Get That Thing Off My Lap
There is an old man who I often see at the corner of Avenida Santa Fe and Darregueyra Street.
I’m fairly sure he’s homeless.
I’m positive he’s footless…
as in, he doesn’t have any feet.
Everything from the ankle up is still there, but not the feet.
I know this to be the case — as does everyone else who walks by — because he doesn’t wear shoes.
Of course he doesn’t wear shoes, but what I mean is that he doesn’t even wear socks. The rounded, naked stumps just sort of jut out the holes of his pants, laying bare on the sidewalk as he leans up against the facade of a pastry shop from dawn until dusk.
He doesn’t have a sign or anything solicitous like that, but many people stop and give him pesos anyway.
You can never have total confidence in what’s written on a cardboard sign. Whether someone is a veteran, a recently terminated employee, or a parent is not something that can be gleaned from a passing look. Even the accompaniment of a dog occasionally strikes me as suspect. Some people are better at intuiting authenticity than others, but the whole thing is ultimately a guessing game.
You can’t fake being footless, however. There’s nothing manufactured or insincere about this guy. He just sits there, plainly and unobtrusively, watching people walk by.
The man is dishevelled. His hair is unkempt and his skin is dirty. All of his physical features make him quite ugly. And yet, he somehow manages to project a compelling air of charm and congeniality. He’s cool and composed, and that makes him likeable.
Notwithstanding the footless man, I’ve found that the vagrants in Argentina are generally much more forward than those in North America.
They’re more proactive…
….more assertive…….
… and dare I say it, they tend to be more pushy.
On the Buenos Aires subway, for instance, it’s quite common for vagrants to do this thing where they board a train car with a big shopping bag full of pens or highlighters, bundled by the dozen and held together with elastic bands. As the train moves, they make their way down the aisle of the car, placing one of the bundles on the lap of every rider who has absentmindedly failed to stand up, cross their legs, or adopt some other sort of defensive posture. If there is space, they will put the pens on your lap.
Once the person has travelled the length of the car and deposited their merchandise, they will return the other direction, collecting the pens from the laps, sometimes shooting a disappointed glance at those who decline to make a purchase.
The idea is to just carpet-bomb the car with cheap trinkets — stuff that I assume has been shoplifted — and then have faith that a non-zero percentage of riders will go along and give them money.
Very rarely, the hustle will work, and some condoling straphanger will cough up a couple hundred pesos, the equivalent of roughly one American dollar.
Sometimes they’ll be selling post-it notes, masks, or tissues, but the products are always the sort of flimsy garbage that can very easily be stolen from a corner store or pharmacy.
And while the people who put the products on your lap are usually adults, parents will occasionally recruit their children to do the selling.
It’s very uncomfortable the first time it happens. You’ll be sitting on a crowded train while trying to listen to Beach House loud enough that you forget about the portly Argentine abuelo who has somehow fallen asleep on your shoulder when an eight-year-old child hands you a packet of gel pens and then stares at you with their sweet, stupid little face.
What are you supposed to do, tell them to get lost?
No me molestes, chico. ¡Alejarse!
Nothing about this game makes me feel good. And I wouldn’t feel good even if I caved and gave them the money — because of course, any such payment would feel much more like a ransom than an endogenous act of goodwill.
I don’t merely notice the train vagrants as I go about my day. They happen to me, in a way that is invasive and nearly unavoidable.
I want to go to the park or the cinema or a restaurant or wherever else it is I know I like to go to do things I KNOW I LIKE TO DO, AND THEN THESE RANDOM PEOPLE WILL JUST APPEAR AND START FORCING STUFF ONTO ME AND TRYING TO GET ME TO CONSUME STUFF THAT I NEVER ASKED FOR AND THAT I OBVIOUSLY DON’T NEED TO CONSUME.
GET THAT THING OFF MY LAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡ NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
As the pen people were doing their thing this morning, and as I instinctively covered myself so that nothing could be left on my lap, I thought about the footless man, and about how the phenomenon clarifies why I find it so painful to use the internet.
I don’t like when the world happens to me. I like to happen to the world.
And it is for this reason, I think, that digital, algorithmically driven advertising is so much more offensive and anxiety-inducing than the type of classic, out-of-home advertising that characterised the consumer experience of decades past.
Whenever you use Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or even Google, you are constantly assaulted by content THAT YOU DID NOT ASK FOR, THAT YOU DO NOT NEED, AND WHOSE PRESENCE ON YOUR LAP DEGRADES YOUR QUALITY OF LIFE.
I’m just slightly too old and slightly too self-respecting to be on TikTok, but I can imagine that experience feels at least as coerced, and probably more.
Like the train vagrants, tech companies will shove the products down your throat. They will interrupt whatever it is you’re doing to insist their toneless digital litter spills all over you.
If the products recommended to you by algorithms were actually useful or relevant, you’d find out about them based on the people you follow and the media you actually search for. You would see them organically as you live your life, and you would naturally find them interesting and attractive.
Although, even if the recommendations were good, and even if the ads were thoughtful or infused with the slightest bit of creativity, it would still be painful to consume — because deep down, you would still know what’s going on. You would still know that every calorie and macronutrient of your media diet has been carefully predetermined by people and institutions you will never fully know.
Tiramisu could be your absolute favourite food, but even the best tiramisu in the world would be terrible if it were forcibly pumped down your throat through a tube — as if you were a goose being fattened for foie gras.
All of the pop-ups, suggested accounts, and the minefield of timeline clutter, it’s all so relentless.
Out-of-home advertising is also ubiquitous, but it doesn’t make you feel so dehumanized or degraded. It doesn’t make you feel like an automaton, hopelessly and unpredictably pinballing around the digital world in whatever way is optimally profitable for the nearly omniscient overlords of Silicon Valley. Out-of-home advertising can be simple and humane.
When I pass my local grocer and observe that all of the mangoes have been arranged so that the reddest side is facing me, I am being advertised to. I’m being pitched to and enticed, of course, and it often works.
But as is true in the case of the footless man, there is something qualitatively preferable about the phenomenon of being drawn to something that is, at least nominally, minding its own business.
The mangoes are just minding their own business. The footless man is just minding his own business. I instinctively find the former appealing and the latter sympathetic for the exact same reason.
They’re just sitting there, minding their own business.
There would be so much less anxiety and psychic anguish in the world if the architects of the emerging metaverse did the same.
“But they’re corporations! They have bottom lines to make and dogged shareholders to satisfy! Were it not for all the overbearing advertisements and content recommendations, they wouldn’t exist!”
I know…
WOULD THAT BE THE END OF THE WORLD?!?!?!
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