If you hate having to stare at your news feed, like I sometimes do, you probably missed one of the most pressing stories of the year: a hitchhiking robot was destroyed in Philadelphia this past week. On the surface, it might come off as mildly amusing, and rather bewildering, but the viral story picked up steam, and sparked much conversation.
Like any viral hit, it left as quickly as it came. It was the hot topic just earlier this week, and it has paled in the clickbait news to the circus act that we are calling the "Preliminary GOP Debate" just the other night. Perhaps what caused the story to plunge into the national spotlight is that it was in the wake of the whole blown-out-of-the-water, milked-out story of our pal Cecil from Zimbabwe. Like Cecil, this robot, known as HITCHBot, suffered a "death," albeit in Central Philadelphia. Subsequently, it sparked viral attention and prompted deserved, and certainly undeserved ignominy.
I found the whole incident intriguing and the more I learned about HITCHBot, the more close to home it felt, and more disappointed I was. It's not the damage to the robot that irked me, it was the outcome of the experiment being conducted by HITCHBot and its researchers, as well as how it sometimes takes just one person to ruin something for thousands of people. The robot was part of a social experiment to test the kindness of strangers, it relied on the kindness of individuals to transport it around the United States to see major sights in the nation (i.e. Mount Rushmore, Times Square, etc.)
It spent a few months in Germany, visited the Netherlands, then last year, went on a month long tour in Canada, completely unharmed.
It lasted two weeks in the United States, doing fine in New England, but as it ventured southwards, trouble happened in the City of Brotherly Love. And to be fair, it could have happened anywhere, but perhaps it was through better communication and caring that this did not happen elsewhere, and why it did happen here. Was someone too careless to leave it out in the middle of Philadelphia in the middle of the night? Possibly. Or was it to naive to trust that strangers would take care of this item? That seems more like it. It's a shame that it has to be that way, because now, a small minority had absolutely shed another bad light at Philadelphia and the U.S. in general.
So what happened? It added more fuel to the tiresome "America sucks, Europe/Canada rocks" or the "Philadelphia is asshole city" echo chamber. This time it's the result of how Americans are seemingly less willing to help others out than their European or Canadian counterparts, or further, it brings to light a history of infamous cases involving violent Philadelphians (snowballs at Santa and throwing batteries come to mind?).
Perhaps one lesson could be this: should we really trust strangers? However, I think the incident asks us "What can we do to be more trustworthy, and what can we do be nicer to those we do not know?" Can we shed the cloak of paranoia and learn to trust our neighbors? That's what we should be thinking about.
