Scan QR Code for Menu at Restaurant

I am powerfully struck by how many of those things that are promoted as good for the environment, or as instances of the future arriving in installments, reduce costs and make the consumer experience more precarious.

A small example is the QR Menus and the cardboard straws, two elements that generate anecdotal discomfort, and may seem, as I was pointed out in the responses to a Twitter thread, quick solutions, which will be "discontinued" and made obsolete by some overcoming means. Overcoming instance probably conjured by a startup. A startup whose name will become synonymous with that solution, in what Toby Shorin called "readability arbitration."

Beyond the benefits that the narrative shift brings to certain sectors, and the more or less noble values that enhance and justify it, I have my attention on how it serves to resolve class tensions and maximize utility by dint of goodness.

--Premium Mediocre en el Metaverso by Helmut Sander (in Spanish).