Musings On A Machine-Driven Life

My current job (being a cashier) does not offer autonomy. Managers decide when I work, when I take my breaks, when I take my lunch, what I do when I work, if I'm doing a good job, and so on. At first, I thought that was the whole story -- people control what I do, and I'm fine with that, because there's nothing particularly difficult about it. A machine could do what I do with relative ease. Upon closer inspection, however, I realized people don't control what I do. Machines do. I undertake all interactions at my job through the conduit of the cash register. The register is everything. I use it to communicate with my managers and the customers I help. In a way, I am an extension of it -- and notably, not the other way around.

Computers write my schedule. They write my managers' schedules. They tell us when we can clock in, when we can clock out, when we can go to and return from lunch. They keep track of our inventory, how our store is doing, what we need to do as a result. They command us.

We have a self-checkout section in the store. Basically, the self-checkout registers do exactly what I do, except without me. The only thing stopping all the registers becoming self-checkout is the integrity of the customer. For some reason, this does not seem like a difficult obstacle to overcome.

At work, I perform the task of a machine, at the command of computers (other machines). But it doesn't end there. I come home and use the computer to communicate with people and to entertain myself. I rely on them utterly. If computers stopped working tomorrow, it would destroy my current lifestyle. Not just me, of course. It would ruin countless lives. It would straight up kill the millions in hospitals who depend on machines even more than I do. Most money would be gone. There would be nothing.

I'm not sure if I should be scared, or really scared.

-Me