by David Beer
The other day, in a cavernous sports superstore, I thought of J.G. Ballard. Echoey. Compartmentalised. Fluorescent. Stuffed with product. It was, probably quite obviously, the sort of place Ballard might have imagined the norms of society suddenly collapsing in on themselves, unable to carry their own contradictions.
Banal yet shiny, ordered yet unstable, glowing yet unspectacular. It just seemed a ripe setting for a sequel to his 1975 novel High Rise, in which, famously, a luxury tower block became the scene of a destructive uprising against the hierarchical social stratification that its vertical floors represented. Or, maybe I could be trapped alone in the store, unable to escape its automatic doors, in a twist on Concrete Island, the 1974 tale of the motorist marooned in a dead-space between intersecting motorways.
I was welcomed by a basket of varied coloured footballs and a rack of monochrome mid-calf socks. To the side an array of baseball caps – each a slight variation on the last.
The store swung around to the left in an L shaped-layout. A dog-leg left, perhaps leading to the golf section. There was a second floor too, with equal square footage. Desolate. In the distance, two racks of sporty house-slippers.
Moving through what I imagined the store planners refer to as zones, everything arrived in glances. Fleeting eye movements, taking in the many minute differences. Rapid and brief views of garments momentarily visible, as lines of sight allowed. Flashes of light off mirrors. High wattage signs. The light was artificially bright. Yet there seemed to be no shadows.
The folds of products are deep-lined. The rails packed tight. The display shelves carry the weight of consumables. Lots of things for sport, and many more besides. Some faux sheepskin boots. Decorative desert boots. A NASA emblazoned bomber jacket – for when you wish to look like an astronaut attending a post-flight press conference. My attention jumped between fuzzy fragments, bits and pieces.
All these things and no algorithm to tell me what I should purchase. That is what I was missing in the actual concrete shop. I had no automated prediction of my taste. I had to make my own decisions. Trying to navigate the mass of items the absence of automation became obvious. I was manual, analogue shopping.
Yet the space is still algorithmic in its layout. If this…then this. As I fed my data into the space I ended up, eventually, in the right zone. Lacking the processing speed of even the most basic machine learning system, progress was slow. I stumbled upon an astroturf zone. Stacked boxes below display shelves. Nothing quite matched what was above it.
It’s not just “help yourself”, the motif is “find it yourself”. Keep thinking like that algorithm. Occasionally switching from algorithm, you must also become a scanner, eyes darting across the labels, zooming on sizing numbers and prices. Rank by most relevant, or size or price (highest to lowest). I had become an extension of the online shop interface.
At the back of the upstairs, which is directly above the front of the downstairs, I encounter an abandoned paying station. Three empty machines, some loose packaging and a large step ladder. Many things in here are too high to reach. They are in view but the racks and rows, as you move closer, reveal themselves to be some way above the average human reach. You can grab at the hem, but there would be no way of releasing the hanger hook. If you shouted for assistance it would echo around the muted space.
All this must be a metaphor for something. I’m not sure what. Thinking like an algorithm, maybe. Yet it would be too much to think of it as an allegory for consumer culture on a grand scale, or for this cold bright cavern to be the physical manifestation of the logics and experiences of contemporary media. It was more the sense of the unreal that seemed to prevail, the pronounced simulation of artifice. Then another cliche. Returning from the wilderness, the desert, Jean Baudrillard appears at my shoulder to tell me that the sports superstore didn’t actually happen.
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