What is going on with online shopping?
The convenience is no longer convenient.
It seems fitting, in a newsletter focused mostly on expressing my profound misgivings about basically everything currently happening in the world, to focus on how online shopping has become a deeply dispiriting experience. Usually, I’d connect it to the broader systems and structures and social manias that influence the endless enshittification of the online experience to enrich faceless shareholders, but I can’t even get to my preferred section of clothes without fighting five pop-ups that say It’s the Spring Sale: 50% Off Select Styles!! After clicking on them, I can confirm they are the ugliest styles. Even if I find and successfully order something worthwhile and receive it the next day, I realize the online sizing charts are skewed and inaccurate, so none of the clothes fit and have to start the return process walk of shame.
The obvious untrustable scuzz of the broader enterprise of online ads is unmistakable and off-putting. But it isn’t as jarring as the option of clicking through Accept all cookies, Reject all cookies, and a bizarre third choice of Customize your cookies. We live in an era of AI where people are putting their faces into filters to see what they would look like in the 1930s and then it distributes images of them with hideous fingers and teeth all willy-nilly. It is unclear what a cookie is in 2024, but it is safe to say the ship of cookies has sailed.
Then, in these sweeping tones of civilizational significance, these websites will promise something like, Levi’s would never sell your data without your consent. I’m just here to buy light-wash blue jeans, the matter of online privacy is between your company and Congress. Regardless, these businesses might not sell your data, but they’re not exactly locking the back door either.
As I grasp for a life preserver in a sea of stupidity, I finally arrive at my cart and realize that the phrase Check out as a guest is going the way of the dinosaur. Now I have to become a company member or sign up for a newsletter just to buy a pair of socks. This is not a country club, this is an H&M. I don’t want to be spammed with emails because I bought a shirt one time.
All of this seems less like a problem solved than one that has been deferred, or temporarily displaced. The internet is a supposedly world-altering technology that is becoming increasingly janky, unwanted, and deeply dire, run to the benefit of billionaires that sulk and bluster atop this enterprise. The Silicon Valley types toggling between strategic sales-oriented meta-freakouts have an understanding of themselves and their relationship to everything as grandiose and abstracted enough that they can only imagine their innovations as ushering in a utopia. Instead, the weird striations of graft and various varieties of authority and artifice that shape the online experience, as well as the types of weirdness that this hothouse environment creates, means the rest of humanity just deals with how everything sort of morphs into a bleary sales funnel. The mall—which, even at their height, were soulless monuments to consumerism—now feels like a fever dream.
Ah yes the Mall, I could try things on, and return them. Deal with the gatekeepers of Penny's and Dillards, and if all else failed console myself in the food court by eating a cookie the size of a Semi Tractor Trailer Hubcap.
Aside from my weekly grocery shop, I'll happily wade through the on-line swamp if that's what it takes to get exactly what I want delivered right to the door...