Is Digital Going to Destroy Urban Life

I am from City of Mumbai and witnessing the gradual decay  of urban life. It can have serious consequences . How and why, I will explain to you.

In last few years, many Malls are closed. Whenever we go to a multiplex, we hardly see viewers except friday  evening, Saturday and Sunday. The kind of crowd I used to notice in our Lokhandwala Market is missing. Even restaurants are not crowded any more. Surge of Online Shopping has made life of brand stores really miserable, forget middle class, even lower income group , including my Kam Wali Bai is totally convinced with ease of shopping online. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar doomed theaters. Apps like Swiggy have made it possible to bring chicest restaurant food on your dining table at better price deal than who is going out driving in chaotic suburban traffic and further waiting for table for lunch or dinner. By and large this is happening in all major urban spaces.

With this pace, e-commerce will totally wipe out the physical market in near future. There will be no cunning shops, no big-box stores, no toggeries, no haberdashers, no wine shops, no malls, no movie theaters, and perhaps no food markets except for a very few pan shops, tea stalls and holdouts. And urban elite will continue to stare at screens at cafes, interacting not at all with their fellows; moms will arrange their kids in their cushioned strollers while listening to distant voice through earbuds; the entrepreneur will text his colleague in another time zone; the aroma of fine coffee will continue to entice. But essence of Kayani Cafe, the notion that one might engage in conversation with a newfound friend, that one might relish a period of profound efficiency, or pick up a stick of carbon and scratch it across a sheet made of wood pulp in an effort to create a likeness , or engage otherwise in a contemplative, even spiritually centered pursuit will be gone and shall be dimly recalled much like the great library of Alexandria (today's Istanbul).

What remains after the digital gutting of the urban scene will be the trappings. Not many will flee to the commutable split level. Urbanites will stay in their lofts ! They, will, for a time at least, continue to perform  efficiently as the generate value to their stakeholders of whatever company engages them. They will, for a time (but not indefinitely) out to eat and drink and be merry. But they will be tracked tethered to their digital life by the invisible strands of streaming data , they will never be free of the demands of the job or their other distributed obligations. Original thought, stymied by a constant reminder that the competition is pulling incrementally ahead, becomes atrophied in an attempt to please the algorithm or the base.
As the urban dweller will be cocooned indoors with their mobile device , the dynamism of the city will be destroyed.

This is going to be a grim reality unless digital is replaced with some disruption.