Bit Rot

by Douglas Coupland

  “As in…religion?”

  “Absolutely. No religion for us.”

  “Politics?”

  “Nope.”

  “The monarchy?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Why are you telling me this? How can you just sit there and tell me you don’t believe in anything? You’re the king! You have a kingdom, and subjects who worship you.”

  “If it makes them happier to worship me, then let them.”

  “So wait. You mean you don’t even believe in any form of higher being?”

  “That is correct. Nothing.”

  “But you’re divinely chosen!”

  “So?”

  Zoë didn’t know how to handle this information. The room began to sway like a floating dock on choppy water. “Did you ever believe in anything before? When you were younger, maybe?” she asked.

  “I tried. Quite hard. Really.”

  Zoë got mad. “Papa, you’re a fraud!”

  “Grow up just a bit, my little cabbage. Don’t you ever wonder how I get through my days in such a good mood, even when the peasants threaten to revolt or when the queen of Spain overstays her welcome?”

  “But don’t you have to believe in something?”

  “Princess, you’re too old not to have had—how shall I say?—certain experiences. You’ve had bad Internet dates. You’ve had people be creeps to you. You’ve seen what you’ve seen; you’ve felt what you’ve felt. Ideology is for people who don’t trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.”

  “I feel like I’m going mad.”

  “Madness is actually quite rare in individuals. It’s groups of people who go mad. Countries, cults…religions.”

  Zoë said, “I wish I smoked. If I smoked, right now would be a very good time for a cigarette.”

  “I’ll have the butler bring us one.” Her father leaned over to a speakerphone beside his bed and said, “Please bring me a cigarette.” Almost instantly the butler arrived with a mentholated, filter-tipped cigarette resting atop a burgundy pillow. “Try it, Zoë. You’ll see what you’ve been missing all these years.”

  The butler lit the cigarette for Zoë. She breathed in some smoke, coughed and grew dizzy. “This tastes awful.”

  “Sometimes what’s bad for our bodies is good for the soul. Smoke some more. You’ll love it. Soon you’ll be unable to stop.”

  Zoë inhaled again. It wasn’t as bad as the first puff. “Does anyone else know you don’t believe in anything?”

  “Just your mother.”

  “Don’t you worry about death?”

  “For every living person here on Earth, there are millions of dead people before them—and there will be billions of dead people after us, too. Being alive is just a brief technicality. Why are you so upset?”

  “This is a lot to absorb in one blast.”

  “Pshaw, there’s nothing to absorb. That’s the point. And soon you’ll be queen and you’ll have to go through your days displaying flawless table manners and cutting ribbons to open horticultural fairs. And you’ll have to deal with a few monsters as well.”

  “Monsters?” This was news to Zoë.

  “Yes, monsters. People who believe in things to the exclusion of their senses. Everyone dumps on politicians as monsters, but they’re actually very easy to handle, because at least they’re upfront about the system they’re using to avoid reality. The real killers are the quiet believers. It’s always the sullen twenty-year-old who wears the Semtex-laden vest into the market square.”

  As Zoë sat and finished her cigarette, there was a pleasant quiet moment between father and daughter. The rain pounded on the window like a crazy person trying to get in. She stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray designed to look like a miniature version of the Magna Carta. She said, “You heard the news this morning about the floods?”

  “I did.”

  “They say the royal graveyard will soon flood.”

  “Won’t that be something,” said the king.

  “Papa, it’s where you’re going to be buried.”

  “Just imagine all those bejewelled skeletons washing away down into the river.”

  “Papa, we’re going to have to find somewhere else to bury you. What are we going to do? Where can we bury you if not in the royal cemetery?”

  “Surprise me,” said the king, at which point he died, making Zoë queen. And as she sat there thinking about her future, she looked at her cigarette butt and had the strangest sensation that the cigarette was actually looking back at her.

  And then she realized that she too didn’t believe in anything.

  She wondered if not believing in anything would rob her of the ability to ever fall in love.

  And then she rang for another cigarette, her first act as queen.

  IQ

  Today I wondered, “If the Internet had an IQ, what would it be?” I made a guess: 4,270—a four-digit IQ. Yes, I know the Internet is just a tool and not a sentient being. But one can dream.

  When I was growing up in the 1970s, IQs were a big deal, and we were always getting tested in school. But the intelligence that was being measured wasn’t empirical (if such a thing is even possible). Rather, IQ tests were about nothing more than the tests themselves. Do you know how these tests work? Does that question remind you of another similar question? Oh, it’s the rearrange-the-cubes question again. And so on.

  There was a magazine in the late 1970s called Omni, which catered to the culture of people who take IQ tests. There was something kind of sexy and key-party about it—I think because the genes for intelligence are right beside the genes that predispose a person to nudism. I think Valhalla for the Mensa set was group sex with Xaviera Hollander on a houseboat with walls covered in macramé wall-hangings and fencing swords.

  I was born at the very end of December, so I was always the youngest person in my grade. I was also terrifyingly skinny, so my way of surviving was to be the smartest one in the class, which is not the same thing as being actually smart—just smart within the framework of school. It did the trick and I emerged in one piece. After high school I did one semester at university, where it dawned on me: I don’t have to be smart anymore. For the first time in my life, I was getting Bs and Cs and it was like a drug; I remember feeling really high when I got my first D. I quit, went to art school, and I’ve never again wanted to enter a situation where I have to take a test.

  I think people are smarter now than they were in, say, 1995. I’ve touched on this before: we all feel stupider yet I think were we to compare IQs from then and now, we’d find that our new standard IQ is more like 103. People time-travelling from 1995 to 2015 would probably speak with us for a few minutes and then quietly excuse themselves and go meet in the kitchen and wonder what drug we’re on. “They have no attention span, and the moment you tell them even the slightest fib, they reach into their pockets, pull out a piece of glass, dabble their fingers over it and then look up at you and call your bluff. What kind of way is that to live life?”

  If you go online, there are all sorts of free IQ tests you can take, but I can only guess that they’re going to rate you as a genius while they ravage your hard drive, steal all of your passwords and give you a wicked case of malware.

  A few years back I had the perhaps singular experience of varnishing a gymnasium floor with a group of retired high school principals. I asked them what they did when they had a problem student—which is not to say a low-IQ student; problem students tend to be smart. They told me, “Oh that’s easy. Once we reach the end of our rope, we simply phone their parents, who are, of course, expecting more bad news, and in a reverent tone of voice we tell them, ‘We think your son/daughter is truly gifted. They’d be much better served at a school that has better resources for brilliant students.’ Nine times out of ten they are so floored, they just murmur a timid thank-you, and a week later our problem student is gone.”

  Lately I have made my peace with the fact that I will never be intelligent e
nough to turn on my TV. I upgraded everything last year, and there are not two but three remotes on the side table, gathering dust. I stare at them, and then I look up at the cool judgmental blackness of my new large flat-screen, and then…I open my laptop’s lid to binge on season three of Homeland. I mean, what on earth is HDMI? (I know, I know: HDMI is High-Definition Multimedia Interface, an audio-video interface for transferring uncompressed video data and compressed or uncompressed digital audio data from an HDMI-compliant source device.) But couldn’t they have just named it Walter? Or Trish? People, how hard would that have been?

  I’m writing this at Toronto’s Pearson airport at gate E72. Instead of endless banks of airport seating, they have elegant marble tables with leather furniture, and each seat has its own iPad and an electrical outlet. The Wi-Fi is, of course, smoking hot. There is also no sound in this airport lounge, which feels like the Airport of Tomorrow. Children who would otherwise be shrieking from sugar spikes and boredom sit calmly and play video games. Everyone is feeding on data and images and sounds. Information flows in and out of these portals. Nobody is getting stupider. Words are being learned. Connections are being formed. Patterns are being recognized. The next kind of intelligence is being crafted before my eyes, and it feels like a much more useful sort of intelligence as opposed to knowing how to rearrange cubes on a piece of paper. Oh yes, my IQ is 510.

  My TV

  On April 19, 1995, I bought my first genuine adult TV set—a twenty-seven-inch Sony Trinitron. I remember the date because two delivery men brought it to the house at about eleven in the morning. We installed the TV in a nook in the bookshelves and turned it on, and on the screen came images of the Oklahoma City bombing. The three of us stopped for an hour and watched the news. I made coffee, we talked a bit and then the day progressed.

  I used to watch TV back then. By that I mean I’d go into the living room and turn on the TV set, saying, “Gosh, I wonder what’s on TV right now? I think I’ll run through the channels.” It’s hard to imagine anyone doing that now, even my parents. Over two decades our collective TV-viewing habits have changed so much that it’s actually quite hard to remember old-style TV viewing.

  I remember 1997 and Princess Diana’s death and being glued to CNN for hours. The same for 9/11. But when Michael Jackson died in 2009, I was in my dining room, writing, and a friend texted to say Michael Jackson had died. Instead of turning on CNN, I went right to the Internet, and it was only hours later that I thought, Hmmm, I wonder how TV is covering this? A shift had occurred.

  By the early 2000s it was obvious that big, boxy Sony TVs like mine were doomed. Screens everywhere were definitely growing both flatter and bigger. I found myself foot-dragging about getting a big screen, however, for a few reasons. One, laziness. Two, having to rearrange and rebuild the bookshelves. Three, the image quality on those early flat-screens was still blurry and smudgy. Four (and this is by far the biggest reason), big-screen TVs are ugly. In the history of human technology, there have been few inventions whose intrinsic ugliness and brutality of form so defeat everything we call home. Trying to put a big screen in a domestic space and have it look like it belongs is almost impossible, like having a 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith inserted into your life—a monolith that has total disregard for your humanity or taste. The black minimalist box on your wall negates your framed wedding photos, your crown mouldings, your art collection, your potted plants. The only environment it looks passably okay in is a house built after 2008 that factors in the bizarre scale of big screens—and even then, when you see one passably installed, you feel like you’ve walked into Moammar Gadhafi’s bedroom. On the other hand, it’s nice to not have everything look orange and fuzzy like it did on the old Sony, and nice to view shows in the correct aspect ratio.

  In 2008 I broke my leg and couldn’t use my old office, so I had powerful Wi-Fi installed in the house, and that was the end of old-style TV for me. Soon I’d adopted all of the present-day viewing tendencies most of us share: binge viewing, laptop viewing, torrenting, series addictions, digital video recording, Netflix and guilty-pleasure viewing (Come Dine with Me Canada—I can’t get enough of that show). But also, amid these shifts, it’s been interesting to watch the evolution of TV as a new art form. Marshall McLuhan predicted this. When a new technology obsolesces an old one, it frees the newly obsolete medium to become an art form. Enter The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire and all the shows that are basically movies that run for fifty hours and act as a paradise for talented actors. Perhaps this shift to long-format TV has generated the biggest change in creative culture in the past decades. I’ve noticed that people now discuss TV the way they once discussed novels: What chapter are you on? Wasn’t so-and-so’s character great? Are you watching the new season? You watched it all in one night? Our long-form attention span is shifting to a new medium.

  I tried taking my old Sony to the recycler, but along the way I hit a speed bump and the set’s plastic casing shattered into a thousand cornflake-shaped plastic bits. It had spent sixteen or so years baking inside its living room nook. And when I asked to recycle the TV’s cathode ray tube, they said, “No, we don’t accept TVs.” Puzzled, I drove away and was flagged down by a street guy with a shopping cart, who asked if I wanted him to take care of the TV set. I’m not proud of it, but I said yes and gave him twenty dollars. He smiled and told me that he wasn’t going to spend the money on drugs but was instead going to buy a submarine sandwich and watch a 3D movie. That was the last pleasure my Sony gave the world.

  The Preacher and His Mistress

  They met on an Internet sex-connection site. They arranged for SWNS—sex with no strings—and the ground rules were that neither had a clue who the other was or what their powers were.

  “I have to say,” said Brenda, as she searched the motel room for her pantyhose, “for SWNS, this was pretty darn hot.”

  “You do this a lot?”

  Brenda stared at him. “Part of the deal with SWNSing is that you don’t ask questions like that.” She leaned to look for her shoes, which were under the bed.

  “But I want to know about you.”

  Brenda froze. “Stop right there.”

  “My name is Barry.”

  “Fuck.” He’d snagged her for the moment. “Okay, Barry, why do you want to know more about me?”

  “Because I think you’re special.”

  “Really, now?”

  “Yes.”

  “What makes me so special?”

  “The look in your eyes near the end there. Something special was going on.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Don’t believe me, then.” Barry reached for his cigarettes.

  “You smoke? Nobody smokes anymore.”

  “I’m not nobody.”

  “Very witty.”

  “Want one?”

  Brenda paused. “Sure. Why not.”

  She lit up, knowing that she shouldn’t, that she should grab her clothes and get dressed in the parking lot if she had to. Instead she asked, “So then, what is it you want to know about me?”

  “Your name, for starters.”

  “Brenda.”

  “Okay, Brenda, tell me what you believe in.”

  “Like God and everything?”

  “Sure. If that’s where your head takes you.”

  “I think God made a mistake with human beings. Nothing original there.”

  “Very charming.”

  “So then, what’s with you?”

  “So now you want to know about me?”

  “Fuck off.”

  They smoked a bit more. Brenda said, “I haven’t smoked since high school. Out by the portables. I never quite got the hang of it.”

  “What year did you graduate?” She told him.

  “So we’re the exact same age.”

  “Gee. Isn’t that thrilling.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “I have to go. Where’s my other shoe?”

  “Meet again?”

  Brenda paused and then said,
“Okay. Same time and place one week from now.”

  “Okay.”

  And so for months Barry and Brenda met once a week, and each time they did, Barry asked a little bit more about Brenda and, against her better instincts, Brenda told him a little bit more, while he never bothered to offer much about himself into the bargain. But at least, she thought, she’d never told Barry her biggest secret—a secret that would change everything between them in a manner that Brenda definitely didn’t want.

  So slowly, gradually, the weekly tryst became the highlight of Brenda’s week. Then one afternoon she looked out the window and saw that the peach tree was blossoming like it had the first time they’d met. She realized that she and Barry had been SWNSing for a full year and that it was no longer SWNSing—she was in love with him, although she didn’t think he felt the same way. Realizing that her love was unrequited filled Brenda’s heart with sweet pain; few things make us feel so alone in this world as unrequited love.

  Soon Brenda did what she knew she shouldn’t do: she told Barry she was in love. She was bracing herself for all kinds of worsts, but his reply simply shut her up: “If you want to spend more time around me, then join my flock. I’m a preacher.”

  “What?”

  “Just what I said. I’m a preacher.”

  Brenda said she needed to go to the bathroom, which was really an excuse to buy a little time. She turned on the taps to make it sound like she was busy, but her full attention was on whether she could tolerate being a member of the preacher’s “flock.” You see, her biggest secret was that she herself was a priestess. There weren’t any rules for a situation like this. Barry had intuitively sensed her priestess energy.

  She came out to find Barry fully dressed. She told him yes, she would join his flock.

  Barry said, “I’ll see you on Sunday morning then, at eleven.” He gave her directions and he left.

  Come Sunday, Brenda showed up to find a reasonably nice church that was maybe a little too close to the highway off-ramp for her taste, but it could have been worse.