Daniel Shin Contributor

It is a Saturday at the Mugshot Tavern, a beloved neighbourhood icon right at Bloor and Keele with excellent prices and beer selections. It should be packed. However, my friend and I found ourselves alone with the bartender.

What was the party pooper? It was not bad weather or a neighbouring bar, but the cash-only sign at the door. Their internet went down, so they could not accept electronic payments.

Staring into the empty tables, I thought: “are we really that vulnerable as a city now that we cannot enjoy a pint of beer without the Visa or Mastercard data centre?”

This is hardly an isolated incident at a lone tavern. Toronto has been bombarded with technology in recent years. Restaurants give us QR codes instead of menus, we download apps to pay for parking meter, and customer service departments tell us to go on their website or call a number, where AI picks up. Major attractions like Rogers Centre, Scotiabank Arena, Canada’s Wonderland, as well as our own food services, went cashless. Every time, they say that this is the “future” and it is “frictionless.” I wonder how frictionless the Mugshot’s bartenders felt being sent home early and losing the day’s pay. Or what is so futuristic about shunning thousands of residents out of our infrastructure when they do nothing wrong.

Have we ever stopped and thought, why? Why does this restaurant give QR codes and refuse cash? Why do we need apps and accounts to do what pen and paper can do? What happens when our phones are dead? What happens when someone from rural Newfoundland is visiting for the first time? What was so terrible about us, that we needed the “future” to be handed down by tech higher-ups instead of being created by Torontonians?

I do not want this to be a shallow-minded rant just to say tech is bad. Rather, I want to challenge you to think about if the tech you encounter is solving your problem or their problem. The greedy eye of tech demands its presence in every personal interaction. As a convenience store clerk, I try not to laugh watching customers make five different faces to activate their Apple Wallet, because this could have been a toonie. It does not help me when I have to explain my issue repeatedly to an AI “agent,” when I know a human would have understood immediately.

Perhaps my observation at the Mugshot was not that tech failed us. It was a retrospective realization of how much power we have given it. A tavern in a true modern city shouldn’t need the internet to sell beer. Toronto cannot call itself frictionless when all it did was outsource the friction to us.

Perhaps the most frictionless way to pay for a can of Coca-Cola is a toonie.