Los Angeles v. "Blade Runner"

How best to describe my recent trip to the City of Angels, AKA Los Angeles, California? 
If you’ll allow me to steal from (or you could say, “honor”) Mr. Parker, “Los Angeles right now is Blade Runner without the budget for special effects.” Perfect.  
 
Now, if you’re from LA or live in LA, don’t get yourself in a bunch that this out-of-towner is talking smack. I called LA home for 10 fun-filled years. 
 
While living there, I made friends I still cherish, made my money in advertising, performed regularly at The Comedy Store (with decompression stops after at Canter’s Deli), worked with some extremely talented folks at Groundlings (people more talented then I, which is why they’re famous and I’m…well, my father thinks I’m very talented), and it’s where I met Mr. Parker. He was in my back yard under the avocado tree, but that’s a tale for another time. 
 
But lo, these many years later, I’m seeing my old town with fresh eyes and, wow. It’s like when you haven’t seen someone’s kid since they were six and now they’re 16 and have a beard. (She should really shave that.)
 
Allow me to frame the picture. We landed in darkness along with a staggering number of other 737s that apparently escaped Newark at the same time. We all disembark (a retro term for what they now call “deplaning” because education in this country is at such an abysmal low that disembarkation is considered a microaggression against the illiterate—Again, thank you Mr. Parker) into a dimly lit terminal. 
 
To find an Uber, you now must make your way through the fluorescent gloom of LAX amid the crush, all in a hurry to navigate what looks like a blinged-up Euro-mall in Singapore stocked with gold-scented perfumes and thousand-dollar T-shirts for the gazillionaire on the move with a minute to burn on their way to the waiting Porsche Cayenne that will transport them to some gilded ivory tower that’s low on toilet paper. (That was one sentence, folks.) 
 
Next, we’re outside inhaling ocean-scented exhaust fumes and herding ourselves into a groaning, hissing shuttle bus jammed with people whose faces are cast in the sickly blue glow of their screens while being transported to the sorting lot. 
 
Once there, escaping passengers and obliging drivers are zippered together in an effort to penetrate the night. And that was just the first 20 minutes of the trip.  
 
After that, the entire time we were in town, it was overcast. Not LA’s fault. Probably. And everywhere, there were artifacts of cold, impersonal automation. 
 
It started with the driverless cars that are now hauling temporarily orphaned teens from here to there without fear of having to make small talk about their lives to another human—or worse, having to listen to small talk about their driver. No requirement to share stories. You know, those things that bring people together and foster understanding. 
 
These autonomous vehicles creep all over town with multiple automated cameras mounted around the car and their navigation hardware spinning away on the roof like an AI zoetrope. (Look it up.) Watching them in action forces a sentient human driver to say things like, “Is that thing actually going to stop in time?”
 
Oh, hey! Need dinner delivered while in LA? Good news! You don’t need personal interaction for that, either. Now navigating the sidewalks of the town in which “nobody walks” (thank you, Missing Persons) are four-wheeled aluminum bins that look like weaponized baby carriages sporting flashing orange lights and, either to be safe or to camouflage their true, sinister purpose, little orange caution flags mounted on tall, fiberglass whips. Honestly, their stop-start movement and swaying flags were almost cute in an R2D2 or BB8 kind of way. (Come on. Star Wars. Can’t believe some of you needed me to tell you that.) 
 
Is this me just not cottoning (yes, a porous, old-timey word) to inevitable progress? I remember my father complaining when the internet removed much of his social interaction back when he made his living in B2B sales. But his real bread and butter was getting in front of people and sharing stories. And while the ease of online purchasing is undeniable, so is the power of face-to-face interaction. It’s a trade-off. 
 
But when do we cross the line? When do we stop knowing how to know people? 
 
Here’s my next question. With all this automation, how is it that no one has invented a robot that cleans all this shit up? 
Everywhere you look now, Tinseltown is covered in perma-grime—yet I didn’t see one bot with a broom, or a shovel, or a flame thrower. 
 
The last Blade Runner-like change we noted in the most populous city in the Golden State are the pop-up sidewalk kitchens. They’re everywhere: flimsy, art-festival tents sheltering a couple working a grill or a griddle or bisected 55-gallon steel drum over an open flame, and stackable plastic café tables and chairs. The only difference between these ram-shackle eateries and the noodle shop frequented by Harrison Ford in the movie (why not go back to the original) is that the ones in the actual LA of today don’t have a gravity-defying hover function. These vendors are firmly planted on the sidewalks populated only with autonomous weaponized pizza delivery bins. Again, nobody walks in LA.
 
That was my experience of Los Angeles 2025. And here’s an interesting note. Back in 1982, Blade Runner was “set in the dystopian future Los Angeles of 2019.” What say you, Ridley Scott? (Director of Blade Runner. Must I explain everything?) And if you’ve seen the movie, the replicants were the bad guys. Yet all they wanted to do is stay alive. Living. Experience the world. Like you and I are supposed to be doing.

​Alexa, beam me up. Fine, I'll walk.