'Bodega' Shows Silicon Valley Hates Human Communities

Wealthy young millennials probably don't understand bodegas. Buzzy new startup Bodega, which aims to impale corner stores by replacing them with optimized vending machines, certainly does not. I doubt Bodega will be more than a wink in the pan, just its willful blindness to its potential social furnishings, once again, shows the worst of Silicon Valley.

Simply put, Silicon Valley disdains cities.

I mean, nosotros knew that already. The funded founders of Silicon Valley tend to be young, childless, rootless transplants, who've poured their time and passion into their business ideas and headed Due west, like so many others throughout history, to make information technology rich. Once they get at that place, they spend their time on campus at Google, Apple tree, or Facebook, not at the corner store. They hang out with other people similar them, in advisedly curated contexts that make them believe everyone is like them. And because they're coders and engineers, they love efficient systems.

Cities tend to be messy, with a lot of knock-on effects and advertising-hoc aspects. Have the role of bodegas. Here in New York, bodegas are technically grocery stores, but the grocery-store aspect is their to the lowest degree interesting quality. They're fully staffed hubs of urban life. They're the rubber spaces you lot can walk into, at night, when someone's following you on the street. They run prison cell phone lockers for kids at the loftier school down the block, which doesn't allow phones. One of them is my local UPS pick-upward indicate. Another one is oft full of tweens gossiping. They're also one of the remaining means immigrants lift themselves upward, generation by generation, as parents who work in bodegas pay the way for their kids to work in tech.

Bodega the startup, on the other hand, is a hotel honor bar which gets plonked into an apartment edifice and so "centralized shopping locations won't be necessary," founder Paul McDonald told Fast Company. "Bodegas can't compete with this technology, considering it is so much more than expensive to take a brick-and-mortar store than a small machine," spokesman Frank Garcia told FC.

Silicon Valley has been "disrupting" things it didn't think were clean or efficient enough for awhile, without thought to the broader customs effects. Usually, they're "disrupting" things in ways that would appeal to wealthy young millennial consumers and non to the poor, elderly, disabled, or its own employees. Accept the Lyft Line shuttle, which cherry-red-picks public transit routes, in not-wheelchair-accessible vehicles, giving its workers considerably worse pay and benefits than urban center motorbus drivers.

They don't have to exercise things this manner. When Citymapper wanted to start a passenger vehicle service, information technology really worked with Ship for London to integrate it into TfL's network, declaring itself to be part of the customs, non better than the community.

Bodega's concept could be a skilful one if the founders and their funders weren't jerks. Equally this vivid Twitter thread explains, there are millions of people in the US who live nowhere most walkable retail, who are mobility compromised and could actually benefit from a selection of goods in or nearly their homes. Bodega placed in soulless exurban flat complexes would hurt only CVS. But instead, these guys target a niche that's already filled.

I of the results of Silicon Valley-driven consolidation is that small businesses go stamped out by behemoths. Amazon killed a thousand bookstores, which paid taxes and had owners. Those owners bought things, invested in things, and sent their kids to college. Uber slaughters taxi companies. Bodega wants to clear-cut bodegas. The problem here isn't artistic destruction: information technology's many beingness replaced by one, business being consolidated into fewer and fewer hands. Yes, Walmart and other big-box stores started the procedure, elimination out rural downtowns, but Bodega founder McDonald came from Google, a company that once said "don't be evil."

If economic efficiency is the only goal, and depression prices and high profits are the only measure, communities will crumble. Every bit I said, with Walmart and its ilk, they were crumbling already. That's no reason to actively brand the problem worse.

I don't fault the bushy-tailed creators of Bodega, non really. They're just individuals with an thought who live in their bubble. I fault the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley who handed them sacks of money, "including Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital, Kirsten Light-green at Precursor Ventures, and Hunter Walk at Homebrew," according to FC. Nosotros've seen a tight group of private venture capitalists become the funding for our new public services and the structure of our communities, as our politicians sit paralyzed by social partitioning, corruption, and a lack of the desire to invest in even basic services, similar buried power lines to protect from storms.

But let'south hope that outrage confronting Bodega, flooding across the internet today, will send its creators back to the drawing lath to ask: how can we build up our communities, not shatter them? In a fragile American fourth dimension, that's what we demand. Don't rip out our cities' little hearts for a amend venture investment return.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/opinion/17435/bodega-shows-silicon-valley-hates-human-communities

Posted by: brittenwhoul1972.blogspot.com

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