She was ahead of me in the coffee shop, phone in one hand, oat flat white in the other. Talking with her friend.
“Honestly? I just trust the algorithm. It knows what I’ll like better than Samuel ever did.”
Samuel, I assumed, was her local bookseller. Or maybe the friend who used to slip her novels with a Post-it note on the cover. Either way, Samuel was not there.
I paid for my coffee. I didn’t say anything.
But I thought about my local bookshop where the man behind the counter once handed me a slim green paperback of a PG Wodehouse and said try this, you’ll either love it or hate it. I loved it. I still own that copy. I can tell you exactly where I was sitting when I read the last page.
I cannot honestly tell you a single book Amazon has recommended to me. Not one.
The algorithm is efficient. That’s its whole pitch. No wandering, no wrong turns, no awkward conversation with a stranger who guesses you wrong. Friction, removed.
But the green paperback came with a person attached. A weather that day. A small risk that he’d misjudge me. The recommendation cost him something, attention, initiative and a risk. And it cost me something too, the willingness to be seen, badly, and to try the book anyway.
That’s the part the algorithm cannot do. It cannot misjudge me lovingly. It cannot care whether I come back.
We are being sold seamlessness as though it were a gift. I’m starting to think it’s the bill.
The woman in the coffee shop walked out into the bright sunny day still scrolling. Samuel, somewhere wherever he was, had no idea he had been replaced.
Sea's The Day 