I was in Europe (just visiting) and they immediately put me to work. At the airport, I had to check myself in and tag my own bags. At the supermarkets, I had to scan and bag my own own groceries. At the bar, I had to take your own order. They call this self-service but it's really just the customer doing free work for the owners. It's not self-service, it's self-servitude.

Consumer Labor

I have worked basically every service job and they're not easy. I worked at McDonald's when I was 14 and finger-jamming the menu was work, that's why they paid me. I worked Big Bear grocery at 15 and scanning and bagging groceries was work, that's why they paid me also. When you're doing this work for hours you definitely notice and it sucks, but when you split it up into minutes and assign it to the customer, this is somehow a convenience. But it's not. Self-service is not actually faster, it's not actually better, it's just the capitalist shaving minutes of labor from the customer to make a buck.

All the self-service economy has done is turn the register around, double the prices and call this an improvement. If you put a bunch of 14-year-olds in boxes and called them an app you would have a 'voice-activated AI agent' that actually worked and was worth a billion dollars, but now we have AI agents that don't work, registers that customers have to use themselves, and the (horrific) burgers cost 4x more. Any efficiency isn't going to the customer, it's going to the owner. They just made you their fractional laborer, and you're paying more for the privilege!

I was watching some old movies (The Maltese Falcon and original Ocean's 11) and they could just pick up a phone anywhere and get a voice activated city guide or dial anybody by name. Such a service now would be a corporation wealthier than most nations, and this was just a public utility back then. I had forgotten but I was like oh, they could do all the stuff we do, and the user experience was better. No modern technology can approach the quality of an old-school phone operator. All the technology has done is dump that labor on the user and increase the quantity, (a spiraling pattern we'll return to in -12,000 years). More people can use such services, but only because the labor is spread across that larger population. We actually just make stuff shit and make more of it, that's the basic formula.

Development

Capitalism is, really, what is says on the tin. The allocation of more and more resources to capital (ie machines). It's not called humanism for a reason. Humans are just squishy parts stuffed uncomfortably into the algorithm, and we constantly don't compute and cause errors. I've worked within the corporate world and the Satanic ideal is making money with no employees. If you just have a bunch of intellectual 'property' and/or capital machinery that spits out money that's the dream. Workers annoyingly demand the fruits of their labor. If you can make customers do the work, it's literally a steal.

Hence what you see at (capitalist) self-service checkouts is not about customer service, it's about capturing customer labor and eliminating workers. These kiosks are the living avatars of Capital (as a species), the most obvious capital machinery that human interact with. I say (capitalist) because these things are just tools that can be used differently under different owners. Both capitalism and communism promote industrialization, but they differ on who controls the process (and the profits), the many workers or the rich few. Of course any economic growth system has the physical problem of a finite planet, but we'll leave that crash for another conversation. For now, we're at the self-checkout machine, and hating it.

I notice the self-servitude in Europe because I normally don't notice it in Sri Lanka. Almost nothing is automated in Sri Lanka. However, when I'm flying back through Qatar they have high technology and a lot of humans, because you actually need that for customer service. What we're seeing in Europe and wherever isn't actually better customer service, it's better labor exploitation and a fundamental cheapness of the owners. Hence, when I finally left Europe and got back to civilization via Qatar I was relieved. I could finally wash my butt properly and there were people around to help and ask questions to. And when I finally got home to Sri Lanka I paid a porter to handle the bags and a driver picked us up at the airport. This would all be considered less efficient, but as one must always ask, less efficient for whom.

The Circulation Of Money

It helps to understand capital not as a system but as an ecosystem, where artificial life (like corporations) emerges out of natural life, specifically humans as social animals. This is not biologically unusual, life is always emerging out of older life in hitherto impossible ways. Capital is most accurately an artificial species whose metabolism, as Marx said, “sweats money from every pore. When one commodity replaces another, the money commodity always sticks to the hands of some third person.” Humans live off the metabolic scraps of capital like anaerobic bacteria live off the scraps in our guts. Anaerobes once ruled the earth and the extinction of natural life by the artificial has happened once before.

Today natural life and artificial life coexist in what we think is a dominant relationship for us, but that hasn't been true since the 1600s for most people. That was when European corporations started eating the world, and now they're eating themselves (even more). Once we understand our proper place within the ecosystem, we can see what's happening. Capital, as a globe-spanning species, moves lots of energy and resources around and, if we're in the right place at the right time, we can get some of it, like the bacteria in our guts. However, capital unchecked by pressure from organized humans (ie communism, but could be other ideologies) will keep more and more resources for itself, and call it efficiency.

We used to live in a society where money touched many more hands before it went into the machine, if it went there at all. People use to, out of necessity, get everything locally. You got your groceries from a local green grocer, your clothes from a local tailor, your goods from a local store. Global capitalist society tries to centralize those functions as much as possible, using oil to extend its circulation across cities, across countries, across the globe. But this kills the Richard Scarry town of small producers and replaces it with scary mega-corporations and, ultimately, algorithmically driven apocalypse.

I can see the old circulation system in action when I drive down a Sri Lankan road. I see poor Sri Lankan families gather their meagre capital (coconuts and a knife) and try to get a bit of the greater circulation of capital (cars) on the road. When I step out of my car, my money sticks to their hand as the thambili goes down my gullet. This is how deeply our metabolic processes are integrated with the metabolic processes of Capital, we are just bacteria in its guts, helping with their digestion and keeping scraps for ourselves. This is called an inefficiency to the capitalist, who would rather have a giant factory bottling coconut water and delivering it via robot, but then that poor family gets little or no money, and bottled coconut water is also awful.

The Agricultural Devolution

This process of mass but also ass production is, of course, not unique to capitalism. It's a tendency that goes deep into human history, when we first put grain into rows. We used to have diverse diets, plentiful exercise, and ample leisure time as hunter-gatherers, as you can see in the fossil record. However, with the agriculture revolution of around 10,000 BC (shout-out Jesus, pbuh), we were able to sustain much higher populations, but with visibly worse bones and teeth. We left 'paradise' to labor by the sweat of our brow. Most of the 'surplus' was captured by a narrow majority while the poor (a relatively new concept) labored in progressively worse conditions through the Industrial Revolution. The thin class of rich near the beating heart of Capital often got nought but gout and inbred for their troubles (and of course damnation eternally).

I, in fact, view the entire 'progress' of humans as not being 'our' progress at all, but the rise of artificial life. This entire period has caused a mass extinction of natural life (including wet bulbs like us) and the fossil record will show—to aliens—the massive rise of machine 'bones', which reproduce via our hands and networked brains. Capitalist reproduction is viewed as somehow separate from biological reproduction, but consider the source. Humans are incredibly biased. Anaerobic life technically 'created' the aerobic life that killed it, and probably still insist on their superiority from hiding up our butts. At one point sexual reproduction would be considered artificial and weird by asexual cells, but we take it for granted now. Capitalist reproduction is just another sort of reproduction. To an alien observer, how is it clear that us random apes control all the cars and machines they'd see in the fossil record? You could just as well say the bacteria in our guts is controlling us (which may, in fact, be possible). As a Resident Alien, I see the artifacts that humans are buried with I don't see human progress, I see the evolution of the artificial out of the natural, and both forms of life as living. I see artificial life popping out of our bodies, like the chestburster in Alien.

Like any predator or even bacteria, Capital will consume more and more unless A) some other species checks it or B) it overflows the carrying capacity of the environment and crashes. Communism was the idea of checking the growth of Capital (re: Marx), but it was too little too late and capitalism has already spread out of control and ruined the earth. Thus late-stage capitalism allocates more and more resources to corporations and feeds less and less people. The tendency is for more and more wealth to be concentrated and 'invested' back into capital machinery (like giant supermarkets and self-checkout machines) and for workers to be cut out of the circulatory process as much as possible. Without the counter-tendency of other artificial beings (governments, ideally communist) none of the surplus would be shared with humans. Irregardless, it's all a deficit to the environment which cannot be paid back except for collapse. The ideal position for us meat puppets within capitalism is being given just enough resources to reproduce the next generation and no more. We are, in fact, not given enough to raise large families at all anymore, as you can see from declining birth rates across most of the 'developed' world.

We are truly not the masters of our fate but the servants of artificial lifeforms. This is the horror I stare into while visiting the mother of all evils, Europe. Humans are obviously checking out of this earth en masse, in exchange for a geologically invisible period of mass goods. We call this period, broadly, capitalism and posit some imaginary humanism behind it. But there just isn't. We are living (or more specifically, dying) through the evolution of artificial life, chest-bursting out the wreckage of the natural world. This is what I feel contributing my own labor to the depressing but deserved corpse of Europe. In the self-checkout line I'm literally checking my self out. I can feel it, the horror.