Decisions of Care

I’ve been thinking about the small things that happen within the margins of interpersonal interactions, specifically those that occur in a service context. The bus driver who always remembers you ride every day at a certain stop and waits a few seconds longer than prescribed to make sure you don’t miss your ride. The coffee shop barista or bartender who sees you walking in and starts making your order. These are “decisions of care.”

If “design is the rendering of care,” as Pavel Samsonov says, it presupposes that the designer imagines someone to care about. This same idea extends to getting different types of treatment in service contexts, depending on your qualifiers — -where you are from, the ability of the person serving to relate to you, power dynamics, money, and a host of other factors — -which makes measuring quality in these contexts far more complicated than just throwing together metrics and looking at a snapshot from on high.

I’m not thinking about the application of this concept in the context of large-scale consumer platforms. The proliferation of AI and the depersonalization of peer-to-peer experiences like trade, shopping, and even day-to-day interactions with local municipalities are increasingly being deputized to third parties. I’ve spent years complaining about large companies and universities outsourcing blue-collar jobs like cleaning services and maintenance. These roles used to be pathways to the middle class, as they enabled hard-working people, perhaps without the same educational opportunities, to receive the same benefits (real and fringe) that knowledge workers, managers, and executives get.

As we continue to mediate person-to-person experiences, people will begin to forget how to interact without a device, platform, or tool. If these platforms are owned by just a few companies without any interoperability, it’ll cause even more problems when they’re shut off or the rules change. Policymakers are ill-equipped to deal with these challenges because there’s very little in the law designed to navigate these complexities. Worse, things like vendor lock-in will trap medium-sized companies and smaller communities into platforms they don’t understand as well as they think. The prohibitive cost of these lock-ins will also cause harm that will be difficult to repair.

Civic life is transforming before our eyes. We’re not able to go backwards, but we can move forward within intention, but it’ll take deciding the sort of world we want to live in and not letting platforms, tools & AI destabilize everyday life faster than we’re able to slow things down.

Crossposted from my blog on July 7, 2024