I got a new insight into the psyche of the super-rich recently, from an article about the planetary middle finger that is the private jet. “A big selling point is the ability to minimise what are known as ‘touch points’: the individual microinteractions that take place as we move through the world, like saying hello to a gate agent or asking a fellow passenger to switch seats,” New York magazine explained. “When you fly commercial, there are more than 700 touch points,” Alexandra Price, a brand communications manager at the jet-charter company VistaJet told the reporter. “When you fly private, it’s just 20.”
It makes being ridiculously rich sound like having very high-end noise cancelling headphones, but for your whole life, so that you exist in a bubble of serenity insulated from the grubby taint of “microinteracting” with the public. It’s babyish – a sort of bought helplessness – and regal, gliding through life behind a protective cordon that prevents scrofulous peasants from reaching for the hem of your Loro Piana leisurewear.
The idea that this is desirable is quite revealing of how the ultra-wealthy experience the world. Because all those touch points – being manspreaded upon or kettled in a customs queue, trauma-bonding with your neighbours on delayed trains, getting barked at about carry-on fluids or negotiating to remove someone’s bag from your seat – aren’t necessarily pleasant, but they’re salutary, reminding us we’re not special. It goes far beyond travel: a “civilian” passage through the world is full of friction rubbing off our sharp edges. I suppose they never get that.
I wonder, too, if this worldview is shaping life for everyone else. Are tech billionaires “helpfully” trying to create a budget version of their human-contact-free existences for us? Because we’re losing touch points by the bucketload, and it’s awful. Take banking: the UK lost 40% of its bank branches from 2012 to 2022 and the few we still have are a special kind of consumer purgatory, full of lamenting lost souls. There are people trying to ask questions that fall outside online banking’s perkily unhelpful parameters, people who cannot or do not want to “use the app” or aren’t online (which is true of 6% of UK households, according to Ofcom research from last year). There are sweaty, confused people like me, maddened by walls of bleeping machines. Amid us stands a single employee clutching a tablet, who isn’t actually allowed to do anything useful.
Soon train stations could go the same way, with nearly all of England’s 1,007 ticket offices threatened with closure or reduced staffing and opening times within three years. Many people who are neurodiverse, who have physical or learning disabilities, or are elderly or offline depend on ticket offices for information, cash transactions and safe assistance at a known place; without them, travel may become impossible. As one blind rail user explained to the BBC, her guide dog knows how to find her local station kiosk, but not a roaming staff member, which is the proposed replacement.
Many more just prefer a face-to-face experience. Because we don’t just need touch points (or “people”, as they are traditionally known); we want them. I work almost entirely from home – thanks, tech billionaires – and rapidly become weird without human interaction, however brief or annoying. Because if you’re not in the world, how do you know anything about it? That’s how Rishi Sunak last year ended up trying to buy a can of Coke by vaguely flapping a bank card, baffled by the reality of contactless payment last year.
When chatbots and helplines failed to resolve a bit of mobile phone absurdity last week, I went to a shop. We made not an iota of progress, but it was a vastly nicer experience to talk to Samantha and her colleagues – covering alternatives to HRT, Alzheimer’s, mindfulness and photosensitivity as well as sim issues – than the robots. There’s no way all our human problems can be satisfactorily resolved without other people, but how boring would life be if they could? That’s why, although I’d love never to change a duvet cover again in my life, I sort of pity the super-rich, with their frictionless passage through the world: it’s colourless and flavourless, too.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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