Do Androids Daydream in Electric Coffee Shops?
What would Philip K. Dick say about us today?
I work at my kitchen table in my boxer shorts.
Boxer briefs to be exact.
Every day.
I can spend an entire 24 hours without seeing another living person, just a series of Google Docs, VS Code, and Gmail windows interrupted by Zoom calls and Slack messages.
I work at a tiny startup that’s entirely remote.
I love the flexibility.
I love the global reach.
I miss the people.
I was daydreaming today about the feeling I used to have when I walked into an office in the morning and saw some friends and did a little head nod or a smile. I remember the day a coworker I had a crush on walked by my desk after lunch and left me a chocolate chip cookie from the coffee shop on Wilshire.
I recognize that the pandemic changed all that…and it’s interesting how this step in our evolution happened.
If you think about the history of the office, for a long time “the office” was the farm, and the boss was your dad.
The steam engine came along and the office was now a factory.
Then the computer and the office was…an office.
And with each evolutionary step, our tools evolved.
We didn’t bring shovels into the factory, nor wrenches into the office.
But 4 years ago when the office became…everywhere…the toolset did not evolve.
I’m tired of Zoom calls.
I’m tired of looking at my friends’ disembodied Discord and Slack avatars and trying to feel some emotion.
I can’t muster a smile for that purple cartoon space bot anymore.
I yearn for something more.
Philip K. Dick’s novel was set in the decade we are living now.
He made his point about the difference between human and android: the ability to feel empathy for another.
I think it’s the ability to long for each other.
There is a loose human connection that we are missing. It’s a background connection that our hearts still feel even when while we are doing something else.
I remember the evenings and weekends going to a Starbucks on Sunset Blvd with a stack of scripts and quietly reading them near a buddy of mine Jonathan, as he whittled down his own pile. He had his fancy latte. I had my hot cocoa.
And then we’d sit there for hours lost in action scripts, sci-fi treatments, outlines for franchises that our bosses bought. And every now and then I’d look up and see I was surrounded by tables of quiet screenwriters with Final Draft up on their MacBooks, their legal pads with scribbled notes sitting beside them.
Some didn’t even have the money to buy coffee. But they came there to sit in that room.
I miss that feeling of being in it together.
I miss looking up and seeing my friends’ faces as they dream of what’s next.
It inspires me.
You can’t look up and nod your head at a bot.
I miss people
