By Angus Stump
Here’s how it works. Or at least, here’s how I hoped it would work, given that I had invented the whole thing approximately twenty minutes before trying it for the first time.
The idea was this: walk into a place with a book. Find the person behind the counter. Give them the pitch — sci-fi, time travel, buddy flick, humor, romance, good for breakfast. Tell them I don’t know who in this town needs this book, but I have a strong suspicion somebody does. Then ask the question.
“You already know who to give this to, don’t you?”
That was the theory. I had no data. I had a hunch, a paperback, and a conviction — untested, possibly delusional — that people know their people. That the barista knows the reader in the corner who comes in every Tuesday. That the bartender knows the friend who just went through a thing and needs something ridiculous and human. That the person behind the counter at a place they care about, in a town they live in, has a whole invisible Rolodex of exactly who needs what. I believed this. I believed it the way you believe something before you’ve had to defend it to anyone.
Norm’s Coffee. Newton, Kansas.
Barista Janet was behind the counter.
I gave her the pitch. She listened. I took a breath and asked the question.
“Yeah,” she said. “I can think of a couple of people.”
No hesitation. No pause to consider. No let me think about that. She just knew.
Thirty seconds and one question. The book was already in motion toward someone Janet understood well enough to know they’d love it, for reasons I’ll never know and don’t need to.
There is an entire infrastructure of human attention that we have decided is inefficient.
The barista who knows your order and also knows you’ve been off lately. The hairdresser with relationship instincts. The guy at the record store who hands you something and says just trust me. These people were not performing a service. They were paying attention. Specifically. To you. On purpose.
We built fancy systems to replace them. The fancy systems are fast and tireless and always on and, in a certain light, impressive.
But the fancy systems do not notice you’ve been off lately.
The algorithm cannot do that.
I drove home with an empty passenger seat and one data point. It was a good one.
