The Internet Isolation Loop
Deleting an app might be the first step in creating a better world.
They call it post-Dash clarity: that horrible feeling when you’ve consumed a disgusting and lukewarm meal from McDonald’s, or Taco Bell, or your local pizza place, or wherever, and you’re sitting on your couch surrounded by wrappers and packaging and realize what you’ve just done.
Online, many say the regret stems from the insane costs of these types of services, which I’m sure is part of it—realizing you’ve spent $40 on $20 worth of food is not a good feeling. But I think something else is going on that’s left unstated in these memes: this clarity happens not just from eating food, but specifically from when you order food to your house through an app, and usually when you’re alone. It is alone, in our houses or apartments, that once we are done eating, we realize just how bad this whole process feels—that we’ve been caught at a vulnerable point (being hungry), and told by exploitative tech companies that there is a solution, only to horrifyingly if subconsciously realize that solution negates a large part of the point of one of life’s deepest necessities and joys.
Food has for most of human history been a tool to connect us to the outside world and each other. It’s not just that we’re losing that, it’s that food has now become a tool to do the exact opposite—to help create a worse version of the world, one that is more isolating, fractured and joyless than before.
Yes, this is a long way of bragging that my New Year’s Resolution was to stop using food delivery apps.