When you are staying overnight in some city, and you have end-to-end appointments, there is surely not much point in being overly fussy about your hotel. It’s just a bed and bathroom, and one only hopes that it has a coffee maker.
Other than that, I’m guessing that the gym is rarely used and the pools are mostly empty. The restaurants are useful but always overpriced, as everyone knows. Fundamentally, hotels serve as utilities and nothing more.
And yet, to fill this need, we’ve seen the advent of these new hotels with strange techy names and a tech aesthetic inside and out, defying all convention in color, shape, protocol, and functionality.
There was a point at which I thought none of this mattered—it’s just a crash pad—but I admit that I’m reaching my wit’s end with these places.
My current hotel is emblematic. Let’s just call it iHotel.
At some point, the vibe of this place—with its curves, cartoon art, minimalist everything, and obsessions with colors with odd names like mauve—becomes no more luxurious than camping. But there is one difference: Everything about this place is smothered with the pretension that this whole approach to life represents “progress.”
Leave the past behind and enter into our new visions of the future! Your experience here is up-to-date, webby and techy, floating around in the cloud, a rejection of all that is old and an embrace of all that is new. A hotel so hip it might as well be an app on the blockchain.
I’m not buying it.
Once you get over the check-in—there is no front desk but merely a standing-around person with a handheld kiosk, passcode, and a micro-printer for your key—and then find your room which is lit up in digital this and that, you come to discover that nothing works as it should.
Doors that should swing out swing in. Plugs that should be pulled have to be pushed. Buttons that should be pushed have to be pulled and so on. Nothing is either on or off: everything fades this way or that on a long gradient.
This creates a funny ritual in which everything you do has to be done twice, once for failing and only the second time to figure it out, so you can learn a micro-skill you will never use again.
We might as well start with the light switches. It’s hard enough to find them and operate them in hotels from 20 years ago when switches started appearing in odd places and you had to undergo a seek-and-find mission just to navigate your way around for the night and morning.
Now they have taken all this a step further and put everything on a mobile app that you can download, as if anyone truly wants another excuse to play on one’s phone. Or you can use the handy iPad sitting on the desk which has a full app that you have to learn before you can dim the lights or close the curtains.
You have to snuggle up in the iChair and find the button for the iCurtains before you get into your iBed for your iSleep.
For some reason, whomever designed the one I’m in now decided that the whole of human history was mistaken in thinking that we need a top sheet. That was just an error that mysteriously lasted hundreds of years. The techies know better that we only need a fitted sheet on the bottom and a puffy duvet on top, which is fine until you become aware that the duvets are never washed.
No need to comment on the art in these places. It is all too peculiar to be memorable. Forget scenes of nature, food, ships, or actual people. We are way over all that in the digital age. Instead, we got stark cartoons or random shapes in frames for no particular reason. Frames are of course out of the question unless there is nothing in them.
Consistent with the effort to deny the meaning of all physicality, the toilet paper in postmodern techy hotels is invariably one-ply. What was once the plight of the poor has become the ostentatious fauxpoverty of the rich.
Another feature we can know for sure without even having to investigate further. There will never be a coffee maker in such a hotel. For that, you absolutely must get dressed, go downstairs, and saddle up into a co-working space with tattooed laptoppers carrying diaries of their world journeys who variously mutter to people listening on the other side of their earpods.
Everyone is typing away on their gadgetry while munching on crunchy healthy food, and then it dawns on me why all these people have plugs in their ears. It’s because an entire generation has failed to learn to chew their food with their mouths closed. If you are the only person without earpods, you are treated to a cacophonous symphony of half a dozen people masticating on breakfast crunchies with their mouths operating as amplification devices.
There was a time when I too was convinced that the minimalist aesthetic you find in Apple stores had merit, and maybe it does for retail shopping. But as with most human projects, people started going too far with this whole ethos.
The fakery of the whole thing is best exposed in the music playing everywhere, which is not real music at all but merely oozy sounds with a predictable bongo-ish beat. Listen to enough of this stuff and you lose your mind. None of it is made by humans with talent. It is just piles of digital sampling, now easily created by artificial intelligence.
It is not listenable because it is not designed to be listened to at all but rather creates a kind of audible sound portrait to accompany the rest of the posthuman surroundings.
What offends me most about these places is the way they disguise and hide anything or anyone that has to do real things. The food at the buffet appears as if from a cloud but you know for sure that there are people slaving away in the kitchen with gas, iron, meat, and grease, people actually working with hands to make the eggs and potatoes and brew the coffee.
But we aren’t supposed to think about those people, nor those who empty the trash, clean the bathrooms, and fix the elevators.
Try as they might, the tech bros and gals will not wipe out the physical world. It will always bite back. As it should.
I only became aware of the absurdities of this worldview that humanity can migrate sooner rather than later to the cloud during the lockdown period in which humanity was split between essential and nonessential. What was being marketed to us as “clean” was really just a class war between the privileged and everyone else.
These hotels put a fine point on it. It’s okay that people might like them but what rubs me wrong is the dogmatic insistence that they represent capital-P progress. It is not progress to have to hunt for a digital tablet and learn an app just to turn off the lights, when a switch on the wall from a century ago did a better job at achieving the aim.
It’s this way with so much of what we call progress now. It’s not obvious that it really is progress, not in the same way that the wheel was an improvement over walking.
Progress used to mean something. The clock was a great achievement. Indoor plumbing has been glorious. Flight and internal combustion were great things, and so too for metallurgical improvements that gave us the commercialization of steel. We are appreciative of the ability to stream music of all ages. I’m a fan of digital media mainly because it is busting up the media cartel.
But is there a reason for all of digital-age aesthetics to invade and dominate the whole of our lives? No. To my mind, standards of beauty reached their high point in the history of humanity before the Great War, a time when the innovators learned from the past and respected it. What we call technology now is what was then rightly called “the practical arts.”
There is every reason to be suspicious of any movement that is impious toward the achievements of the past and believes instead that it can reinvent all things. This way lies danger to our very humanity. If the whole of the world looks and operates like this iHotel, woe to us!
