I learned everything I needed to know about Super Bowl 50 on Twitter. I saw people turning up eight days before the game to voluntarily enter a Verizon-sponsored Disneyland in downtown San Francisco named Super Bowl City — “dope … if you are drunk,” one guy tweeted. I saw the cop-protestor showdowns. I learned Beyonce GIFs are the only replays worth seeing. I learned that stadium concession workers made less per hour than the cost of one $13 Bud Light. And I learned — scrolling through hundreds of #SB50 tweets — that even Techlandia must still cede to the atom-bound limits of the analog world. Or, in other words, even people paying $3,000 a ticket sometimes have to stand in line.
Which sounds ridiculously obvious, until you consider how easy it is to jump the line these days with the right mix of cash and tech. Techlandia counts lines among the ultimate deficiencies in need of disruption. It’s no wonder that Levi’s Stadium, located in the heart of Silicon Valley and the site of the Super Bowl, opened in 2014 with a first-in-the-nation app to funnel 68,500 fans around with minimal lines (though you wouldn’t know it by looking at the Twitter pictures). Press a button on your phones and a stadium runner will bring a 49ers sweatshirt to your seat for a $5 delivery fee (poof goes the gift shop line). Push another button for in-seat delivery of a beer and hotdog. If you insist on visiting the concessions, the same app will estimate how many minutes you’ll spend in line (same for the bathroom). To keep your line-cutting smartphones in order, stations of power-charging cords dangle around the concourse like digital drip IVs.
Ever since the early PC-bound web days of e-commerce, and now with a multitude of mobiles apps, much of digital innovation has been aimed at annihilating lines, and with it, people’s patience for them. The most exuberant line cutters these days hire TaskRabbits to queue up for the latest iphoness, letting them download more apps to weasel out of more lines. The doorman at Marriott Marquis downtown San Francisco tells me at least one quarter of the guests blaze right past his cab line and step into an app-hailed car. A colleague told me he times his app-hailed hot dinner delivery to meet him (avoiding a restaurant or grocery line) as he steps out of his Uber (no bus line). Why go wait in a Black Friday line when the same deals are available online 24–7? Starbucks has a new line-cutting app that advertises “No Time? No Line,” letting you breeze by folks to grab your pre-ordered coffee at the counter. (Taco Bell has the same, because taco.) At the center of the line cutting is a startup office culture basking in #timeisprecious life hacks, obsessed with simultaneously pampering and wringing more hours out of its workers: hire a helper to stand in the post office line so you can spend more hours building the app to do the same.
Milton Friedman would love this free-market, industry-driven solution to the line—anything that can be sold, should be sold—but a first grader may be more skeptical. Remember when cutting line was the quickest way to a lunch line fight? An exchange from Tom Junod’s Esquire profile of Matt Damon comes to mind:
*I mentioned an experience I’d had over the summer, when I took my daughter to a water park we’d been to many times and found it transformed by the availability of a “Fast Pass,” which allows visitors to pay an extra forty-five dollars to go to the head of the lines. “It changed everything,” I said, “because people were now paying to cut the line, and everybody knew that it was unfair. I knew it, my daughter knew it, and so did the people doing the cutting.”
Damon nodded. “If you really want to know what it’s like to be famous, all you have to do is go to that water park and pay your forty-five bucks. Go to the water park and that’s what it’s like.
“You jump the line.”*
The line is where two very American impulses collide—one of the quickly eroding vision of an even playing field, the other of money buying better service. (What is being rich if not jumping every one of life’s metaphorical and physical lines?) And while jumping the line face-to-face in the physical world is the surest way to a dogfight, why do we mostly accept the digital equivalent without comment?
For one, it’s harder to see.
Let’s start with the mother of line taming: Disney World. Two years ago, the park launched FastPass+, allowing park attendees to reserve up to three rides 30 days in advance on its app. Those staying in Disney resorts can start reserving their rides even earlier. Clara Moskowitz is a Brooklyn-based science journalist who does the ethical arithmetic on her annual escapist getaways to Orlando. Sometimes all the FastPasses for certain rides are already gone for the day, seized weeks before in cyberspace, she notes. They were grabbed by planners like her. “Disney fans like me pride themselves on getting around the lines,” she says. “I kind of look down on people who wait in line for 1.5 hours as noobs, that don’t know what they’re doing.” She says she hears complaints from kids asking their parents why they’re in the slow lane as she passes “all the time. I see people having terrible Disney World vacations, and I shake my head and say, this could have been so much better if your parents had just done more research.”
Moskowitz sees the system as more or less fair, especially when considering the stone-cold capitalist nature of Disney. To Moskowitz, the Disney system rewards forethought not money. (The company is rather cagey about its secret sauce; my pleas to Disney to tell me about its line-corralling science were shot down.)
After hanging up my call with her, a friend of mine who grew up in India who had been eavesdropping got annoyed by fairness talk in the context of Disney. Kids at Disney are already at the front of the globe’s bigger, abstract line, he said. Their parents have the resources to get to Disney in the first place—currently tickets go for $99 a day. Who cares if some of the rich kids get on rides faster than other kinda-rich kids? Plus, they’re in the United States: they won the line lottery. Life was never fair, he says, and a line-skipping app isn’t making it any worse.
It’s not just the Six Flags of the world that let you buy ever-shorter lines with more cash. Airlines first got hip to line taming with online check-in. Then the TSA joined in with a pre-checked security fast lane in 2011, for those who pay the $85 application fee. In recent years, a private company named CLEAR created its own short line at many airports for members paying $15 a month—you confirm your identity via biometric readings in CLEAR’s own line and head straight to the metal detector. It’s also available at the San Francisco Giants’ stadium and Yankee Stadium.
While disposable income has long been a prerequisite for most line-skipping, it’s no longer enough. Now the most valuable velvet rope-cutting currency is digital savvy. Anyone with a smartphones and basic knowledge can now jump the line, often for free. But, perhaps inevitably, as the barriers come down for some, they seem to be rising higher than ever for those left behind.
Take Jeremiah Lowery, a 29-year-old homeless man who last summer headed to the San Francisco DMV, where he needed to get a California ID to cash his checks from construction gigs and to get into shelters. (It’s pretty clear from the description he probably hadn’t been at the front of many of life’s lines.)
“On Aug. 16, he waited in line for the fifth time,” reads a suspenseful public defender press release describing the ensuing incident. “He reached the counter at the end of the day, clutching his paperwork.”
After exchanging some words and being told to come back in October, the clerk allegedly told him to leave. But Lowery refused to move. The standoff escalated into a fistfight, and Lowery ended up getting charged with two felonies for assault. A sympathetic, line-hating jury acquitted him of the felonies, dinging him with a misdemeanor instead. “One juror said ‘I can’t stand the DMV, I feel like I’m going nuts every time I’m there,’” says Lowery’s attorney Sandy Feinland. “My guy was like a folk hero.”
Lowery could have been spared all this. The DMV started allowing appointment reservations online years ago. You can even get one by calling into the hotline if you don’t have internet access. But a guy looking for housing and a job isn’t privy to such shortcuts. “He didn’t have the resources,” Feinland says. So he’s stuck in the line, without even Candy Crush Saga to wile away the time.
But wait a second, a skeptic might say, people love lines! Just skim New York Magazine’s feature extolling the status, the “it” factor, that keeps modern-day New Yorkers lining up for more. Techlandia has some of those lines, too: Bi-Rite Creamery’s sugar-depleted one, Mission Chinese’s hipster huddle, Tartine Bakery’s weekend rush. (“It builds the anticipation,” a woman with smart bangs and ankle boots in the Tartine line told me on a Sunday morning.) If you speak pop psychology, the people in these lines are “self-signaling”: showing themselves what kind of person they are, in this case, by how long they are willing to wait for their cultural totems. These are well-behaved lines, too: studies show people enjoy the wait for experiences more than they do for gadgets, and are more cheerful while doing so. I found Jesse Garza, a 40-something media producer in another such mirthful, self-signaling line in downtown San Francisco: the opening night of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He wore a Han Solo T-shirt, and was passing the time watching Star Wars parodies on an ipads, and taking smartphones videos of another line-waiter’s mechanical Yoda.
As I quizzed him, Garza started to parse his life’s lines. He said this one was sort of fun—an event. Opening night tickets for The Force Awakens sold out online across the country within hours and, as many theaters now assign seats in advance, there were few incentives to arrive early. Yet people still showed up hours ahead of time to party in wholly voluntary Star Wars lines, according to an amused Fandango rep. These were nostalgic lines. Air quote “lines.”
Yet obviously all lines are not made equal. Garza says he recently started pre-ordering his Starbucks espresso through its new app each day, skipping the line to grab it off the counter as soon as he walks in. (An app called Preo allows bar-goers to do the same in New York City and Florida bars, disrupting perhaps the most arbitrary line system of all.) Garza concedes that the Starbucks app makes him feel a tad special, or at least resourceful: “It is kind fun when you see someone you know who’s waiting, and you walk up and grab it.” He also considers the app fair—free, provided by the company for anyone with a smartphones who takes the time to download it.
Still, Garza has his limits.
“Don’t be that person who sends someone else to stand in line for you,” he says, speaking of the TaskRabbit line holders. “You sense more and more, people with more and more money are getting more and more things that other people can’t or won’t. That is cheating, I think.”
In a world in which Star Wars and brunch lines are desirable, but others definitely not, the new privilege may not be whether you stand in line. It’s that, if you have cash and a smartphones, you can choose when.
