Bit Rot

by Douglas Coupland

  I drove past the under-construction subdivisions that died in 2008, their two-by-fours turned the grey colour of moths. I wondered if we’re addicted to the idea that society without a middle class isn’t really society. I wondered if maybe, back in the days of Detroit, jumbo refrigerators and the Beatles, we tricked ourselves into thinking that the middle class equals the future—and without a middle class, we can’t see pictures in our heads of what tomorrow might be. I found it strange how politicians repeat the words middle class over and over and over again, as if doing so will allow us to pretend it still exists—that it’s not evaporating daily like a puddle on a road.

  Night came and I was anywhere and nowhere when my phone buzzed—it was Mr. Xu and he was back in town! He had his big surprise all ready for me at his short-term corporate lodging suite. I couldn’t remember the last time I was happier to get a text.

  I drove to the Executive Privilege Short-Term Corporate Lodging and ran to Room 307, where the nerdy but lovely Mr. Xu awaited me.

  “Ah, hello, capitalist lapdog. You be ready for grand surprise?”

  “Shut up! I can’t believe you’re back!” I gave him a smooch and said, “Okay, dial me in. I am ready for your big surprise, buster.”

  “Apologize in advance if not good enough.”

  “Show me your surprise!”

  “Very well.”

  A drop cloth concealed what was supposed to be the main living area. Mr. Xu pulled it back and I bathed in the majesty of what I saw.

  He said, “Pretty kick-ass sexy, don’t you think?”

  I sucked in some breath and said, “Mr. Xu, you have truly amazed me.”

  Before me, in beautiful rows on shelves, lay more than a thousand unique pairs of sneakers that would crash eBay in a flash if they all went up for sale at once.

  (20) Temp Figures It All Out

  If you came here expecting a happy ending, that’s exactly what you’re going to get. It’s a few months later, I’m now Mrs. Xu, there are twin Xus in the offing, and the twins will be in line to inherit more than a billion dollars. I remind myself of this every time I think of the coffee room’s Girl Guide cookie honour box, and how horrified I always was to find that staffers had shortchanged it, and how I paid the difference from my own pocket.

  What about TWK? Don’t worry about the old gang—they’re doing just fine. The building is now home to Mr. Xu’s vanity project (and mine), which is to be the world’s largest online retailer of vintage and high-end sneakers. Sarah Number One is once again in charge of online marketing development, and Sarah Number Two is back developing e-commerce strategy. This time their decisions will have a chance of being implemented and making some kind of difference.

  In a slight romantic twist, Sarah Number Three, who I never really got to know, is seeing Kyle, who quit the refinery after a week spent inhaling its magic aromas. Kyle is now getting a full sleeve of ink on each arm and is in charge of “branding atmosphere,” which means—I’ll be honest—I have no idea what, but I’m just so glad he’s no longer inhaling oil. I’ll always have a soft spot for that lovable lunkhead who kind of flirted with me and who I kind of flirted with, back when we were both younger and dumber.

  The Danimal we now call “the Shaker,” because we send him out to do anything that involves old-school middle-management people shaking each other’s hands: conferences and land leasing and that kind of stuff. It’s a remarkably effective category and he loves it. Dan and Chantelle split up quite amicably. Chantelle and Darren are engaged and living together in the gated community. Chantelle’s lips have shrunk and she looks a tiny bit more human and promises not to get more work done.

  And the happiest ending of all is for Kurt, the old guy by the stoplight, who now has his own office out by the delivery bay, where his main task is to sit, enjoy life and maybe watch the Carpenters on VHS—he refuses to go online.

  So maybe you entered this story expecting there to be a bogeyman—someone who we can yell at and whack with sticks like a piñata. But there is no bogeyman here. There’s only the times we live in. We can bitch about them or we can move forward, and if you don’t move forward…well, you’ll be left behind, left in the past, which makes no sense, because the present is all we have. And really, how does Kate Winslet always manage to drop those pounds?

  Retail

  The alpine suburb of Vancouver where I grew up was so remote as to be technically rural. The nearest store of any sort was five miles away, which was moot, because we never got to go there anyway. So until I got my driver’s licence, I was a prisoner of remoteness and, as a result, to this day retail seems like magic to me. You walk into a space filled with well-lit, cunningly arranged, tantalizing objects, you see something you like, you hand over this stuff called “money” and they give you what you want. What could be better? I’m always amazed by how cavalier people who grew up in a town or city are about shopping. You don’t understand: shopping is amazing. It’s like transmutation.

  I like the way stores work so hard to earn your enthusiasm. Stores are so well thought out and make your head feel shiny and new, and then you get home and your house is a mess and you think to yourself, well, at least stores have their shit together.

  The first thing I do in any new country is go to a hardware store. Hardware stores anywhere are inspiring and make you want to make things. Foreign stores add a new twist, especially when you find a tool that obviously has a specific use, only you don’t know what it is. It’s like shopping in a parallel universe, or like eating in that nightclub in Star Wars.

  The Japanese have the best department stores. The stores aren’t so much brands as they are fully immersive lifestyle experiences, and they sell everything from toothpicks to (yes) whale sushi to Robert Rauschenberg paintings. They’re so well put together, you feel like you should dress up just to go there. On this topic, there’s a line from The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) in which Dad Brady says, “Okay kids, put on your best sweaters—we’re going shopping at Sears!” This is funny because you’d never in a million years think of dressing up to go to a Sears. If anything, you’d try to dress down so as to blend in: fleece pants and a day pass from the local clinic clearly pinned to your inside-out T-shirt.

  Japan also has a category of department stores everyone calls zombie stores—nobody can figure out why they still exist, but they lurch along anyway. You walk into a zombie store and they have stuff lying on tables and things are technically for sale, but it’s so depressing that you flee before buying anything.

  It’s similar to another Japanese phenomenon called sabishii (sa-bee-shee). Sabishii is when you look at a restaurant from outside but there’s nobody in it, which is kind of depressing, so you don’t go in…which reinforces the restaurant’s sabishiiness, and soon the restaurant goes out of business.

  I was really excited to go to Harrods in London. When I got there everything was…shiny. It looked like it was designed by the guy who did Michael Jackson’s wardrobe. I guess I was expecting a whole other level of luxury, which sounds so corny. And what would a whole new level of luxury look like, anyway? In the old days, more luxury meant more jewels and shiny stuff. These days, it usually means a lot less, like Muji or airport interrogation rooms. Humanity actually seems to be split down the middle on the definition of luxury: those who want gilded leopard-shaped teapots and those who want to live in the white box their iPhone came in.

  I like department stores because there’s always something to surprise you. I was in the Macy’s in Union Square in San Francisco two years ago, buying pyjamas, and there were all these hip inner-city kids buying pyjamas too, and I thought to myself, Isn’t it great that kids are discovering something good and sensible like pyjamas. And then my friend Liz told me that they buy pyjamas because they’re the exact sort of thing a fifty-year-old white guy would buy, and that kids wear their pyjamas as streetwear, and with much irony. Owned!

  I was leaving a Hudson’s Bay store in Vancouver a few years back, and this woman who look
ed like she lived in her car grabbed me and said, “Not so fast. You’re coming back inside with me.” She was a store detective and she was convinced I’d shoplifted a bottle of Eau Sauvage. She was genuinely excited about taking down a customer—frothing at the kill. A small crowd gathered, I produced the receipt, her face collapsed, and I’ve never gone to that store again. Once the trust is gone, it’s over.

  The most seductive retail on earth is the Paul Smith store in Heathrow’s Terminal 5. You’re already discombobulated from jet lag and sleeping pills, and then you drift through the mall, and the store is like a vision of…unexpected quality and uniqueness. Old books and architectural scale models sit alongside actual merchandise. Nobody leaves empty-handed.

  Right now I like these new hipster stores that each sell exactly four and a half things and feel like the Great Depression when you walk in. A painted rock, a really good notepad made in Antarctica, a knitted cozy for displaying heirloom tomatoes, vintage aspirin holders and a sock. I’m never sure if it’s a pop-up conceptual art gallery or if it’s for real, which is actually the very best retail confusion there is.

  Trivial

  Last night I went to a café where a friend, Jess, was hosting a trivia night. When first I received her invitation, I thought…trivia night? Trivia. Yes, there used to be this stuff called trivia and I haven’t thought about it in ages. So I was curious to see what a 2015 trivia contest would feel like. I arrived to a rowdy vibe: ten jovial teams of five and six members, many of them on the young side—a lot of millennials and borderline millennials.

  Jess was in charge of writing the questions and told us: “Tonight instead of Hollywood fluff, we’re going to have trivia questions that broaden our view of the world.” This sent shivers down my spine as I remembered that trivia is sort of the opposite of broadening one’s world. Trivia is trivia because it’s trivial. And then, of course, came Jess’s final rule: “No cellphones allowed, put them away now.” That was when it got real.

  The questions erred on the side of difficult. Here’s one of the first: “A contronym is a word that has two opposing meanings, which is to say, a contronym is its own antonym. What is a contronym that means both ‘give official permission or approval for’ and ‘impose a penalty on’?”

  Ahhh…here’s the thing: right now you, the reader, and I, the writer, are sharing a moment, and this moment is tense.

  This is because I, for at least a few moments, know the answer to this question, whereas you, for at least a few moments, don’t. This is called a power imbalance. To rectify this power imbalance, you have a few options: You can put down this book and figure out the correct answer. (Just think how satisfied you’ll feel.) Or you could put down this book and never open it again. (Boo hiss.) Or you could circumvent all of this and look it up online. (Wait—no cloud allowed.)

  The answer is sanction.

  Next: “Which one of the following products does NOT contain beef by-products? Asphalt, car tires, baby powder, paint, sugar or drywall?”

  While you mull this over, I’ll just mention what a great feeling it is for me to have important information while you don’t—and also state that this information dynamic is precisely why we hate elites. So smug. It also reminds me of a line from the US version of The Office, where Jim says about his co-worker Dwight, “This is the smallest amount of power I’ve ever seen go to someone’s head.”

  Okay, the answer is baby powder.

  The larger question for me during the trivia evening was, “Wait—we used to have all of this stuff stored in our heads, but now, it would appear, we don’t. What happened?” The answer is that all of this crap is still inside our heads—in fact, there’s probably more crap than ever inside our heads—it’s just been reclassified. It’s not trivia anymore: it’s called the Internet and it lives, at least for the foreseeable future, outside of us.

  The other thing I realized is that we once had a thing called a larger-attention-span-than-the-one-we-now-have. Combine these two factors and we have the reason why a game of trivia in 2015 almost feels like torture. I sat there with four other reasonably bright people, not necessarily knowing the answers to all of the questions, but knowing that the answers, no matter how obtuse, could be had in a few seconds, delivered without judgment by my iPhone 6 Plus. But then I decided the evening was also a good reminder of how far things have come since the early 1980s heyday of the board game Trivial Pursuit.

  Q: What country is north, east, south and west of Finland?

  A: Norway.

  Q: “Clean,” “jerk” and “snatch” are terms used in which sport?

  A: Weightlifting.

  Q: Why was trivia such a big thing in the late twentieth century?

  A: Because society was generating far more information than it was generating systems with which to access that information. People were left with constellations of disconnected, randomly stored facts that could leave one feeling overwhelmed. Trivia games flattered twentieth-century trivia players by making them feel that there was both value to having billions of facts in one’s head and that those facts were actually easily retrieved. But now we know that facts are simply facts. We know where they’re stored and we know how to access them. If anything, we’re a bit ungrateful, given that we know the answer to just about everything.

  You may be wondering who won trivia night. It wasn’t me—but instead of feeling like a loser, I felt the way I once did when a friend spent an afternoon slaving over the creation of croissants that she served for dinner. All that toil and sweat—why not just go out and buy some? The croissants you make on your own will never be as good as the ones from the bakery, and you won’t have used up an entire afternoon in the process.

  Q: The word croissant comes from where?

  A: Google it.

  Über That Red Dot

  I’ve always felt vaguely embarrassed for cats chasing the red laser-pointer dot on the floor. We like to think of cats as being smarter than that. Oh, come on—the dot comes from this laser pointy–thingy I’m holding. Get your act together.

  I also always feel slightly annoyed at myself for holding the pointer and leading the cat along…It’s not that I’m being cruel—it’s more that I’m making it clear to myself and to everyone that intelligence is a continuum and not a threshold, which in turn makes me wonder what metaphorical red dots I’m following that I don’t know about. Who’s holding the laser pointer and laughing contemptuously at me?

  And then I was in Paris last week, ordering a car from Uber. I was in an office with two co-workers and we were staring at my iPhone, watching the little black car on the streets navigate the tangled topological mess that is the streets of the 9th arrondissement.

  “Look. It’s stopped.”

  “Huh.”

  “I wonder why?”

  “Maybe it’s hit a red light.”

  “Look! It’s started moving again.”

  “No! It’s going the wrong way!”

  “That’s not true. That’s a one-way street, so it has to go that way. It’s Paris.”

  Note that it wasn’t the driver, a human being, we were discussing: it was the little black car on the screen.

  “Look at it now. It’s making good time on Rue Saint-Lazare.”

  “Oh no—it’s stopped again.”

  “What is its problem?”

  Then I had a chill: Uber is the one holding the laser pointer—and I wonder if they’re even aware that they are? For fans of Uber, and there are many, possibly the most underrated asset they have going for them is the red laser-dot experience of staring at the phone’s screen as you watch the car come ever closer.

  “It’s almost here!”

  “It’s here!”

  Bliss.

  Everything about Uber makes sense. Beyond the onscreen fun of ordering, when the car shows up, it’s clean and new, the drivers are well-dressed and courteous. “Bottled water? Phone charger? What music do you like?” And then they take you where you need to go. And their prices
are good. Uber in LA is the best. Also Berlin. And Paris. And London and Sydney. But not in Vancouver, where I spend a fair amount of time.

  I get a lot of visitors in Vancouver, and those from New York City are always horrified because my kitchen has a garburator in the sink.

  “Oh my God, you have a garburator.”

  “Oh. Yeah. They’re great. They reduce your trash stream by a lot.”

  “But people put their…babies down the garburator!”

  I know. But in their defence, these are otherwise really smart people standing there saying this. So I always go easy on them and point out that the reason New York didn’t have garburators until recently is because back when they were invented, the Teamsters went crazy because trash going down the drain is trash the Teamsters can’t move in their trucks. So they fabricated the urban legend of people putting babies down the garburator to galvanize public sentiment on their side.

  “Oh.”

  So back to Uber. What I hear from some people now is, “Yes, but you could get raped by an Uber driver! They could be psycho murderers.”

  “Well, you could get raped by any driver, really. So why are you focusing on Uber?”

  I think right now the Uber situation is like the Teamsters and garburators. There’s no real argument to not have Uber drivers. They are superior to taxis in all possible ways. The only thing stopping them are all these cab drivers who had to pay extortionate amounts of money for a medallion, and suddenly entering their arena are these new people with superior service who didn’t get hosed buying a medallion (honestly, medallions? How is that even still a thing?). So of course taxi owners are angry, and of course they’re going to lash out and try to generate urban legends to frighten people who, the moment they use an Uber, will never use a taxi again if they don’t have to. Uber’s not alone in this sort of engineered fear environment. Remember the Craigslist killer?