No, it is not a spelling mistake. Like many other cities in the world, Barcelona has incorporated home delivery drivers as one of the most visible creatures in its urban zoo; in turn, the act of "ordering a Glovo" is already part of a linguistic imaginary that subsumes the act of eating to having the hot menu sent to our home. For the inhabitants of Ciutat Vella, food delivery drivers are a kind of ghostly neighbor who, if this servant of yours were a wet-blanket cultural critic, could define as a kind of itinerant homeless very well suited to liquid modernity; in effect, they are usually racialized fellow citizens who bring us dinner home like a kind of wise men, beings who live the stress of a city in perpetual motion, the gloval Barcelona, but with whom we barely exchange a simple courtesy dialogue and half a euro tip.
Unlike most Barcelonans, I tend to be tremendously in favor of capitalism and the geniuses who take advantage of our laziness to do business. In this sense, given that the gloval paradigm will take over most cities on the planet, I celebrate that Barcelona leads the sector and I envy the genius of Óscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud for inventing it (while I'm at it, I also applaud that its founders choke on money after selling part of the company to the giant Delivery Hero, also ensuring that Glovo plans to open a center of almost 30,000 square meters in the Mile 22@ campus of our city). My liberal condition, however, does not prevent me from also being reassured by the Government's tenacity in auditing delivery companies so that their workers do not fall into the almost slave-like status of false self-employed and can thus earn a decent living.
The existence of global Barcelona not only affects the economy and the urban landscape (streets where people walk less and less and which are becoming mere consumption highways); it is also the sign of an existential cloistering and a life increasingly centered on the home bubble, a paradigm of being that, despite having been the result of the damage of covid, goes beyond the fear with which the little yellow bug from Wuhan has made us more sedentary. The global existence maximizes a comfort and speed in consumption that, if exponential, will soon cause going out to dinner or taking the trouble to go to the market to become practically anachronistic activities. Without being a technophobe or a nostalgic for the rural, I often wonder if what my neighbors do, having their breakfast croissant brought home, when they have a bakery two minutes away, doesn't bring laziness closer to madness.
The existence of global Barcelona not only affects the economy and the urban landscape, it is also the sign of an existential cloistering and a life increasingly centered on the home bubbleBut I am not a moralist either and I have also experienced the surrealism that excites existence gloval. A few days ago, at home, we had a craving for churros. Yours truly, a member of Generation X and a product of the late last century, proceeded to move her butt to go down to Petritxol street, three hundred meters from home.As was to be expected, on Christmas Day, Barcelona residents hysterically flooded La Pallaresa and Dulcinea with queues worthy of a surprise Bruce Springsteen concert (yes, the metaphor is also Xer's).The price of keeping the snack going was to open Glovo and order some churros with chocolate from Churrería Jessy in the Creu Coberta neighborhood, which arrived in just over twenty minutes (not only were they very good, but my nostalgic condition ended up even more humiliated with a postmodern churro, filled with Nutella, which was the best of the entire order,by far).
If we move from anecdote to category, in terms of consumption, it will always be better that I didn't end up returning home empty-handed and without spending a euro at the farms in my area, so that the owners of Jessy and the delivery person who so diligently brought me churros home have work. All of this we have well assumed, but it must also be warned that the global existence can end up turning into reality the wet dream of the elites who strive for a more home-bound, lazy, and, therefore, conformist and controlled society. This is neither the fault nor the responsibility of the founders of Glovo, my poor children, who have had the grace to turn our cravings into a plate of Nachos with cheese, the kind that sends your diet to hell. But one must be attentive, because inventions that maximize our comfort can also, and I insist on can, end up reifying us.
Like most readers, this stabber tries to find coexistence between tradition and paradigm shift. Today (I write the Punyalada, as always, on Fridays before lunch) with friends we will fervently invade the kitchen of the Gelida winery or Can Vilaró, the restaurants that resist Barcelona's culinary diversity with tuna crests and fricandó. At night, with the cold increasing and the fatigue of so much Christmas and so much absurd revelry, perhaps we will end up giving in to the global temptation of some nachos from La Taquería that will be hastily eaten from the sofa. This balance, a kind of social-liberal third way, seems to me a good pact with reality. Or perhaps it's just things about the crisis that stalks us once we turn forty.
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