Silence buys a shrunken city
The day after New York’s primary election, the city came together and spoke in one voice. Not about our machine-run politics, which most New Yorkers have checked out of, but to condemn Bodega™, a glass box created by two former Google bros to peddle non-perishables like pretzels or pasta or tampons in your apartment lobby, with a camera identifying you and billing your credit card — no need to walk outside or bring your wallet or interact with a human.
Whodathunk the future was Vending Machine 2.0, a crummy Horn & Hardart reboot?
Silicon Valley, always eager to create job-killing solutions to imaginary problems, digs it. Big venture capitalists are putting their money on Bodega™ after senior executives at Facebook, Twitter, and Google kicked in “angel funding” — quite a step up from Mo fronting his cousin Ali $30,000 to start a bodega — according to the much hate-read Fast Company story announcing the plan intended “To Make Bodegas and Mom-and-Pop Stores Obsolete.”
Using the word “disruptive” as a positive modifier may be the signature stupidity of our time, and the pile-on about Bodega™ was, well, satisfying.
That said, an awful lot of the social-media signifiers were the gentrifiers, people who rely on things like Amazon and Fresh Direct deliveries — a real threat to local supermarkets and mom-and-pop storefronts — bashing and bewailing a patently silly idea that won’t do much more than separate a few wealthy suckers from some of their couch change.
Surfing the outrage wave and speaking truth to retweets was a pain-free way for so-called creative-class types to publicly demonstrate that they were Real New Yorkers™ who dig egg sandwiches and even asked the counter guy to hold their keys that one time and whose motives are thus Jane Jacobs-certified pure — unlike the mostly non-perishable goods and out-ofstate smokes warehoused along with hardworking immigrant workers and Instagram-worthy cats at your actual corner bodega.
I love my bodega guys, who in the course of working hard to make better lives here for their children — some of whom are still in Yemen in the midst of the civil war there — really are eyes on the street watching out for the neighborhood. And the workers at my mini-market who track and fill me in on the latest ICE and immigration news.
And I’m glad people are vowing to resist the severing of our real-world ties that bind by profit-seeking tech overlords. I just want those people to mean it.
“Bodega” trended on Twitter Wednesday. The city’s primary election didn’t even get a hashtag. Less than 15% of Democratic voters bothered showing up at the polls.
A whole lot of those 440,000 or so voters were city workers and others with a direct stake in the outcome of the races.
Very few of them were the Bernie Sanders supporters rightly outraged one year ago to learn that they couldn’t vote thanks to New York’s closed primaries and insanely early registration deadline, or the people who vowed 10 months ago to stay woke after Donald Trump was elected President.
New York’s system of off-year elections with closed primaries is doing what’s it built to do: protect vested interests and incumbents. And Mayor de Blasio’s critics and foes are dismissing his huge primary win margin Tuesday by stressing the pathetic turnout. But his voters did show up.
Asserting that the millions who didn’t vote were somehow speaking up against de Blasio is almost as ridiculous as claiming a vending machine
New Yorkers have been checking out of our politics since Mike Bloomberg first ran for reelection in 2005, which is bad news for our city. A bad machine doesn’t know it’s a bad machine. But the people who use it know. The question is if they’ll do something to make a better one, or just complain.
Speaking of which, if you’re not registered to vote in party primaries or want to switch parties, put this down and go online and do that right now. The deadline for next year’s elections is Oct. 13 of this year.
Be sure too to vote this November for a state constitutional convention — a rare chance to circumvent the New York powers that be, and that are so powerful precisely because so few people participate in these elections.
Meantime, I’m all for virtue-signaling so long as that means the people doing it try hard to actually, y’know, be virtuous.
Do more shopping at your local stores if you want to keep having them. Participate in our local democracy if you want to keep having that. In the market you vote with your dollars, not your tweets. In politics, your vote is your voice and silence is consent. is the future of commerce.