Next-Flight-Homers
People who click on the Internet but not in real life when they go to meet their hookup at an airport cocktail lounge; related to but not the same as Room-Getters — people who click both on the Internet and in real life.
Ninetenicillin
A pill that makes one feel as if the events of 9/11 had never occurred. A variation of Millennial Tristesse, a longing for the twentieth century.
Nonrotational Dreamlessness
The theory that dreams are largely a biological response to the planet’s rotation, so citizens of planets that do not rotate most likely do not dream.
Noun-Nouning
By repeating a noun twice, one invokes the noun’s generic form, its invariant-memory form. “No, I don’t want blue khakis with pleats. Just give me clean generic beige khaki-khakis.” Or, “Officer, I’ve tried to remember what kind of car the getaway car was but I can’t — it was just a car-car.”
Omniscience Fatigue
The burnout that comes with being able to know the answer to almost anything online.
Omnislut
Mitochondrial Eve — the “universal mother” — a female who lived about 200,000 years ago, to whom all human beings are related via the mitochondrial DNA pathway. “Superdog,” a.k.a. Y-Chromosomal Adam, the universal father, lived 60,000 years ago.
Pathologography
A new strain of biographical writing that acknowledges the importance of performing forensic analysis of the subject’s physical and mental states. Biology is not destiny, but it can certainly open and close a few doors.
Permanent Halloween
The ultimate expression of individuality is to arrive at a point where one wears a Halloween costume every day of the year. Writes Louise Adler, “The more like ourselves we become, the odder we become. This is most obvious in people whom society no longer keeps in line; the eccentricity of the very rich or of castaways.”
Phantom Point
An object that exists but, when you really think about it, does not; for example, a corner or an edge. Also known as “virtual tangibles,” phantom points must be considered when contemplating theoretical geometry. For example, the head of a pin — a point that obviously exists and yet does not — is theoretically no different than the state of the universe before the Big Bang. It encompasses everything and nothing.
Poetic Side Effects
The result of looking at a water molecule and being able to predict rainbows, or inventing the motor vehicle and predicting that dogs will cheerfully stick their faces out into the oncoming wind.
Point Mesmerization
Deflection by dispersion. The manner in which a lion tamer controls a lion, keeping it mesmerized by holding a chair up to its face, legs first. The lion, unable to relinquish its instinctual and powerful ability to focus, stares at the ends of the chair legs, its eyes darting back and forth between the four of them to the exclusion of the larger picture.
Polydexterity
Handedness isn’t just about writing or throwing a ball. It can be applied to almost all body activities: winking, crossing the legs, guitar playing, sleeping on one’s side, and so forth. No person is ever universally monodextrous.
Pope Gregory’s Day-timer
Doesn’t mean anything in particular, but it certainly would have been interesting to see.
Post-adolescent Expert Syndrome
The tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-to-21 age range. “Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard.”
The inability of teens to consider the consequences of risky action is due to the fact that their brain’s development is only 80 percent finished. The cortex matures from back to front, leaving connection and development of the frontal lobe incomplete until somewhere in the mid to late twenties. Not surprisingly, the frontal lobe is home to reasoning, planning, and judgement.
Post-human
Whatever it is that we become next.
Preliterary Aural Bliss
The notion that what you think of as your inner voice is actually a rather new “invention” created by the printed word, solitary reading, and a text-mediated daily environment. In the old days — say, a thousand years ago — people didn’t have an inner voice. Citizens inhabited a mental universe that had more to do with sound effects than speech. Words and voices might pass through your head, but it wasn’t necessarily you that was speaking. Maybe the king or the gods or something, but not you.
Proceleration
The acceleration of acceleration.
Propanolol
A beta blocker used by the military that curtails adrenaline production, which in turn reduces memory production, which in turn reduces post-traumatic stress.
Proscenial Universe Theory
The notion that time simply provides a medium — an arena — within which emotions are able to play themselves out. As Joyce Carol Oates says, “Time is the element in which we exist. We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.”
Proteinic Inevitability
The tendency for life-forming molecules to aggregate and create life the first moment they possibly can. So dedicated are they to this cause, recent research suggests that in the beginning stages of life on earth, small molecules acted as “molecular midwives,” assisting in the formation of life-creating polymers and appropriate selection of base pairs for the DNA double helix.
Pseudoalienation
The inability of humans to create genuinely alienating situations. Anything made by humans is a de facto expression of humanity. Technology cannot be alienating because humans created it. Genuinely alien technologies can be created only by aliens. Technically, a situation one might describe as alienating is, in fact, “humanating.”
Punning Syndrome
The medicalization of what was previously considered merely an annoying verbal tic displayed by a limited number of people. Punning is an almost inevitable side effect of connectopathies within the brain’s verbal nodes, somewhat akin to Tourette syndrome.
This leads to a larger discussion about the concept of spectrum behaviour: sliding scales of behaviour connected by clinical appearance and underlying caus-ation, ranging from mild clinical deficits to severe disorder. Psychiatric disorders understood along spectrums include autism, paranoia, obsessive compulsion, anxiety, and conditions that result from congenital malformations, brain damage, and aging. There are many more, however, and each category itself can be broken down into more specific spectrums.
Quantum-DNA Link Theory
The belief that DNA is not just a blueprint or recipe for life, but that the physical DNA molecule acts as a quantum-level transmitter or homing device communicating with other life-forming molecules in the universe — similar molecules that act as blueprints for other sentient beings that are aware of space and time and the role of themselves within it. This theory presupposes that countless sentient beings exist throughout the universe, and that life is the universe’s raison d’être. It is a lot to believe in, but ultimately this line of thought resonates with swaths of belief systems, from “the Buddhist concept of Indra’s net, Teilhard de Chardin’s conception of the noosphere, James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, to Hegel’s Absolute idealism, Satori in Zen, and to some traditional pantheist beliefs. It is also reminiscent of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious.” Thank you, Wikipedia.
Random Sequence Buzz
The small, pleasant chemical reaction experienced in the brain when hearing the next song in a randomly sequenced finite song list. Not to be confused with radio sequence buzz, wherein songs are drawn from a reasonably well defined yet still open-end
ed supply of music.
Rapture Goo
The stuff that gets left behind. The fact that the only thing that really defines you is your DNA. Jesus gets your DNA. That’s all he gets, roughly 7.6 milligrams of you. All the blood and guts and bones and undigested food and everything else within the ecosystem that is your body will simply grace the floor.
Red Queen’s Blog Syndrome
The more one races onto one’s blog to assert one’s uniqueness, the more generic one becomes.
Romantic Superstition
Dislike of having the romantic notion of personality reduced to a set of brain and body functions.
Rosenwald’s Theorem
The belief that all the wrong people have self-esteem.
Sequential Dysphasia
Dysfunctional mental states do stem from malfunctions in the brain’s sequencing capacity. One commonly known short-term sequencing dysfunction is dyslexia. People unable to sequence over a slightly longer term might be “no good with directions.” The ultimate sequencing dysfunction is the inability to look at one’s life as a meaningful sequence or story.
Sequential Thinking
The ability to create and remember sequences is an almost entirely human ability (some crows have been shown to sequence). Dogs, while highly intelligent, still cannot form sequences; it’s the reason why the competitors at dog sports shows are led from station to station by handlers instead of completing the course themselves.
Sin Fatigue
When hearing about the sins of others ceases to be compelling, a condition most commonly experienced by religious and medical professionals.
Situational Disinhibition
A social contrivance within which one is allowed to become disinhibited, that is, a moment of culturally approved disinhibition. This occurs when speaking with fortune tellers, to dogs and other pets, to strangers and bartenders in bars, or with Ouija boards.
The Social Question
If you were to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you do it facing the city or facing the ocean? In answering, one is forced to wonder about the absolute extent to which social behaviour is embedded in the human psyche. “True suicides” don’t care what side of the bridge they jump from. If one gets up there and considers the question “Do I face the city or the Pacific Ocean?” then the implication is that the suicide attempt is not a hundred percent genuine.
Somnimural Release
The ability of dreams to prevent you from remembering that the dead are dead, or that vanished friends have vanished.
Somnitropic Drugs
Drugs engineered to affect one’s dream life.
Standard Deviation
Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness, yet it is the feeling of uniqueness that convinces us we have souls.
Star Shock
The disproportionate way in which meeting a celebrity feels slightly like being told a piece of life-changing news.
Stovulax
A micro-targeted drug of the future designed to stop fantastically specific OCD cases, in this case a compulsion involving the inability of some people to convince themselves after leaving the house that the stove is turned off. As science further maps the brain, such micro-targeted drugs become ever more plausible.
Technological Fatalism
An attitude positing that the next sets of triumphing technologies are going to happen no matter who invents them or where or how. The only unknown factor is the pace at which they will appear.
Time Lance
Suppose one could send a particle a millionth of a second ahead in the future. By knowing its direction and speed, one could then determine the net overall expansion direction and speed of the universe.
Time Snack
Often annoying moments of pseudo-leisure created by computers when they stop responding in order to save a file, to search for software updates, or, most likely, for no apparent reason.
Time/Will Uniqueness
The belief that awareness of time and the possession of free will are the only two characteristics that separate humans from all other creatures.
Torn-Paper Geography
The phenomenon in which, if you take a sheet of paper and rip it in half, both pieces will probably resemble an American state or Canadian province. If one continues to rip the paper, the phenomenon continues — a reflection of New World geopolitics versus the Old World. European and Asian borders are delineated by rivers, watersheds, and battlefields. New World borders are most often a mixture of rivers and the nineteenth-century Cartesian grid. Old World = people before property; New World = property before people.
Trainwreck Equilibration Theory
The belief that in the end, every family experiences an equal amount of trials, disorders, quirks, and medical dilemmas. One family might get more cancer, another might be more bipolar or schizo, but in the end it all averages out into one big train wreck per family.
Trans-human
Whatever technology made by humans that ends up becoming smarter than humans.
Trans-humane Conundrum
If technology is only a manifestation of our intrinsic humanity, how can we possibly make something smarter than ourselves?
Trigenerational Amnesia
The reluctance of most people to investigate their family tree back more than three or four generations. There are more reasons for not wanting to know than to know. Too much research could possibly destabilize one’s beliefs about oneself, beliefs that may or may not be correct.
Unchecked
“Unchecked, science and monotheism both mean to vanquish nature” — a lovely quote from Christopher Potter in You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe.
Undeselfing
The attempt, usually frantic and futile, to reverse the deselfing process.
Universal Sentience
The notion that apprehension of the universe by humans or other intelligence is, in a fundamental sense, the universe’s raison d’être.
Unwitting Permanence
The notion that when you, say, throw a Coke bottle off a ship’s deck to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, that bottle will remain there, unambiguously, until the sun eats up the planet. Most of the world’s landfills display unwitting permanence.
Vision Dysphasia
The counterintuitive manner in which people born blind, given vision later in life through medical advances, tend to very much dislike that vision.
Weather Test
If human beings had never existed, would the weather outside your window right now be exactly the same? Of course not. So we’ve obviously changed things. So it becomes an issue of figuring out how different the earth would have been minus human beings.
Web-Emergent Sentience Theory
The belief that globally linked computer systems will one day erupt into some new form of overriding post-human sentience. Sometimes referred to as singularity.
Web Sentience Release
The belief that this newly evolved web sentience will relieve people of the crushing need to be individual.
Why We Keep Our Distance
Once you’ve seen a person go psycho, you can never look at him or her the same way ever again.
Witness Elimination Program
The myth is that witness relocation exists, whereas people who “enter the program” are simply shot.
Zoosomnial Blurring
The notion that animals probably don’t see much difference between dreaming and being awake.
With thanks to the following for their care, thought, and research:
Thurman Allen
Debbie Audus
Steve Audus
Kathryn Bailey
Ala Bialas
Tim Bieniosek
Eve Brosseau
Jeremy Bye
Dylan Cantwell Smith
Jodi Crisp
Iam Crowley
Chelsea Damen
Monique Daviau
Elizabeth Davidson
Antonella D
iFranco
Brian Draper
Elizabeth Dulley
Jaime Endick
Kevin Everest
John Fogde
Laura Foxworthy
Leanne Gebicki
Stephen Gray
K. C. Humphries
Anne Lawrence
Jessica Miller
Erik Mortensen
Kay Müller
Simon Nixon
Stephie Schlittenhardt
Erin Seiden
Goncalo Silva
Mary Silver
Mark Staples
Amanda Traphagan
Nikole Villanueva
Helena Vissing
Maria Wickens
Laura Winwood
Kate Wooley
Lara M. Zeises
DOUGLAS COUPLAND
Douglas Coupland is the international bestselling author of Generation X, and eleven other novels, including The Gum Thief, Hey Nostradamus!, All Families Are Psychotic, and Generation A, which was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His nonfiction books include Marshall McLuhan, Polaroids from the Dead, Terry: The Life of Terry Fox, and Souvenir of Canada. His books have been translated into thirty-five languages and published around the world. He is also a visual artist and sculptor, furniture designer and screenwriter. He lives in Vancouver, B.C.
ALSO BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND
Fiction
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
Shampoo Planet
Life After God
Microserfs
Girlfriend in a Coma
Miss Wyoming
All Families Are Psychotic
Hey Nostradamus!
Eleanor Rigby
Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures) Page 18