Why does Silicon Valley hate human interaction?

The backlash against one tech startup was so instant and furious the founders must have whiplash

Silicon Valley doesn’t like people and wants us to be unhappy. That’s the only explanation behind the latest startup idea to win $2.5 million in funding.

Here’s the skinny: smart, automated retail boxes in every apartment, office, gym and university campus — the only places that Silicon Valley bros can imagine you’d ever go. (Library? What’s that? Public transport? Nah, mate, it won’t fit in an Uber.)

The cupboards will use machine learning to decide which necessities to stock and you can buy with a swipe of your phone. In other words, the founders — Blah and Blah, both formerly of Google — have invented vending machines. While it’s handy to offer more useful products than sweets and cola, it’s hardly innovative when you’ve been able to buy books, electronics and more from machines for years at airports, and anything from hot soup to fresh vegetables in Japan.

We’ve seen dumb startups before, so why the anger? Because it’s named Bodega, and according to a profile in Fast Company, the founders appear to hope to run real bodegas out of business – the 24-hour, immigrantrun corner shops that are the best part of New York. “Eventually, centralised shopping locations won’t be necessary, because there will be 100,000 Bodegas spread out, with one always 100 feet away from you,” Blah told the magazine (though post-backlash they claimed that wasn’t the aim).

If you’ve never been to New York, bodegas are corner stores perfected: everything you could possibly ever need, 24 hours a day, plus cheap breakfast sandwiches made to order. They frequently employ immigrants and minorities, and are so much the centre of community life in some neighbourhoods that the latest Spider-Man film has scenes set in one, with its destruction an emotional driver for the main character. If Hollywood doesn’t convince you, recall that one of the most remarkable protests of this past year was New York bodega owners closing shop in a strike against anti-immigrant moves by Trump — some of the stores locked up for the first time in decades.

No wonder these shops are beloved from Queens to Brooklyn: they’ve got your back and will make you breakfast — plus they’ve got cats. The startup worsened the backlash by foolishly choosing a bodega cat as their logo, the beloved shop pets shared by the neighbourhood. Cultural appropriation is one thing, but appropriate cats and you’ll have a war on your hands.

Disruption happens, people get hurt. And using an algorithm to find locations underserved by late-night retail and installing vending machines with desired products isn’t a bad idea. The shop next to my local Tube station closes on an apparent whim, sometimes as early as 7pm, meaning I can either trek the mile to the next shop or go without milk in the morning. A dumb, AI-less vending machine dispensing bottles of milk in the station ticket hall would be life-changing — although I’d still rather have a bodega, with someone to cook me hot food after a night out and a cat to pet.

But Silicon Valley appears to think human interaction is a problem that needs solving, that walking down the street and talking to another person is an experience we want to avoid, when obesity, isolation and lack of community are all challenges in society.

Even if this were genuinely good idea, I still wouldn’t invest in Bodega. That the founders didn’t predict this backlash bodes poorly for the company. Corporate culture is a serious problem across tech firms, but it usually takes years for the market to turn on a startup. Bodega’s would-be customers already hate it, and it looks likely that there’ll be boycotts of the first vending machines.

Compare that to Uber. When the cab firm first hit the road, customers were jubilant. You could get a cab in minutes, for half the cost of a regular taxi, at the push of a button. It took years for the backlash and boycotts to start. Bodega managed that within minutes of launching — I’d worry more about their future success than that of corner shops.