The Lot Attendant’s Lamentation

“We are robots!”

That was what the parking lot attendant told me in the arts district in Pasadena where we have our photo studio. I had asked what he thought of the lot’s new payment system where a camera reads your license plate on the way out, an app then charges your credit card, and the gate goes up. It is convenient, for sure.

I wanted to follow up with the attendant, but he politely told me to have a good day and noted the cars stacking up behind me.

Years and years ago, at the underground parking lot between the federal building and the district court in Los Angeles, there was an attendant who took your payment in cash. That man or woman had a city job.

When a credit card machine took it over and the attendant was no longer there, I thought it was the start of something much bigger. That something has morphed into the large-scale loss of jobs in the AI age. Paradoxically, it is also true that the overall employment rate has stayed high.

So, when there are still humans in the parking booth, I talk to them. “Can you say monopoly,” a different attendant told me, referring to Metropolis, the parking conglomerate that runs the lot in the arts district and is now the biggest parking lot operator in North America, valued at $5.5 billion.

I had asked what she thought of the new camera-license plate system. But her reaction was in the form of a more fundamental complaint, about the loss of any human exchange in the course of her job.

“I used to talk to people when they came in. People knew my name.”

Now, she said, windows are tinted on many cars, so she can’t even see the driver and nobody stops for a moment to talk. And there is so little to do, she was leaning back in her chair and dozing off when I first came up to her.

Ok, so I did ask her a political question. I asked if she thought the Democrats caved when, well, when they caved on the government shutdown.

To my mind, she gave a wise answer. She enunciated with conviction, “I don’t know.”

Because there are arguments on both sides. And one interpretation of the fact that the senators who folded are immune from constituent pressure in the near term suggests they were able to deliberate based more on the merits and less on the politics.

But the clear après-goût of the standoff is that our national administration is certainly not a “government of the people, for the people, and by the people.” It is a government of and for big money.

A couple days after I talked to the attendant, our staff at Courthouse News had lunch with our accountants. We talked about the fact that the Republican majority is going through a back door to do what they could not do through the front door, abolish national health care, by making it so expensive that the people who need it cannot afford it. Our accountant asked, “What are people going to do?”

On that topic, at Courthouse News, where we can afford to provide a medical plan for employees, I was told last week by our broker that the cost of the plan is going up 13% this year.

While at lunch with the accountants, almost all of us enjoying adult libations, I asked the youngest and most vivacious of our employees if she was dating anyone — no doubt an abominably serious employment relations faux pas. She said no, it is so hard to date in Los Angeles.

Everything is through an app and the men are crass and blatant about their motives. It’s not romantic, not fun, not even interesting. She just hangs out with her buddies, a mix of young men and women.

We also talked about a book of black and white photos we just published, called "Paris After the War," and the fact that young people generally do not read physical books.

And while that is true, we have displayed the books in the window at the studio, and we do get a buyer once a day or so. Then we started giving away a free T-shirt with each book, which has pumped up sales. So there is some hope there. But, since I paid for 1,500 copies, it will be a while before we sell out.

As it happened, I was there on Saturday and sold one copy to a woman who works on movie trailers for a big studio. I threw an extra print into the bargain. We talked a little about her job and she said there used to be twenty people working in her department. Now there are three.

So that is just a snapshot of the past few days, but it all comes together, in a kind of impressionist painting of words and events, to form a picture of a world that is, step by step, less human, that is moving towards a strange and dystopian reality, bit by bit.