me_irl

You're right that people avoid talking to people nowadays, preferring a text or an email or whatever. But that's not the point here, it's being interrupted from whatever you're doing to answer the phone for no reason. Modern autodialers make calls continuously, and when someone answers they feed the call to whichever telemarketer in the room is open. If they're all occupied the machine just hangs up, but it keeps dialing because they don't want to pay their minimum wage workers to sit idle for precious seconds. So for that reason people out in the world have to stop what they're doing to pick up the phone, say "Hello" and hear nothing but dead air and then a click. It's the tech equivalent of kids ringing people's doorbells and running away, except for profit. Fuck that crap.