When Will the Homeless Start Accepting Apple Pay?

The great thing about Apple Pay is that you don’t have to actually touch another human being at any point in the transaction, nor need their sweaty prole hands drip all over your dollar bills or the change that emerges from their pathogen-soaked cash register.

That’s why I’m fully in support of Apple Pay, the tech giant’s payment system that uses your phone as a sort of ghostly credit card you just waft in front of the till. No icky germs from other human beings: brilliant!

I’m exaggerating, of course – but only slightly. I’ve got friends who consider shopping trips with abject terror because they might accidentally come into contact with another person. And there are more of these germophobes around than you think.

Yesterday, Apple announced its new music streaming service, which sounds alright, and a few other dorky details about its operating systems that need not detain us here.

But by far the most exciting news was that Apple Pay is coming to the UK, and getting rolled out further in the US. With this new Apple Pay thing I can pay for services or give money to people on the street without running the risk of physical contact.

Which suits the hypocritical progressive hipsters of San Francisco perfectly, I’ll bet, as they drive up rents in the city and institute unsustainable minimum wages that drive out ordinary people and force their beloved comic book shops to shutter their doors.

Meanwhile, the tech giants get to swank around in Teslas and pay $5,000 a month in rent to live on nice clean streets and bleat about transformative social change and the evils of Republicanism without actually needing to have any dirty poor or black people anywhere near them.

I’m not the type to indulge in conspiracy theory, but doesn’t it seem like this glossy and ultimately pointless new tech only really serves to drive a wedge between the people who can afford it and the people who can’t?

Not quite the glistening technological utopia we were promised, is it.