#123: Debaser
In an interview during the brief run of his unpopular sitcom The Norm Show, Norm MacDonald explained how even if nobody watches a network TV show, it still gets credited with a million or so viewers because so many people just leave their TVs on all day. Sometime in the last few years, I started thinking about that observation as a metaphor for the economy and how we experience it personally—or like a platoon of a million semi-trucks barreling down the highway, all of which would keep going for a while if their drivers took their feet off the gas. Last month, all the drivers did let up on the gas at the same time, and now the trucks are all coasting to a standstill at once, which is a weird thing to watch. But during ordinary pre-pandemic life, individual parts of the economy would seemingly coast on similar momentum, and we would barely notice. Or to return to the TV metaphor, we’d just leave the TV on in the living room, and shows we’d never even heard of would keep putting up numbers. But now, suddenly, we’re actually running out of shows, figuratively if not literally.
Economically, what’s happening right now seems deflationary (despite money printer go brrr) but in a cultural sense we are witnessing unquestionable deflation. Six weeks is long enough to break a lot of habits and to forget about things that didn’t really matter, or at least stop doing them consciously. We will eventually find a way to resume doing anything we truly value—we’ll go to restaurants again and we’ll even shake each other’s hands. But I suspect it will be a long time before I resume the practice of eating dinner at a restaurant I don’t like that much just because I wanted to catch up with a friend and we couldn’t think of anything better to do. Instead of The Norm Show playing to an empty living room while everyone else is taking a nap, the equivalent of The Norm Show won’t exist, and the TV might not be on at all. I abhor most of the generalized “new normal” takes I’m seeing these days but I feel confident that the societal reset currently underway will wipe out a lot of our most mindless activity, behaviorally and economically—and not just due to the shorter-term risks involved.
This is merely a silver lining to the current situation, of course—I don’t even think it’s a desirable outcome. I’d have welcomed such a reset if it came from our own measured introspection as a culture, but as with any crisis-driven upheaval, the collateral damage of this contraction will outweigh the benefits. All of that bloat employs a lot of people and it’s unhealthy as well as traumatic to unwind it like this. Last November, I wrote a post about “money sloshing around” in a then-overheated economy and how that excess manifested in culture as overtourism and “hordes chasing after prizes that look surprisingly mediocre on closer inspection.” Right now, we have the exact opposite of that—a mandatory global fast that suppresses consumption at every level. Nothing is sloshing around right now except Zoom calls and anxiety (and oil, I guess). When it all starts returning, it’s likely to creep back slowly. Another post I wrote one year ago, “Paleo Internet,” similarly grappled with that erstwhile abundance, describing how mass-market expansion fuels demand for artificially-scarce artisanal alternatives and vice versa in an endless cycle. Despite the timing, the conclusion of that one feels more pertinent than ever: As digitally-mediated human interaction becomes cheap and ubiquitous, access to in-person human interaction becomes a luxury good. Right now you can only get it on the black market, but it will still be more expensive when it comes back.
Reads:
Shannon Mattern on Andrew Cuomo’s PowerPoint briefings and the “aesthetics of authority.”
In the absence of in-person tourism, you can explore the Faroe Islands by using a remote control to direct a real tour guide with a camera around the landscape (thanks Bryan).
Human activity has decreased so drastically around the world that seismographs are detecting the change (thanks Brendan).