“Yes, sir.”
By now, the food vendors of Gamalon-5 had gone into competition with each other in the burgeoning human flesh trade. Their nickname for Earth was “Beef Rock” and the money was terrific. The lieutenant’s nephew generated catchy sale slogans:
“Our Humans Read More Books!”
“Individual Humans—Unique Flavour!”
“On Sale This Week: PhDs for 30 Krogs a Pound.”
“Postgrad Students 15 Krogs a Pound.”
“Need a Taste of Mystery? Try Our Fillet of Crime Novel Addict.”
—
But then in the 1990s the quality of human flavour began plummeting. The commander consulted the lieutenant. “What is going on here?”
“Sir, as an unintended consequence of reading books, humans have made the next leap and have invented digital communications.”
“They WHAT!!!”
“I’m so sorry it happened, sir. We were on holiday and it just sort of swelled out of nowhere.”
“So are they now using digital communications to conduct commerce, distribute moving image files and keep in contact with former schoolmates?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So they’re reading fewer books?”
The lieutenant sighed. “Yes, sir.”
“Then the situation is truly dire.”
The lieutenant asked, “Is there anything else, sir?”
“Just everyday worries. My teenage daughter has announced that she’s gone Spam on me.”
The lieutenant smiled: “going Spam” was a trendy phase among the teens of Gamalon-5, who thought eating humans was cruel. They opted instead for cans of Spam imported from Earth; nothing so closely approximated the oily, salty taste of cooked human flesh as the hammy goodness of Spam. “I’m sure it’s just a phase, sir.”
“Tell that to my wife, who has to put two different meals on the table every night.”
The next afternoon the commander was going through his files and summoned his lieutenant. “Lieutenant, it says here that book sales are higher than ever, as the humans are using a technique called ‘Amazon-dot-com’ to purchase them.”
“That is a deceiving statistic, sir. Amazon increases the need of humans to own books but not necessarily to read them. They leave them scattered around their homes as what they call ‘intellectual trophies.’ ”
“Drat.”
Time wore on and human meat became ever more unpalatable, and consumption dropped dramatically. And after a point the government of Gamalon-5 refused to subsidize the import of humans and soon barred the practice altogether. The lieutenant sighed as his ship flew away from Beef Rock one last time, leaving the humans to themselves and whatever gruesome fate they might cook up. He heaved a guilty sigh, turned around and scanned the universe looking for new sources of meat.
Farewell, Beef Rock.
Globalization Is Fun!
Have you ever wondered what it would smell like if you took every perfume and cologne in the world and mixed them together in a big vat? You already know the answer. It’s called a duty-free shop. I’ve always hated the term duty-free. There’s something irresponsible about it, as if you’re getting something for free, except it’s not free—someone else has to pay for your loot. I’ve never bought anything duty-free and this doesn’t make me a better or political person—it may actually be a scientific indicator of cluelessness. But shopping duty-free is one of those doors I don’t want to open because I could never close it again, sort of like Ouija boards or shoplifting or cocaine.
I used to have a summer job at one of those stores where you’d give me your name and then I’d bring out a large book and I’d magically find your family crest, which you could then order and have shipped to your house at a nonsensically high price. Much heraldry is nonsense, but comforting nonsense. My boss told me that when people travel, their sense of self begins to erode and they need to purchase something, anything, to shore up their sense of identity. It’s why airports sell stickers and pins and car decals from around the world. (Kiss me, I’m Oirish!)
I was in China last year and ran out of clean clothes to the point where I had to buy a new shirt at the airport if I was going to make it through a ten-hour flight home. I chose a Lacoste shirt from a boutique there, which cost pretty much the same as it does anywhere. In flight I realized I’d purchased the only authentic piece of designer clothing in the entire country.
There’s nothing to buy in China; everything’s fake. If you want something “Chinesey,” you’d best just go to your town’s local Chinatown and get stuff there. It’s faster, cheaper, easier and probably what you wanted anyway. In the end I collected cigarettes. Chinese tobacco packaging is really beautiful—imperial yellows and reds and blues—and they don’t have big, scary, ugly health warnings on them (“Smoking Is Nature’s Way of Killing Popular People”). I collected sixty-four different packs and framed them and hung them up by my studio door. When my dealer brought by a Chinese art collector for a visit, he remained stone-faced until he saw the packages, and then a switch flipped and he became animated and fun, and he began discussing the class implications of each brand: “Those ones are only for bureaucrats, and those ones are the ones that people with Audi A6s smoke, and those are for peasants and…” He was so excited about them that I sold him the whole framed piece, and in some magic way that transaction became a shorthand for the entire world of art and art dealing.
I live in Vancouver, where we used to have just one Chinatown, but now we have quite a few, depending on what sort of Chinese you are: Taiwanese, northern Chinese, Shanghainese, Hong Konger or Singaporean. Most of these new Chinese people are kind of embarrassed by the old Chinatown, which still fosters a sort of Suzie Wong, marines-on-shore-leave variety of Chinese consumer identity that froze around 1962—which is something I actually really love. But I suspect that the twenty-first-century Vancouver Chinese person would rather choose to be identified with a S500 Mercedes sedan instead of a strand of paper lanterns. And in any event, the Suzie Wong Chinatown is now being razed to make way for condo towers, and that’s what makes Vancouver Vancouver—every ten years it becomes a totally different city.
Airports: I fly more than most people, and I really have to congratulate HSBC for targeting what is probably the single most potent metaphor for globalization—the airport jetway ramp—and for branding a piece of infrastructure in a kick-ass manner that hasn’t been seen since Hitler championed the autobahn. For years HSBC had a campaign that most of us who flew from A to B remember well: “smart/stupid, stupid/smart”; “love/hate, hate/love” and so on. But now they’ve got a new campaign where they show corn with a husk made of knitted textile, and Holstein cows with black patches shaped like continents, and…it’s just creepy. It reinforces your biggest worries about globalization: that it’s boring, alienating and controlled by technocratic elites who feel sorry for you for having to fly commercial, not private, and that any resistance to their decreed future is futile.
Here’s something I read online: “Shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, a Russian bureaucrat travelled to the West to seek advice on how the market system functioned. He asked the English economist Paul Seabright to explain who was in charge of the supply of bread to London. He was astonished by the answer: ‘Nobody.’ ”* Obviously. In bread capitalism, everything from wheat fertilizers to brioche-making night-school classes is done by private initiative. But if, in the end, the ownership of the bread industry or any other industry globalizes to the point where there are only a few players, aren’t we right back to a default Soviet system, where the supply of bread or what have you is centralized and crypto-communist? And in this new system, both power and profit go to the One Percent—the new politburo. Its shield? Globalization is so boring that people fall asleep before they can articulate the issue. Boringness is the superpower of communism. Globalization kills you, but first it puts you to sleep.
* * *
* Tim Harford, Financial Times, October 27, 200
8.
Unclassy
A while ago I was interviewing assembly line workers in a suburban Shanghai Internet router factory. When I asked workers what class they belonged to, they asked me what I meant, and I said that I was from North America, where most people will describe themselves as middle-class. Even with high-calibre translators, none of the workers was able to tell me what class they thought they were part of. They didn’t see themselves as working-class or middle-class or any other form of currently existing class.
This led me to believe that we are at a very interesting moment globally, one in which old class definitions are becoming increasingly obsolete while emerging definitions still seem vague or nonexistent. This lack of definition also got me thinking about how our notions of the future are knotted together with our notions of middle-class status, and where this relationship is headed. Herewith, some new words for a new era.
Greeciation. The almost overnight gutting of large chunks of the middle class.
aclassification. The process wherein one is stripped of class without being assigned a new class. If you lose your job at an auto assembly plant and start supporting yourself by giving massages and upgrading websites part-time, what are you—middle-class? Not really. Lower-class? That sounds archaic and obsolete. In the future, current class structures will dissolve and humanity will settle into two groups: those people who have actual skills (surgeons, hairdressers, helicopter pilots) and everyone else, who are kind of faking it through life. Implicit in aclassification is the idea that a fully linked world no longer needs a middle class.
blank-collar workers. The new post-class class. They are a future global mono-class of citizenry adrift in a classless sea. Neither middle-class nor working-class—and certainly not rich—blank-collar workers are aware of their status as simply one unit among seven billion other units. Blank-collar workers rely on a grab bag of skills to pay the rent, and see themselves as having seventeen different careers before they suffer death from neglect in a government-run senior-care facility in the year 2042.
Detroitus. The fear of Michigan. It is the queasy realization that it’s probably much too late to fix whatever little bit of the economy is left after having shipped most of it away to China. Detroitus is also the fear of roughly ten million primates needing 2,500 calories a day sitting on top of a cold rock in the middle of the North American continent, with nothing to do all day except go online and shop from jail. Detroitus is an existential fear, as it forces one to ponder the meaning of being alive at all: we wake up, we do something—anything—we go to sleep, and we repeat it about 22,000 more times, and then we die.
Chinosis. The dawning realization that China probably really is the future. This realization is also coupled with the dawning realization that North America is to become what China is now ceasing to be: a place where one might as well work for thirty cents an hour making toothbrushes and party balloons because there’s nothing else to do. The United States is ruled by politicians. China is ruled by economists. People undergoing Chinosis know that it is only a matter of time before China begins opening factories in the United States.
ebulliophobia. The fear of bubbles.
ebulliolaria. To have ebulliolaria is to be sick of bubbles.
ebullioholism. An addiction to bubbles.
fortility. The increasingly archaic notion that anything less than a forty-hour workweek with 3 percent unemployment is a social failure. In the future, a culturally mandated forty-hour workweek may well seem as odd and cruel as does seven-year-old children working in Victorian cotton mills.
centrosis (a.k.a. centrosclerosis). The inability to view society as successful unless it has a large middle class. Centrosis dictates that the future and the middle class are inextricably linked; if one aspect dies, so will the other.
suburbulation. The overuse of aspirational middle-class imagery to convey to what remains of the middle class that it isn’t doomed.
jeudism. In the future, every day of the week will be a Thursday. We’re all working toward the grave, and life will be one perpetual fast-food job of the soul. The weekend? Gone. We all pretty much know it in our bones. Poverty without an Internet connection will be truly dreadful…but fortunately we do have the Internet—so bring it on, world! Every day is like Thursday, and I’m in.
Wonkr
I look at apps like Grindr and Tinder and see how they’ve rewritten sex culture—by creating a sexual landscape filled with vast amounts of incredibly graphic site-specific data—and I can’t help but wonder why there isn’t an app out there that rewrites political culture in the same manner. I don’t think there is. Therefore I’m inventing one, and I’m calling it Wonkr.
You put Wonkr on your phone, and it asks you a quick set of questions about your beliefs. The moment there are more than a few people around you (who also have Wonkr), it tells you about the people you’re sharing the room with. You’ll be in a crowded restaurant in Nashville and you can tell that 73 percent of the room is Republican. Go into the kitchen and you’ll see that it’s 84 percent Democrat. You’ll be in an elevator in Manhattan, and the higher you go, the more the percentage of Democrats shrinks. Go to Germany—or France, or anywhere, really—and Wonkr adapts to local politics.
The thing to remember is Wonkr only activates in crowds. Its job is to tell you the political temperature of a busy space. Am I among friends or enemies? But then you can easily change the radius of testability. Instead of surveying just the room you’re standing in, it can assess the block, or the whole city—or your country. Wonkr is a de facto polling app. Pollsters are suddenly out of a job: Wonkr tells you—with astonishing accuracy—who believes what, and where they do it.
Here’s an interesting fact about politics: people with specific beliefs only want to meet and hang out with people who believe the same things they do. It’s like my parents and Fox News. It’s impossible for me to imagine my parents ever saying, “What? You mean there are liberal folk near us who have differing political opinions? Good Lord! Bring them to us now and let’s have a lively and impartial dialogue, after which we all agree to cheerfully disagree…Maybe we’ll even have our beliefs changed!” When it comes to the sharing of an ethos, history shows us that the more irrational a shared belief is, the better. (The underpinning math of cultism is that when two people with self-perceived marginalized views meet, they mutually reinforce these beliefs, ratcheting up the craziness until you have a pair of full-blown nutcases.)
So back to Wonkr…Wonkr is a free app, but why not pay, say, ninety-nine cents to allow it to link you with people who think just like you. Remember, to sign on to Wonkr you have to take a relatively deep quiz. Maybe thirty-one questions, like the astonishingly successful eHarmony.com. Dating algorithms tell us that people who believe exactly the same things find each other highly attractive in the long run. So have a coffee with your Wonkr hookup. For an extra twenty-nine cents you can watch your chosen party’s attack ads together…How does Wonkr ensure you’re not a trouble-seeking millennial posing as a Marxist at a UKIP rally? Answer: build some feedback into the app. If you get the impression there’s someone fishy nearby, just tell Wonkr. After a few notifications, geo-specific algorithms will soon locate the imposter. It’s like Uber: you rate them; they rate you. Easily fixed.
What we’re discussing here is the creation of data pools that have, until recently, been extraordinarily difficult and expensive to gather. However, sooner rather than later, we’ll all be drowning in this sort of data collected voluntarily and involuntarily in large doses. Almost anything can be converted into data or metadata, which can then be processed by machine intelligence. Quite accurately, you could say, data + machine intelligence = artificial intuition.
Artificial intuition happens when a computer and its software look at data and analyze it using computation that mimics human intuition at the deepest levels: language, hierarchical thinking—even spiritual and religious thinking. The machines doing the thinking are deliberately designed to re
plicate human neural networks and, connected together, form even larger artificial neural networks. It sounds scary…and maybe it is (or maybe it isn’t). But it’s happening now. In fact, it is accelerating at an astonishing clip, and it’s the true and definite and undeniable human future.
So let’s go back to Wonkr.
It may, in some simple senses, already exist. Amazon can tell if you’re straight or gay within seven purchases. A few simple algorithms applied to your everyday data (Internet data alone, really) could obviously discern your politics. From a political pollster’s perspective, once you’ve been pegged, then you’re, well, pegged. At that point the only interest politicians might have in you is if you’re a swing voter.
Political data is valuable data, and at the moment it’s poorly gathered and not necessarily well understood, and there’s not much out there that isn’t quickly obsolete. One could try to glean political data through consumer threads, but your choice of butter or margarine probably wouldn’t be of much help in determining your politics. But wait. Actually, it would be very helpful. What you bought and where you bought it could reveal astonishing levels of information about who you are.
With Wonkr, the centuries-long highly expensive political polling drought would be over, and now there would be LOADS of data. Why limit the app to politics? What’s to prevent Wonkr users from overlapping their data with, for example, a religious group-sourcing app called Believr? With Believr, the machine intelligence would be quite simple. What does a person believe in, if anything, and how intensely do they do so? And again, what if you had an app that discerns a person’s hunger for power within an organization? Let’s call it Hungr—behavioural data that can be cross-correlated with Wonkr and Believr and Grindr and Tinder? Taken to its extreme, the entire family of belief apps becomes the ultimate demographic Klondike of all time. What began as a cluster of mildly fun apps becomes the future of crowd behaviour and individual behaviour.
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