The Autons from ‘Doctor Who’ are coming to a high street near you
Not having an 11-yearold to hand, I haven’t been following Doctor Who in its current incarnation, so I can’t be sure if the present generation of pre-teens is as irrevocably scarred by the series’ villains as mine was. Forty years on, my nightmares are still occasionally haunted by the Autons. More terrifying even than the Daleks, the Autons were shop mannequins that bore a haunting resemblance to the ones in our local department store. Hulbards of Sittingbourne. Animated by something called the Nestene Consciousness, they roamed the shopping streets of suburban Britain in natty menswear, shooting death rays out of their plastic hands until conquered by Jon Pertwee, the most dandified of all the Doctors, with his superior intelligence and bespoke ruffled shirtings. Well, here’s the thing. The Autons are coming to a high street near you.
This time their purpose is not the wholesale destruction of the human race, but the gathering of information on its shopping habits. In Italy, mannequins have been fitted with intelligent cameras that can detect customers’ reactions to the outfits on sale. In a French bookshop, sales rose by 10 per cent after cameras were installed that monitored shoppers’ facial expressions, so the shop staff could tell when they needed help; and in an Estonian branch of Mothercare, emotion-detection technology found that shoppers who came in smiling spent more than the grumpy ones. Fancy that!
The manufacturers of all this watchful kit claim, of course, that its purpose is “to improve people’s shopping experience”. This is a phrase that invariably repays close examination. At best it means “sell more stuff ”. At worst, it signals an intention to banish from stores the unglamorous things that people actually need – buttons, buckets, dried butter-beans, proper yellow dusters and the like – and replace them with the class of merchandise that Betty Macdonald, in her great memoir, The Plague and I, unforgettably identified as “toecovers”: simulated wicker tea-light holders; scented ironing water, glittery cupcake sprinkles – the expensive flotsam of 21st-century consumer society.
I don’t mean to sound too Luddite about all this. I am entirely in favour of technology that records my facial expression on discovering that my local supermarket stocks only Chilean cherries at the height of the British cherry season; or summons shop assistants to the sales floors of certain high street retailers, where huddles of beleaguered customers, clutching garments in the wrong sizes and pathetically asking each other for help, are a familiar sight.
But there is a gossamer-fine line between datagathering and intrusion. As with the technology that reads our private emails, the better to bombard us with personalised advertisements, the covert monitoring of our involuntary physical reactions feels very much like theft. And to what strange uses might all this data eventually be put? Will the price of mackerel shoot up as I approach the fish counter, heart pounding? If I hover by a rail of age-inappropriate bralettes in Forever 21, pupils wistfully dilating, will a virtual shop assistant shimmer up and firmly redirect me to some more suitable purveyor of middle-aged modes? And where is the sonic screwdriver that can deactivate this eerie commercial manifestation of the Nestene Consciousness?