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Abstract
Fast-food is rapidly being digitized. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the food-service industry quickly advanced digital infrastructures of self-service kiosks, QR codes, customer-reward systems, and company apps to keep business going. But in the pandemic’s aftermath, this infrastructure has only grown larger, and has become central to creating the “seamless customer experience.” Business literature describes this as a uniquely digital experience, which values a continuous connection with customers over episodic interactions. At a glance, this business ideology is pragmatic and virtuous to fast-food corporations: it aims for a smooth, frictionless flow of goods, services and information. But the seamless customer experience and all of its technologies also possess certain politics, and their mediation of producers and consumers has been problematic in recent years. Seamless technologies enabled food-service amidst a deadly pandemic; in 2023, concession workers at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport protested seamless infrastructures for obstructing service and threatening to replace their jobs. I had initially thought of seamlessness as a harmful business strategy and design. With ethnographic research, however, I met fast-food employees who strategically used these technologies to their advantage and enjoyed them. I was struck with several questions: were seamless technologies oppressive or liberatory: were they true cases of automation or “fauxtomation?” What are seams, technically and socially, and why do corporations want to hide them? What is the future of service? These questions drive this research as I historically, ethnographically, and speculatively analyze the seamless customer experience within fast-food. This thesis is split into two main sections on production and consumption. The initial production section encompasses a history of how “self-service” spread digital interfaces throughout commercial space, enabled seamlessness to transcend the world of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), and inspired the digitized world of fast-food seen today. I ground my intervention in existing critical scholarship on “erotic” logistics, and with a variety of interviews and ethnographic evidence, explore how employees conform to or manipulate seamless infrastructures to their benefit. Within the consumption section, I develop a social theory of seams as encounters, where consumers come upon the human and technological limits of infrastructures, and speculate what a seamless world without encounters could look like. This leads me to sociological and anthropological theories of “non-places,” which help me probe whether seamless consumption is harmful to society. Ultimately, I conclude that seamlessness does not unemploy workers, destroy human difference, or produce societal collapse. Seamless design is neither good or bad, but rather situational. Its remediation of production and consumption does not entail the death of service, but a redefinition of what “service” means, altogether.