Bit Rot

by Douglas Coupland

  Futurosity

  I’ve spent much of my life waiting for the future to happen, yet it never really felt like we were there. And then, in this past year, it’s almost instantly become impossible to deny that we are now all, magically and collectively, living in that far-off place we once called the future. It’s here, and it feels odd. It feels like that magical moment when someone has pulled a practical joke on you but you haven’t quite realized it yet. We keep on waiting for the reveal, but it is always going to be imminent and it will never quite happen. That’s the future.

  What was it that pulled us out of the present and dumped us in this future? Too much change too quickly? One too many friends showing us a cool new app that costs ninety-nine cents and eliminates thousands of jobs in what remains of the industrial heartlands? Maybe it was too much freakish weather that put us in the future. Or maybe it was texting almost entirely replacing speaking on the phone. Or maybe it was Angelina Jolie’s pre-emptive mastectomy. Or maybe it was an adolescent comedy about North Korea almost triggering nuclear war—as well as incidentally revealing Sony’s thinking on Angelina Jolie. Or maybe it was Charlie. How odd that much of what defines the future is the forced realization that there are many people who don’t want a future and who don’t want the future. They want eternity.

  I feel like I’m in the future when I see something cool and the lag time between seeing it and reaching for my iPhone camera is down to about two seconds, as opposed to the thirty seconds it would have taken a few years back. I feel like I’m in the future whenever I look for images of things online and half the ones I see are watermarked and for sale. I feel like I’m in the future when I daydream of bingeing on season four of House of Cards on my new laptop that weighs nothing and never overheats and its battery goes on for ages.

  How long is this sensation of futurosity going to last? Is it temporary? Maybe society will go through a spontaneous technological lull, allowing the insides of our brains to take a time holiday and feel like they’re in 1995, not 2015. But that’s probably not going to happen. Ever.

  Is it healthy to live in the future? I suspect not. We’re not really built for permanent high-speed change—accelerated acceleration. So will there come a collective cracking point? And if so, what would a collective cracking point look like? It might not be a riot or a referendum. It might be that we all wake up one morning and realize we’re not middle class or working class or anything; we basically just exist and the Internet makes it bearable.

  Someone asked me last week, “In the long run, is technology our saviour or our demise?” I thought it over, and the thing is, we made technology. It is only an expression of our humanity, so it’s wrong to think of it as something given to us by aliens, so we can blame technology, not ourselves, when something goes wrong. The question that he was really asking was, “Are humans going to kill themselves?” The answer would be the exact same answer that would have been given ten years ago, two thousand years ago or one thousand years in the future. We’re still around, so the answer is no, but this still doesn’t change the fact that we’re stuck living inside the future, where we’re stuck worrying about this question for all of our waking hours.

  I suspect that abandoning one’s pre-Internet brain is the only intelligent adaptive strategy necessary for mental health in the world of a perpetual future.

  How much futurosity can our brains accept before they explode or implode? I wonder if maybe the sensation of futurosity is a mental tick applicable only to people born before a certain window in time closed, a state of mind specific to those who remember a world that once possessed a present tense. Millennials are lucky in that they have nothing to shed, nothing to trigger tristesse, nothing to unlearn. For a recent museum show, I made T-shirts that read, “I miss my pre-Internet brain.” We photographed them on seventeen-year-old models, and everybody had a good laugh.

  I try to imagine a world without a present tense—the millennial world where time is a perpetual five seconds from now—and, if I squint my brain (for lack of a better analogy), I can almost sort of get it right. Those pioneers I mentioned in the introduction, leaving a trail of abandoned pianos, sofas and wooden dressers behind them, were shedding weight in order to progress toward what they knew to be their inevitable destiny. I remember reading once of pioneers trapped in a forest fire, lying submerged in a swamp and breathing air through reeds, while what remained of their past went up in ashes. That’s what I feel like right now, submerged in the mud, waiting for the fire to pass, waiting to emerge into a world that is lighter, fantastically different and quite possibly starting over from scratch.

  Worcest​ershiste​rshire

  Last December in Chile I stayed with friends in the wine region south of Santiago. After a few days I noticed that food would come from the kitchen to the table and, before the meal was over, it was already decomposing on the plate. Vegetables began disintegrating before dessert arrived; meat quickly went dumpstery. I wondered what was going wrong, only to realize that something was going right. The food being served was fresh and unprocessed. My chicken had last clucked that morning. The lettuce was a freshly guillotined head. I soon began to appreciate and expect this level of extreme Chilean freshness. When I returned to Vancouver, those pure Chilean meals and their high-speed time-lapse-photographyish disintegration became a memory, and my culinary life went on.

  My studio is across the street from a supermarket, a very convenient location. Whenever anyone from the studio needs something to eat, we zip across to the deli section, get some sandwiches or soup or what have you, and think little of it.

  The studio is chaotic and things quickly vanish: brushes, scissors, X-Acto knives…Now throw deli food items into the mix: a sandwich ends up here; cauliflower soup ends up there; stew ends up on the shelf over there. And then weeks go by and, while searching for masking tape, I’ll find an egg-salad sandwich from the previous month lodged between a box of acrylic tubes and a folder of magazine clippings. But then I’ll stop and stare at the sandwich: Its bread has shrunk a tiny bit, but it’s still the same colour. It’s odourless and its egg-salad filling still occupies the same volume—it’s neither shrunken nor bloated nor watery—and its colour is pleasingly…eggy looking. And we’re talking three weeks later here. The half-finished cardboard container of stew I mentioned a few sentences back? It sat for six weeks, free of mould or shrinkage or stink or any real evidence of time’s passage.

  Suddenly I began to imagine my body having a conversation with this supermarket deli food upon first arriving in my stomach:

  “Hi. I’m Doug’s body.”

  “And I’m a science-enhanced egg-salad sandwich.”

  “Nice to meet you. Now it’s time for me to absorb you.”

  “Well”—chuckle, chuckle—“just you try.”

  And so my stomach, primed by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, begins to, well, what exactly?

  “You know, I’m trying to absorb you, sandwich, but I can’t seem to break you down into tiny, absorbable bits.”

  “You can just park me in the colon for a while,” says the sandwich. “Don’t worry, I won’t be changing much.”

  “But that’s just the thing. You don’t change on your own, and I don’t seem to be able to do much with you, so what do we do here?”

  “Treat me like a piece of stray cling wrap and just pass me through Doug’s system, and we can pretend we never even had this talk.”

  “Deal.”

  From my stomach’s POV, what the hell just happened? If food doesn’t rot outside the body, then what’s supposed to be happening inside the body? Am I technically starving? Am I triggering a food switch that will turn me into Jabba the Hutt or Mr. Burns?

  I asked my doctor friend, Debra, a nutrition specialist, about this. She told me it could go four ways. First is the inert mass or “cling wrap” scenario. “The body will see the sandwich as fodder to keep the stomach artificially full—neither poisonous nor nutritious.” This reminds me
of those laxative American potato chips containing Olestra.

  Second is the desperation scenario. “Depending on the egg sandwich’s absorbability, it could contribute to either extreme obesity or to extreme weight loss depending on the overall quantity of nutrition in your life: Is your body so desperate it will absorb anything?”

  Third is warfare. “The sandwich could prompt an immune reaction if the gut becomes more permeable and the immune system denounces these non-food particles as foreign invaders masquerading as food and declares war on them.”

  Fourth is common sense. “If the body is in great shape and operating as it should, it should reject these items as not meeting minimum requirements of fuel, and they should take a hurried trip up or down but, nevertheless, out. And good riddance.”

  An hour ago I opened my fridge door and stared at its racks of condiments. Pre-9/11 Worcestershire sauce (or, as Bugs Bunny would say, Worce​stershis​tershire). Catalina salad dressing from Michael Jackson’s wake. Mustard from the Bush years. All of it happily sitting there, year after year, just waiting to enter a human body. It’ll keep forever—just like all those deli soups and sandwiches. I wonder what my stomach would say to my condiment rack’s contents? “Oh, hello there, hamburger relish from 1997. Nice to see you again. Let’s have a look at you…Well, you’re not growing fur and you haven’t turned blue, so I’m turning you into a dinner garnish. What’s this?…Oh…a little patch of fur. Well, I’ll just scrape it off. Nobody will be the wiser. And who’s that I see back there? Ketchup from the first Obama election night! Nice to see you, old friend.”

  Bulk Memory

  A few years ago in Santa Clara, California, I saw a strip-mall store with a sign saying, “Bulk Memory Sale.” I think there’s actually something kind of sexy about memory being sold in bulk, like chocolate raisins or bottles of pesto at Costco—it’s like you can buy a new childhood or a new set of relationships with your family. The sign, aside from charming me, made me realize just how different memory is now versus what memory was, say, fifty years ago—or even twenty.

  Memory means more than just organic memory inside your brain, or the secrets in your diary tucked beneath your pillow. Now memory means what you have in your laptop and all other devices. It also includes whatever you’ve stored in the cloud, and everything on the Internet. You, like it or not, are intimately embedded in the Internet. Andy Warhol believed that all the Chinese restaurants in Manhattan had just one jumbo kitchen under the ground where all the food was cooked. In a way, your memory—our memory—is now not unlike Warhol’s Chinese kitchen. We all get our information from the same place, and there’s just one menu and it’s called “The Same Internet for Everyone on Earth.” So give a yak herder in rural Tibet some smooth connectivity, and he’ll access the same memory menu you do. Instead of going to yaks.​com, he’ll probably kill time reading the really scary and bitter one-star hotel reviews on TripAdvisor, or maybe he’ll get caught in a cute puppy warp on YouTube, or maybe he’ll make himself a worthier person by bingeing on TED talks, but he’ll probably be checking out porn. So. Much. Porn.

  Am I being judgmental here? If I am, it is a positive judgment, because the last thing planet Earth needs right now is 6.5 billion people being outside in the world wrecking things. It’s actually all for the better that everyone is inside YouTubing Russian dashcam compilations instead of wrecking the physical environment.

  I’ve always been interested in the unintended side effects of technology. For instance, when the car was invented, who would have thought dogs would like sticking their heads out the window to enjoy the scentscape generated by speed and wind? Likewise, I think about the unintended side effects of all of humanity ordering from the same Chinese kitchen of memory. People are people, and everyone’s going to be looking for the same things, pretty much regardless of culture. Of course, there are localized clamps on what one may or may not see online. In Beijing a year back, I’d put a search word into Google and instead of getting an answer in the usual 0.128 second, I’d have to wait maybe fifteen seconds or so before results came back—if they came back at all. Was that a bit spooky? Yes, it was. And just try looking for anything frisky in the Emirates.

  But what I find most fascinating here is that the Internet bends you to its will, regardless of who or where you are—it neurologically rewires you. The way the Internet homogenizes a human brain is nothing short of astounding. We are rapidly hitting the point where human neural patterns are becoming globally similar at a level that possibly hasn’t been achieved since the last ice age, when a handful of hardy souls survived the cold by sitting in a cave and telling the same stories over and over again.

  This homogenization of human thinking is an elective process brought about by the Internet’s undeniable quality and quantity of information, as well as the insane speed with which it arrives. These three factors are, in turn, brought about by eerily consistent logarithmic increases in memory storage and its accessibility, and the processing speed and power it affords—bulk memory on sale in Santa Clara, California.

  Can you hop off this new memory express any time you want? No. There’s no turning back; speed and memory are irreversibly addictive. The only true enemy on this strange new turf? Paywalls, though I’m sure they’ll crumble someday soon; the future is an infinity of links to cute kitten GIFs, Doctor Who reruns and online gambling.

  Are we smarter as a result of all this speed and memory, or are we stupider? It’s probably a moot point. Never in human history has nostalgia been as useless or uncomforting as it is now. I’m not even talking about nostalgia for the decade you grew up in—I’m talking about nostalgia for five years ago. Or three years ago. Or life before Twitter. But, really, would you cheerfully go back to your 2002 laptop, or your 1998 dial-up online service, or driving to an office somewhere to buy a plane ticket? Doubtful. So we’ve made the trade. In any event, in fifteen years you’ll be able to download the entire Internet into something the size of a box of Marlboros—like Microsoft’s doomed Encarta times fifty trillion. And this means that you won’t even have to go online to get online. You’ll go there only when you need something in real time. Basically, everyone on Earth will have the sum of humanity’s accumulated knowledge on them at all times. What will that feel like? Knowing how ungrateful humans are as a species, we’ll probably be bored with it and start getting ourselves into more trouble. And then our machines will become sentient and start feeling sorry for us, and then they’ll start killing us, and we’ll probably deserve it. HAL 9000, please come home.

  The Mell

  On August 11, 1992, I was in Bloomington, Minnesota, close to Minneapolis. I was on a book tour and it was the grand opening day of Mall of America, the largest mall in the United States. The local radio affiliate had a booth set up in front of the indoor roller coaster, which strafed the booth like an air strike every seventy-five seconds. I was up on the stage with them, doing a live interview for a half-hour while thousands of people were walking by with “country fair face”—goggle-eyed and feeding on ice cream. I felt like I was inside a Technicolor movie from the 1950s. The show’s host assumed I was going to be an ironic slacker wise-ass and said, “I guess you must think this whole mall is kind of hokey and trashy,” and I said, “No such thing.”

  He was surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I feel like I’m in another era that we thought had vanished, but it really hasn’t, not yet. I think we might one day look back on photos of today and think to ourselves, ‘You know, those people were living in golden times and they didn’t even know it. Communism was dead, the economy was good and the future, with all of its accompanying technologies, hadn’t crushed society’s mojo like a bug.’ ”

  Silence.

  It’s true: Technology hadn’t yet hollowed out the middle class and turned us into laptop click junkies, and there were no new bogeymen hiding in the closet. We may well look back at the 1990s as the last good decade.

  In August of 1997 I
was in London with friends and we went to a theatre to see a movie in an upscale mall in…Belgravia? Mayfair? We were an hour early, so we decided to check it out, although most of the stores were closed (it was after six and malls closed earlier back then). Yet hundreds of people were there, mostly Arab, having a lovely air-conditioned passeggiata. Two levels up there was an Internet hangout area, and as we walked past we saw twenty teenage boys watching twenty different screens of (even to those who consider themselves unflinching) profoundly graphic pornography. Mothers and fathers and kids walked by as if the boys were reading spreadsheets, and it was then I thought to myself, You know, I bet you anything that it’s porn that drives up the quality and speed of the Internet. And I was right.

  I remember driving through Scottsdale, Arizona, the January after the 2008 financial crash. I needed to find, of all things, a glue gun to do a mock-up for a project. A nine-hundred-foot-tall road sign told me that in the mall ahead, there was a craft superstore—terrific!—so I took the turnoff, entered the mall parking lot, and something very strange happened. Wait—was the mall closed? No. Were all the stores open? Yes. Then it dawned on me: I was the only car there. A part of my psyche began waiting for zombies to emerge from American Apparel and Bed Bath & Beyond. I cautiously parked in front of the craft store, went inside and found the glue gun, which, back home, would cost $12.99. There in Arizona it was $1.29, which is to say, it was basically free, and at that price they should have just gone out to the freeway and hurled glue guns at passing cars. So I bought one and returned to the car, and as I drove away I thought of all of the mall’s merchants meeting at the end of the day to go over sales figures. “Okay then, what have we got today?”