This year, on the first night of Saturday Night Meal Swipes, I got so confused by the Grubhub app that I gave up and ate scraps off of a friend’s takeaway box. But finding determination through my hunger, and upon being handheld through the ordering process by a Grubhub spokesperson, the workers and I discovered that not only was I the evening’s last patron but the 1000th. There was an amused outburst as the workers closing up for the night overheard. Employees clapped for a successful first night with the new system, with 1,000 being a nice round and high number to end on. A UChicago Dining spokesperson asked for a photo, positioning me with my tofu poke bowl, a Grubhub utensil kit, and a stiff french fry plushy that the manager had found in the back—my makeshift prize. 

I was delighted myself! I ran around Hutch, telling all the people I knew—which was many, given the way that Hutch seems to pull everyone you know into the same room. I joked that “girls like me don’t win sweepstakes.” I taped my receipt to my wall. And yet, what was once comical if not resented for its gratuitous inconvenience, has now become entirely accepted. Because as soon as Grubhub became efficient, we happily adopted a process that ultimately removes us further from each other not only as producers and consumers but also as humans.

Certainly, Grubhub has its benefits. It’s efficient, reduces crowds, and even allowed someone to broadcast Subway Surfers onto the order-displaying screens—or so I heard. But what’s efficient isn’t necessarily good for us in the long run if it’s not human. As college students, we’re all familiar with the silent Uber ride, driver and rider hardly acknowledging each other, or the “leave it at my door” function—or, in Hutch terms, leave it on the metal rack. More recently “Google Assistant” called Shinju to make my birthday reservation for me, though I would’ve preferred calling myself. I can only imagine what mechanical voice spoke to the front desk, asking for a table, party of eight. 

With Grubhub’s addition to Hutch, we’re again not even given the option to communicate directly or bring our goods together in a simple exchange. Instead, we abstractly send our money—or Maroon dollars—off and collect our food from a metal rack. It’s Marx’s commodity fetish—the abstraction from labor and goods, the agency of objects, and the consequential loss of human connection in our exchange—doubly done. We don’t understand how labor becomes goods. We don’t know why goods cost as much as they do. And now we don’t even see each other, bartering with an abstract third-party app that brings our objects together for us, even if it’s just money and to-go boxes. Within Hutch, we’re removed from even the subtlest human connections, all for the sake of a few seconds that would’ve been spent waiting in line.

It’s all moving so fast, and our generation is told we can handle it because we grew up this way. But we’re accepting it so easily that it’s hard to understand what we’re losing and the scale of what we’ll miss in the long run: the social-emotional learning that comes from brief human interactions. For a long time, I thought there was a startling difference between Gen Z and the iPad kids, but we’re all pushed to change our habits for the sake of efficiency. The difference might just be how willing we are to accept it. 

And maybe this is a silly argument to make about a process that’s solely UChicago’s problem, but it’s not just Grubhub at Hutch. It’s Uber Eats and Google Assistant. Every trip home to the Bay or back to Chicago comes with a new VR experience storefront, the coffee shop I worked at closing, or my mother watching 10-second ballet videos on Facebook. There is barely enough time for anything to become familiar and even less incentive to know each other. And coming back to Chicago this year, I was met with bright orange banners (and a $3 coupon!). I was again waiting but in a different form, my back pressed against soda machines next to four other phone holders, all for the sake of efficiency and at the cost of connection.

Camille Cypher is a second-year in the College