What’s so irresistible about IKEA? Some guru pretender said that IKEA is about being, not buying, and it’s true — IKEA is set up like a cozy simulation game for adults. Parents can leave their children in the IKEA playground, have something to eat in the IKEA restaurant, stroll through the enormous display rooms, and then there are the ubiquitous pencils, pads, and tape measures, which transform potential buyers into master craftsmen and craftswomen, measurers of length, width, and height, into builders and designers. There are those well-marked arrows on the floor, gently coaxing us through the IKEA labyrinth to the exit. Admittedly, there are no signs for shortcuts; they’re for our sense of orientation to figure out. From the display rooms we automatically end up in the IKEA self-service warehouse, pushing shopping carts that are just waiting to be filled, all the while following the guiding arrows to the check-out and exit. At IKEA everything is welcoming and accessible; IKEA doesn’t rub our social status in the dirt. At IKEA we buy the feeling that things are under our control — we do the measuring and choosing, we assemble the furniture, we take the responsibility. IKEA doesn’t underrate our intelligence; IKEA makes us an equal player: IKEA gives our self-confidence wings. At IKEA we don’t feel disqualified for a second, with IKEA the word impossible is eternally deleted from our dictionary.
The game is, without doubt, deeply embedded in our brains, our instincts, reflexes, and behavior; that’s why we buy toys, proudly showing them off to one another. This reflex — visible even in one-year-old babies, who’ll push every button they can find — remains with us until our last breath. We adults also push buttons on a daily basis: on the remote control, television, radio, VCR, computers, elevators, home intercoms, ovens, lamps, mobile phones, and bank machines. We’ve wised up: we know that as soon as we forget to push a button, that’s when the trouble starts.
That’s why today’s banks look like Internet cafés. That seems to be why ABN-AMRO, the biggest Dutch bank, refurbished its branch in downtown Amsterdam: there are no tellers or employees anymore, just computers — every client serves him- or herself. Today, we serve and look after ourselves in all kinds of ways: we organize our own travel, book our flights and hotels, do our own banking, pay our bills, make our own diagnoses, figure out on our own whether garlic or green tea is better for reducing high blood pressure. We pick out and try on clothes ourselves, because there’s no one to give us any advice; we are left completely to our own devices when we buy technical gadgets, the youthful assistants usually clueless. We communicate with invisible service centers, which then refer us to their websites to find the information needed to solve our problem. We’ve become self-sufficient, the term has entered our dictionaries and it’s intent on sticking around forever.
The greatest erosion of our self-confidence and our strongest internal protest are not caused by our social, sexual, racial, national, physical, age, fashion, or any other kind of incompatibility, but by a button, the symbolic button that — if touched incorrectly — will disqualify us from the game. We didn’t make it into the packed tram; we locked our keys inside, having slammed the door behind us; we forgot to charge our mobile phones; we didn’t bring our glasses; the key got stuck in the lock; we didn’t turn the alarm on; we don’t know how to turn the alarm off; we parked the wrong way, and there’s a ticket waiting for us on the windshield; the computer crashed and we didn’t back up in time — all of these, and thousands of similar details, result in internal emotional upheavals whose intensity is completely disproportionate to whatever provoked them.
At the beginning of January 2011 I was supposed to travel to New York and participate in a roundtable discussion. New York is a city I love, I’ve been there numerous times, and from the moment I land at John F. Kennedy Airport I enjoy every second.
At Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, checking my passport and ticket, the check-in person asked me:
“And where’s your ESTA form?”
It turned out that the ESTA form — Electronic System for Travel Authorization — is a new bureaucratic obstacle to be negotiated in order to gain permission to travel to the USA. The clerk advised me to complete the form on the special computers there at the airport. Filling out the form on a pokey little screen, with a ball-shaped mouse that was hard to move and kept getting stuck, following less than clear instructions, and anxious that I’d be late for my flight, it was no walk in the park. The guy at the computer next to me seemed to be making good progress.
“How’s it going?” I asked, hoping he might help me.
“I’ve been hunched here for an hour and I’m still at the beginning,” said the man jumpily.
I approached the airport’s KLM hostesses.
“The machines aren’t under our jurisdiction,” they said.
“Whose jurisdiction are they under then?”
“The Americans’.”
“Is there anyone who can help me?”
“No, the details you enter on the form are strictly confidential,” they said.
“How can they be confidential when I’ve got to supply them when I check in?!”
“Yes, but you’ve got to fill the form out yourself, unassisted.”
“Like packing my own luggage, you mean?”
“Exactly.”
Although I knew negotiations with these Dutch clerks would come to nothing, I persisted.
“What if the person traveling is blind, illiterate, or has never seen a computer screen in his or her life?
“Those kinds of people don’t usually travel,” the tall blonde KLM hostess brushed me off.
I gave filling the form in another two or three tries, then gave up and headed home. The organizers kindly agreed to change my flight to the following day, so I sat down enthusiastically at my computer, found the ESTA form on the American Embassy’s website, breezed through filling it in, and paid the requisite fee by credit card. A slightly worrying message appeared on the screen saying that I’d get an answer within seventy-two hours, but sometime after midnight the permission arrived.
In the morning I set off again for Schiphol. The check-in clerk went through my documents.
“You’ve put your passport number in wrong!” she said.
And really, a mistake had snuck in.
“What shall I do?”
“Try to correct the mistake on the computer. . let’s hope it’ll be entered into the system before check-in closes. .”
Sweat ran down my spine, my heart pounded. The ball-shaped mouse was unresponsive and a message kept popping up saying that my session had expired. The program kept sending me back to the beginning, deleting everything I’d entered in the process. The young guy at the computer beside me was sweating through it too.
I replayed these twin episodes in my head, hoping I might find a detail to reassure me that it wasn’t entirely my fault. But it was: I was the one who didn’t find out about the new rules on time; if I had, I would have known that I couldn’t travel without authorization, and then, when given a second chance, I was the one who filled out the form incorrectly. I felt hopelessly disqualified. The KLM staff were right: such people don’t travel. Crestfallen, I went home. The organizers didn’t get in touch again, and even my closest friends felt no pity for me. A logical and justifiable disqualification had come my way.
In totalitarian systems nothing was tailored to the individual, nor did the system depend on him or her, a hostile, invisible state apparatus controlled everything. The individual navigated through his or her little life by making adjustments, by cunning, hypocrisy, corruption, haggling, compromise, bribery, and God-knows-what else. The individual could blame all his or her troubles on the cruelty of the system. What’s more, in totalitarian systems disqualification was often fatal. People lost their lives in prisons and camps, and their being “unaccommodated” also often meant the suffering and death of those close to them.