Bit Rot

by Douglas Coupland

  What the hell just happened? What happened was that a massive power imbalance just entered your life, right there on your roof, an imbalance that’s particularly creepy because there’s something intrinsically cowardly and rapey about drones, and we loathe the sense of powerlessness they instill in those whom they monitor. Getting droned on your rooftop while clad in nothing but Piz Buin makes you understand the value of privacy in a way that all the think pieces on Edward Snowden can never do.

  Recreational drones (there’s a nice term) possess the consumer world’s newest consumer dynamic: creep. Creep is to creepy what fail is to failure. Creep is getting droned up on your roof. Creep is seeing blurred-out faces on Google Street View. Creep is going into a chain restaurant and reading the menu to discover that supply-chain transparency is the new badge of honour. Transparency is the new fresh. It’s like that old skit where the waiter introduces you to several cows and you get to choose which one will be used for the evening’s steak, but instead it’s McDonald’s, and they’re out to prove they no longer use pink goo in their burgers. Creep is seeing someone wearing Google glasses—one of the cofactors that led to the device being withdrawn from the market until future iterations remove its creep. The Onion had a wonderful headline the week the glasses were removed from public sale until further notice: “Unsold Google Glass Units to Be Donated to Assholes in Africa.” You’d think that de-creeping Google Glass might be difficult, but in the end it’s probably just a numbers game. I remember seeing early adopters using cellphones on city sidewalks in Toronto between 1988 and 1990, and they looked like total assholes—they just did in a way that people born later find very hard to believe. But then smartphones arrived in 2002 and the numerical tipping point came, so I guess everyone started looking like an asshole, except everyone cancelled out everyone else, so we’re all not assholes in the end.

  Maybe a person could get used to being monitored, or could get used to the awareness that strangers are always noting one’s presence. Imagine being Madonna and popping down to the corner store for a carton of milk. She walks in, the store goes quiet. Madonna gets what she came for and leaves. Does she love being recognized everywhere she goes or does she hate it? Does she even notice it anymore? We all may now be je suis Charlie, but we’re also on track to becoming je suis Madonna.

  Technology didn’t come from outer space. We humans invented it, and thus our relationship with it is inevitably tautological. Technology can only ever allow us to access and experience new sides of humanity that lay dormant or untapped. Nothing human is alien. The radio gave us both Hitler and The Beach Boys. The Internet gave us Mentos, Diet Coke and kittens. Drones give us a new dimension of pubescent snoopiness, but they’re also giving us massively asymmetrical warfare—and hideous, unmerited death.

  There’s actually not that much ontological difference between military and recreational drones except for scale and violence. The dynamic of surveillance, cowardice and rapey-ness remains the same with both, only the scale changes. And of course, with military drones, creep is transformed into horror.

  Oddly, there’s something about drones that taps into that certain strain of puerility in which weapons become toys and toys become weapons. Having fun with a cap gun at age six easily relates to grown men unironically wearing assault rifles to a Missouri Walmart—arguably the one place on earth least at risk of invasion of any sort. We’re just expressing our right to bear arms. The moral twin of this weaponized restaurant visit would be the casual, whatever shrugs these same people give when discussing remote-control satellite drone attacks.

  Sip of Pepsi. Focus. Cross-hatch. Sip Pepsi. Deploy drone. Bug splat. Sip of Pepsi. Repeat.

  One interesting tendency I’ve noticed whenever people start discussing military drones: there’s always that one person who says, “But you know, the people who are really stressed out by drones aren’t the people on the ground” (who’ve just been blown up, maimed, had their life destroyed),“they’re the ones operating the drones. They have an incredibly high stress level. Some of them even get PTSD!”

  Okay sure, but what about the children?

  Cities everywhere are trying to ban drones or making the rules for using them so difficult as to create a de facto ban. I wonder if a better idea would be to issue all citizens a drone that would come with mandatory instructional training. Drones would no longer be simply the neighbour’s tween pursuing Mrs. Robinson’s boobs. Suddenly the metaphor of surveillance would become the omnipresent fact of real life. Your windows would become your enemies. Pull the blinds. Maybe the people in those scary desert countries aren’t just whining. Maybe there truly is something not just cowardly and rapey about drones, and maybe they are, in some intrinsic way, genuinely evil: omniscient without godliness; semi-selective and without mercy.

  Let’s get back to the roof where you were suntanning nude when the drone approached. It’s now hovering eleven feet above you, and it’s live-streaming your private bits to wherever. But now it’s starting to do something new: Huh? Suddenly it drops a small cache of live hungry baby spiders all over your oiled torso. Holy crap! Next it fires a volley of X-Acto knife blades at you. Argh! After that it drops a lit cherry bomb onto your towel. And here’s where it gets worse: there’s now another drone floating beside it, and in the distance are thousands more headed your way, blackening the sky like passenger pigeons 150 years ago, so many drones that they cross the horizon.

  Now let’s go back to those fifteen seconds when I was in Hall 6 at the Foire de Paris, when the bright red drone hovered in front of my face. It was an almost impossibly alien moment. The device in no way felt human to me. It just didn’t, but it was made by humans, so how could it be anything but? In a McLuhanistic sense, we might ask which aspects of our senses, or what dimension of our humanity, do drones personify and amplify? Why does it feel as though drones are at the furthermost reach of human behaviour? Why do they possess so much creep? Is it because of our need to lurk? Our need for titillation? Our cruelty? Our laziness? If any other animal on earth invented drones, they’d use them to catch more food. Humans like to use them to ogle and to kill each other. Let’s get Freudian here again. Perhaps drones embody a perversion of reproduction strategies. Drones are stalkers. Drones deliberately transmit STDs. Drones are abortionists. Drones are rape. Drones are the embodiment of sexual damage.

  In Hall 6, people continued to 3D-print stuff, but not the stuff they make on their own—the things they’d never dare print out in public. Sex toys are massive download categories in the 3D-printing universe, as are weapons. This is mirrored in the world of Internet searches, where quests for porn and violence in all their forms are both copious and relentless.

  There, at the end of the hall, flew the drones. One of them, I was told, was a 3D-printed drone, which feels not just ironic but somehow inevitable. Was my red drone a 3D-printed drone? Does it matter?

  When I think of aliens, I think of the alien from M.N. Shyamalan’s Signs (2002), standing in Mel Gibson’s living room, missing a finger, dripping acid, and bent on revenge.

  When I think of aliens, I think of that scene in the Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds (2005) where aliens snoop through the basement of a ruined suburban split-level home while concealed humans try not to make a sound for fear of being discovered.

  And, yes, when I think of aliens, I think of E.T. (1982) concealed in a suburban closet, desperate to leave the air-conditioned hell of southern California. But these aliens are more about me than they are about real aliens. (My aliens tend to be monsters who infect and enchant and toxify the middle class.)

  Alien is alien. I don’t know if it’s even possible for human beings to imagine what aliens could do or think or be or want or be motivated by. That’s why we have science fiction. But whatever aliens actually are, I want them to be more than merely human. I’d be happy if it turned out aliens look like drones, but they’d have to be drones without cowardice, rapey-ness or death in their souls—they’d have to be drones
free of creep.

  Stamped

  I collected stamps in my early teens, preferably those from remote, underpopulated islands such as Pitcairn, the Falklands or Nauru, or from countries where postage stamps were maybe the biggest local industry: Liechtenstein, Andorra and Monaco. I have three brothers; I think I was simply looking for peace. I liked these two sorts of locales because they pushed the borders of why stamps even exist. For example, Pitcairn Islanders, I imagined in 1977, must have collectively written maybe eleven letters a year, perhaps along the lines of: Dear Mother, Rescue me from this godforsaken rock in the middle of nowhere. All they talk about is the Bounty. I imagined, back then, that the Monégasques used their stamps to mail photos of their yachts to Liechtensteiners, heckling them about their cruel landlocked condition.

  I recently decided to collect Japanese postwar stamps. There’s an innocence about them. They collectively tell the story of a country on a magic carpet ride, and looking at them in their correct little windows on a page simply makes my brain feel good. So after many moons of keeping away, I revisited Vancouver’s sole remaining stamp store to find hundreds of stamp albums of all sorts, piled up against its walls, hoarder-style.

  “Brian, what the hey?”

  “Doug, I know. They’re all piled here because young people don’t collect stamps anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Most people under forty have neither sent nor received a letter in their lifetime. To them, stamps are a form of industrial waste, and they have no sentimental attachment to them.”

  I thought about it. If you’re a millennial, a stamped letter in the mail is either a bill or it’s a communication from a stalker—which is to say, it’s either from someone clueless about online billing technology or it’s from someone scary. I can see why twentysomethings wouldn’t be into stamps. They must have about as much appeal to them as lorgnettes or fax machines.

  I just used the word twentysomethings. That is a word you simply never, ever saw or heard anywhere until the early 1990s with the Gen X explosion. (Sorry about that.) In the ensuing two decades, I’ve learned that generational demonization is something that’s hard-wired into us as a species, and there’s nothing to be done about it. But what’s been most interesting to me over the past two years in particular is the demonization of millennials.

  They’re useless! They’re entitled.

  They can’t make decisions on their own!

  They complain about everything!

  If you don’t give them a gold star sticker, they’ll pout and sulk, and then the next day their parents will come in and threaten to sue you until you give their kid a sticker!

  There may be some anecdotal truth to these claims, but mostly what I notice is that the media is saying pretty much the same thing about millennials as they did about Generation X.

  They have no future.

  They have $130,000 in college debts.

  They’ll never own houses.

  They’ll end up living in mobile homes and in middle age will cobble together a living changing the diapers of their parents’ friends.

  The most interesting lie I see perpetuated in millennial bashing is that millennials aren’t political and they don’t vote. When I hear this, inside my head I hear a loud screeching brake noise and say, WTF?

  Millennials are the most politically informed cohort ever. They know their rights. They know about power imbalances. They know about environmental degradation. They know about GMOs, Yellow 6, fuel rods, transgender politics and the near complete lobbyocracy of US politics. You can’t pull the wool over the eyes of most millennials. I think, because millennial political expression began with the stillborn Occupy Wall Street movement, they get branded as apathetic. But the issue with millennials isn’t apathy. I think it’s the fact that they look at the mechanics of voting and compare it to the universe they inhabit, and they collectively say, You have to be kidding: every four years I go into a plywood booth and use a graphite-based stylus to “fill in a box” beside my choice for who’s best for the job? What century are we in? How is this still even happening?

  And they have a point. Voting methods feel archaic, like taking everyone’s computers and devices away and telling them they have to instead use envelopes and stamps to communicate with each other. In the era of Airbnb, Netflix and Skype, we have a political selection ritual straight out of the nineteenth century. Millennials must view terms such as hanging chads (Bush election, November 2000) and recounts (almost every election) and wonder how so many useless voting methods still manage to exist. Why don’t we just vote online? How hard can that be?

  Naysayer: But your password could get stolen!

  Another naysayer: Someone could rig it!

  Yet another naysayer: Why should we change because kids these days are just too lazy to visit a voting booth!

  Right. And I imagine that if Joseph Kennedy were alive today, he’d certainly have a team of hackers on salary to win his sons’ elections for him, but we’re pretty much beyond that level of hackability by now. The time is here to reinvent the way we exercise our votes. Who’ll go first?

  Future Blips

  Last summer in a London hotel’s breakfast room, I was reading the Financial Times while waiting for my ride to show up and, without thinking much about it, I looked at the top of the page to see what time of day it was. I blinked and then thought to myself, Hmmm…Okay, Doug, the top of a page is not a toolbar. You seem to have crossed some new sort of line with technology. This experience was what I call a “future blip”—a small, haiku-y moment when it dawns on you that you’re no longer in the past.

  Another blip: A few days back I walked around the house looking for newspaper so I could pack a box, and I realized I didn’t have any. I ended up using paper in the studio trash can, left over from eBay purchases.

  And finally, today I was wondering what it would be like to live in Antarctica, so I Googled Antarctica and party. I put in the word party because it would probably take me to the blog of someone younger and more likely to post images online, and I was right. I’ve now learned that hipsters are starting to colonize the Final Continent.

  It is incontestable that we are collectively rebuilding the way we process information. For example, notice that when we tell people about an idea we want them to research later, we don’t focus on the idea so much as how to search for it. Search words establish future locatability. “When you get home, just Google Mother Teresa, topless and lawsuit. You’ll find what I’m talking about right away.”

  The way we’re collectively redefining searchability is indeed a reflection of the way we now collectively file away information in our brains—or the way we don’t. One of the great joys of life is that we’re all getting much better at knowing what it is we no longer need to know. Freedom from memorization! Having said this, there’s a part of me that misses being able to bullshit people at dinner parties without having an iPad come out before dessert to sink an urban legend or debunk a stretched truth.

  I wonder if nostalgia for the twentieth-century brain is a waste of time. While I may sometimes miss my pre-Internet brain, I certainly don’t want it back. Everyone’s quick to dump on new technologies, but how quickly we forget a two-hour trek to the local library in the 1990s to find something as mundane as a single tradesman’s phone number in the Yellow Pages for a city twenty miles away. How cavalier we all are when we say, “Let me just quickly Google that.” What we’ve really just said is, “Let me instantaneously consult with the sum total of accumulated human knowledge. It’ll take just two shakes.”

  When I was in art school, I was the ticket collector on Tuesday nights at the local rep theatre. This was 1983, long before VHS, and because of my ticket stint, I got in free to all the movies. I made a point of seeing as many as I could. They changed every two nights and the fare was upscale. I became an unwitting trove of information on Lina Wertmüller and was able to see gems like The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Aguirre, the Wrath
of God a decade before they became staples at video stores. Three decades later I was in a gas station in central British Columbia and saw a generic Canadian country “hoser” in red and black plaid renting a DVD copy of Kagemusha at the counter. I was impressed that even out in the sticks there existed a need for art-house films, but then my hoser’s friend asked him why he was renting Kagemusha and he said, “Uhhh…I think it’s, like, a kung fu movie.”

  So let’s do the math: probably five movies a week for four-ish years in art school makes about one thousand movies. At the same time, I saw as many first-run movies as anyone else. Then add the appalling amount of TV I watched, as well as all the music I consumed—we’re into thousands and thousands of hours of media devoured during art school alone. Don’t forget books, too. And magazines. And then add three decades more of this sort of cultural consumption and we’re into maybe the high five figures in hours of consumption. For someone born in 1991, three decades after me, even if they spent every moment of their waking life trying to catch up to my media consumption (BTW, a terrible idea), it would be futile. Especially since my rate of consumption continues as high as ever. So then what gets lost and what gets kept? Wheat. Chaff. All of that.

  It’s said that Goethe was the last human being who knew everything about the world that was possible to learn at that time. In this sense Goethe was like a proto-Internet, but now he lives on in a 2.0 version called the cloud. We’re all Goethe now. I may miss my pre-Internet brain, but I’m rapidly forgetting it too.