I toured a new house this week. I’m moving to a new city so I toured a lot of places, but this one stood out. Not because it was particularly nice or particularly wretched. It’s just that this was the first house or apartment tour I’ve experienced where I didn’t interact with a single human being.

The tour was self-guided — or rather, outsourced to someone who would work for free — which meant wandering up to an empty house and fumbling with a lockbox on the back door, aware at all times of the neighbors watching me from their driveway. But it wasn’t just the tour. There was no other person involved at any point in the process — a total absence of human contact. When I called to schedule the tour, I thought, naively, that I’d speak to a leasing agent and we’d fumble through a polite conversation about dates and times and “what would work best for you” plesantries. Instead, I navigated an automated phone tree that directed me to an online portal that asked me for my social security number, date of birth, and a photo of my driver’s license. (This was, I need to stress, to set up a tour.)

After uploading this information to a website called RentMojo or LandlordRocket or something else that inspired confidence, I started getting text messages from a phone number with my area code, a phenomenon linked in my brain with low-effort scammers. I almost disregarded the texts on instinct because I was looking for housing in a city 900 miles from my hometown Throughout my tour experience, I recieved a cascade of semi-coherent instructions from this number telling me to reply with this or that numeral if I wanted to reschedule or cancel or if I was running late. And finally when I got tired of showing the property to myself and followed the instructions for locking up, I recieved a final indiginity: A link to a survey.

“If you have a minute, we’d really appreciate some feedback,” the text read, though I was still unsure about the nature of this “we.”

I decided this house wasn’t for me. The rent was too high and the quality too low. But I suspect I could have completed every other stage of the application process without ever seeing or talking to anyone besides a computer. It was an experience I’d classify as not quite horrible, just mildy unnerving and annoying — a quiet marker of minor dystopia, not a symbol of the end times. But the hell of searching for a new place to live already causes enough psychic damage. No one needs this extra little misery.