Every Room Is Starting To Look Like The Same Room

I woke up last month and for about ten seconds I did not know which country I was in.

The room gave me nothing. White walls. A grey headboard. A little printed card on the desk with the wifi name and the password. The same desk lamp I have now seen in five cities. A blackout curtain doing its one job well. I lay there and had to walk it back through the flight to work out where the bed was.

That has never happened to me before. Ten years out here and the room always told me where I was. The smell of it. The light switch in the wrong place. The particular way the morning came through the gap in the curtain. Now the rooms have been sanded down until they are all the same room.

The hotel noticed people like me were staying a month instead of two nights. So it put a desk in the room and called one corner of the lobby a coworking space. The small guesthouse noticed the same thing. So it fitted a keypad to the door, put its listing on the same app as everyone else, and got a chatbot to answer questions at 2am.

They met in the middle. The hotel started acting like a place you live in. The guesthouse got a front desk you only ever talk to through an app.

Both of them read the same list of what a remote worker wants, and both of them delivered it. Fast wifi, proven with a screenshot. A chair that does not wreck your back. A rooftop with some plants and a quiet playlist. Blackout curtains. A discount if you book 28 days.

I know that list well. I wrote half of it, in a way. For years I was the one complaining. I wanted a chair I could sit in for six hours. I wanted wifi that held during a call to a client who was already annoyed. I asked for these things in every review I ever left.

I got them. That is the part I did not see coming. I got them everywhere.

Not a good thing or a bad thing on its own. Just a fact. You walked in tired and there was someone standing there who lived in that town. They knew which street flooded when it rained. They knew the noodle place that was still open. They knew the road you should not walk at night and the one that was fine. You did not have to ask it straight out. It came up.

Now I check in on my phone in the taxi. A code arrives. I press it into a keypad and the door opens and there is nobody there to have said any of that to. If I want to know where to eat I ask the chatbot. I did once. It sent me to a place with almost the same menu as the lobby cafe. I went anyway. It was fine. I could not tell you now what I ate.

The building got smoother and quieter and easier, and somewhere in that it forgot how to tell me where it was.

You can standardize a room. You cannot standardize a street. The optimization stops at the front door, because past the front door is a city that was never for sale to the app.

Outside, none of it has converged. The woman who fries bananas on the corner from five in the evening does not have a rate card. She has a cart, a wok, one plastic stool for the person waiting, and a way of doing it that is hers and nobody else's. No 28-day discount. No rooftop. There is no version of her in the next city, because the next city has its own woman on her own corner doing her own thing, and the two of them have never heard of each other.

That is where the place went. It used to be in the room. The room told you. Now the room is the same grey box in every airport city on earth, so the place has moved out into the street, where the keypad cannot reach it.

I drop the bags in the same room I was in last month in a different country. I plug in at the same good desk. And then I go out, on purpose, and get a little lost, until the town shows me something the room refused to. A market that smells like one exact place. A coffee that costs a third of the lobby price and tastes like where I actually am. A corner where a woman is frying bananas and it is six in the evening and I finally know which country I am in.

The room won't tell you anymore.

The street still will.

Andrew - No Refunds •••