as she shook her head from side to side. They didn’t have it.

How serious is this? A DVD-rental-establishment not carrying Soapdish is a little bit like a bookstore not carrying King Lear. Okay, so maybe it’s more like a bookstore not carrying Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s still bad. We’re talking about the comedy that brought together Sally Field, Kevin Kline, and pre-rehab Robert Downey Jr. If the owner of this particular Blockbuster franchise had a personal problem with the movie (Who do these people think they are? I love soap operas! And Sally Field was never attractive!) and yanked it from the shelves, that would be one thing. But I’m betting that’s not what happened. I’m betting it went something like this: a computer program keeps track of all the titles in the Blockbuster inventory, and how often they get rented and therefore how much revenue the company takes in from each one. At some point, Soapdish dropped below a certain mathematically derived threshold of profitability, and this mindless piece of software flagged it for removal, so that the few inches of space it was taking up in each fine Blockbuster outlet could be reallocated to a slightly more popular film. There was no check in place, no manual override, no reasonable human being, you know, with a soul, to step in and say “hey, you know what? It might not get rented that often, but this is a really great film. We should keep it around.” It annoys me for the same reason I get angry every time I encounter one of those cars that beeps at you when you don’t put your seatbelt on. It’s like, I’m the human, you’re the machine, I have a sense of right and wrong, you don’t, I tell you what to do, not the other way around. I can almost hear the eerily smooth robotic voice intoning: that movie’s not very popular, Dave. Wouldn’t you rather watch Space Chimps? Put your seatbelt on, watch this big budget piece of shit, and shut the fuck up.

Increasingly it seems that one can only express one’s individuality in ways that are ratified by computers. I love the internet, and I obviously use it as a soapbox, but I’m not interested in doing but everything over the internet. I actually enjoy the experience of going to pick out a movie, instead of just adding it to my online queue, or going to pick out a book and then—stay with me, people—buying it in the store. “Without ever leaving home!” is a phrase that’s beginning to sound a decidedly morbid note. Why leave home at all? For that matter, why live, when I can order books and movies from the comfort of my grave?

Maybe I was so frustrated by the Blockbuster incident because that very same day I had gone into a Barnes & Noble and asked the information desk attendant to look me up a shilling shocker (witches! poison! lies!) called The Burning Court, after a short and disappointing waltz through the ever-shrinking fiction section. Eventually, the saleswoman found a record on her computer. “That’s book’s out of print,” she told me, a note of dismay in her voice. Why would anyone want to read a book that was—gasp—between editions? And what kind of insane bookstore would carry such an article? With a sinking feeling of dread and distaste, I allowed her to order the book for me over the internet from a third party, but it’s not the same. The tactile pleasure of browsing is, perhaps, all but forgotten in this convenience-driven culture. You run your finger along a row of spines, slip one out, read the back, hmmmm, no, that’s not the one you want, put it back, you can spend half an hour this way. Now it’s all simplified for you—movies are recommended by software that selects them based on other things you’ve already seen and liked, so there’s absolutely no chance you might ever see something that would actually blow your mind.

I know my complaint isn’t new, and I found in editing this that I had to work hard to avoid sounding crotchety, even senile. I’ve never been that big on technology—at least not in all its bizarre and marvelous new manifestations. While I do my best thinking at a keyboard and lovingly embrace the internet as a medium of information exchange, I will never own an ipod, or a cell phone that’s anything but just that. I guess the Soapdish incident brought home something that’s been bothering me for years. You walk down the street, and there are fewer and fewer independent bookstores left, fewer and fewer neighborhood video-emporia (nostalgia for the local video palace is the theme of Michel Gondry’s film Be Kind Rewind, skewered with pitiless skill by our own Elliott Feedore). So you walk into a Borders or a Blockbuster, and what you see depresses you even more: fewer and fewer choices—fewer real books, fewer movies that aren’t new releases. I don’t know what to do about it except wish—that our economy was a little more forgiving, so that small businesses that provided a valuable community service (like stocking outré and relatively unpopular media) could afford to keep their doors open. And of course, when I can, continue to patronize places like the Video Room, the corner movie Mecca in my home zip code, where the chief clerk is a cranky balding dude with a massive dent in his forehead, who will nakedly despise you if you rent movies he doesn’t like.

The startling bareness of bookstore shelves is a small piece of a huge, indeterminate, and by no means recent, cultural shift. It triggers the paranoiac in me, the part that’s watched Bladerunner and The Matrix and Terminator a few too many times. Of course I don’t actually think that machines will become self-aware, raise armies and take over the world—but it bothers me that we’ve come so close to living as if they already had, almost without noticing. How much of our choice, our free will—which is the only thing we have—we’ve cheerfully turned over to Deep Thought and Hal. For fun, let’s make a list of things human beings can do that robots can’t:

1)      Be ironic. Machines are always in deadly earnest—they never have a sense of humor about themselves

2)      Make improbable chess moves…oh, wait…

3)      Drop acid (but it’s only a matter of time)

4)      Tell that Soapdish is a good movie.

‘nuff said. Oh, that’s number five—adorably shorten words.