One recent Tuesday, at two thirty-seven in the afternoon, I received an email from UPS letting me know that a package had been delivered to my home. A

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2024-11-15 15:00:04

One recent Tuesday, at two thirty-seven in the afternoon, I received an email from UPS letting me know that a package had been delivered to my home. Attached, as evidence, was a blurry, off-kilter photograph of a small, slightly dented but otherwise nondescript cardboard box that had been placed on my driveway, next to the garage door. A minute later, at thirty-eight minutes past two, I received a second email announcing the package’s arrival, this one from the online merchant that had shipped the box and sold me the shirt it contained. The company congratulated me on the purchase, praised my good taste in menswear, and offered a few suggestions of other articles of clothing I might be interested in buying.

The two emails capped a fusillade of messages. It began five days earlier, when, as I tapped the Place Order button for the shirt, a banking app on my phone notified me that my credit card was being charged $79.95. (It was a nice shirt.) Seconds later, I received both an email and a text from the merchant, confirming the purchase and letting me know that I would receive further communications when the shirt shipped. Which I did, the very next day, when both the merchant and UPS emailed me a shipment confirmation with a tracking link. (When I clicked the link, I learned that the package had been picked up and had arrived at a UPS facility in Tacoma, Washington.) I also received emails from the two companies, as well as another text from the merchant, the day before the delivery, informing me the shirt would arrive the following day—“Get ready!” the retailer brayed—and yet another UPS email, early on Tuesday morning, confirming that the shirt had been loaded onto a truck at a local warehouse and was officially “out for delivery.” There was a coda, too: The day after the shirt arrived, the merchant sent an email expressing its hope that I liked the garment and suggesting I post a review on its website.

I find myself in possession of a lot of information these days. I’m in the loop. I’m in many loops, all spinning simultaneously. It’s not just the minutiae of commerce—orders, shipments, deliveries—that are richly documented. When I’m driving, my car’s dashboard, linked to my iPhone through CarPlay, shows me exactly where I am, tells me the posted speed limit and the current traffic conditions, and lets me know both the distance I have to go before I reach my destination and the estimated time of my arrival. (There’s also a readout available on the town or city I’m visiting: population, elevation, square footage, GPS coordinates.) My phone’s weather app gives me a bespoke meteorological report of remarkable thoroughness. Right this second, the app tells me it’s eighty-four degrees and cloudy outside. A light rain will begin in seventeen minutes and will end forty-eight minutes after that, at which point it will become partly cloudy. The wind is blowing west-southwest at six miles per hour, the relative humidity is 58 percent, and the barometric pressure is 30.18 inHg. The UV index is six, which is High, and the air quality index is fifty-one, which is Moderate. The sun will set this evening at 8:11 p.m., and in four days the moon will be full. I’ve taken 4,325 steps today. My refrigerator’s water filter has only 10 percent of its useful life left. My credit rating just dropped eight points. I have 4,307 unread emails, two more than I had five minutes ago.