There is something deadening at the most basic level about any space with too much capitalism happening in it. The vibes are all off, and it resembles what every right-wing blowhard would describe as the Horrors Of Socialism. This new DoorDash payment plan feels like the apotheosis of something—fast food delivery made dumber and more gamified through our insistent refusal to get off our phones and walk to a grocery store. It’s a futuristic aesthetic gone janky around the edges, in service of a howling and willful category error. It’s neither a solution nor quite a problem, but a strange and sterile rephrasing of the question. Nothing outside of a remedial understanding of Marxism can prepare you for how fucking stupid this shit is, but almost anyone engaging with observable reality should be able to assume that something has gone horribly wrong.
I’m not much of a tinfoil hat kind of guy, but it is entirely plausible that after mass layoffs from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, companies like DoorDash now feel liberated to offer payment plans for meals. My fellow Americans, are we cooked? These types of things would be deemed socially and financially harmful, if not illegal, if we didn’t live in an absolute hellscape governed by malevolent demons, but I still don’t understand how people are using these slop apps in the year 2025. Prices were high but barely justifiable back in 2021. Now it’s $50 to get a medium pizza to arrive stone cold at your door, with roughly 40% of those costs associated with all kinds of gimmicky delivery fees. This latest development in technological fuckery is selling the idea of convenience and financial inclusivity, and there is an attendant grandiose and mystified mixture of awe and dread in the broader culture—something that can only happen in an economy that is exhausting every other avenue of profit maximization.
Silicon Valley has cycled with increasing speed over the last few years through a number of boomlets and bubbles that were also sold as something amazing that will improve our lives. There are true-blue boondoggles like the Metaverse, a new virtual world in which we would all flourish and play and mostly go to meetings. AI has been promised to revolutionize the way we create, but has mostly just automated various online annoyances and mass-produced flabby, haplessly uncanny dross at industrial scale. I still don’t understand the practical use-case or public-facing utility of the Apple Vision Pro. It’s all deranging, but in a familiar way. Given all the oddly abstracted discourse about the state of American democracy contrasted with our ongoing mundanities, it’s just bizarre to consider how anyone could celebrate the “freedom” to finance a burrito bowl. Everyone downstream is left to reconcile and rationalize the distance between the soaring possibility of apocalyptic societal collapse and the reliably shabby fact of these little indignities introduced into our daily lives. People see the lapse between the promise of capitalism and what it delivers and feel, understandably, that this is all a negative externality of a globalized MLM scheme.
But this assessment gets more complicated when you consider that a disconcerting percentage of our society is comprised of sloths who are addicted to spending money. Sure, grocery prices are escalating and our wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, but anyone paying for a McFlurry in four installments has lost the plot. It’s difficult to feel sympathy for anyone looking at their monthly expenses and seeing a mortgage/rent, a cell phone bill, electric bills, and car payments—and then a $2 charge for a $6 Six-Inch. It’s a chicken and egg situation as to whether consumerism conditioned us to be like this, or if DoorDash is a mirror reflection of our worst impulses.
In a few years, the average American will owe $100,000 of fast food debt to DoorDash, but they’ll be able to pay it off by sharecropping at Mr. Beast’s yurt commune for 90 days. Imagine your AmEx declines on your last burrito payment and the bank makes you throw it up. I can’t wait for the economy to crash because all the big banks are over-leveraged on subprime Big Mac loans. In the meantime, you can call me Fryler Durden, because I can’t wait to finance the biggest order my local Mickey D’s has ever seen, then blow myself up before making the final payment just to show these sons of bitches who’s really in control.
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Author: Sam Colt
Karen O’Blivious – Senior political correspondent who insists she’s neutral but only interviews people who agree with her.