#124: The Way We Never Were
I wrote a piece for Real Life this week about how the pandemic has pushed us deeper into the digitally-mediated world that we already inhabited beforehand, and how losing access to shared physical space accelerates that process while revealing the painful limitations of online-first existence. In the essay, I argue that physical space is a necessary complement to the internet: The latter is at its best when interwoven with the former, rather than existing independently of it. With every week that passes, we gain appreciation for the mundane rituals of embodied existence that we rarely noticed before they became forbidden, like hugging a friend or being in a crowd, but it’s possible we’re also idealizing a mode of existence from which we’d drifted away long before coronavirus put it entirely on hold. Spending six weeks at home has been surprisingly easy because a robust infrastructure was already in place to support remote work as well as the Seamless and Netflix yuppie lifestyle. The United States was entirely unprepared for a pandemic in most important ways, but we had accidentally prepared for an extended quarantine. We can’t pretend we were utilizing meatspace to the fullest when we actually could, although it’s hard to believe that now.
In 2001, when the countryside was just a glimmer in his eye, Rem Koolhaas declared that “real life is inside, while cyberspace has become the great outdoors.” In retrospect, real life was more outside than we realized twenty years ago, at least relative to how we were living just before this pandemic and certainly relative to how we’re living during it. The discourse around “reopening the economy” has fascinated me for precisely this reason, as it accidentally admits that we have nothing to reopen but the economy, which basically encompasses everything. The current period of full digital immersion feels like the culmination of an atomized neoliberal dystopia administrated by Amazon—a “capsular civilization”—and our desire to reopen things is probably driven by our repulsion from this environment as much as an attraction to the physical spaces that are temporarily closed, as well as our need to restore the balance with meatspace that makes the internet more enjoyable. As the American urban environment has grown increasing privatized, consumption has been the primary way to engage with it. Spaces where we can do anything other than eat, drink, shop, or exercise have diminished, swallowed up by what Koolhaas calls junkspace. In other words, the outside world has assumed a lot of the same qualities as the contemporary internet over time.
Thankfully, the physical domain is subject to more inertia than its digital counterpart, and is harder to push toward full monetization. Since the quarantine began, I’ve been taking a lot of walks and bike rides. In New York, the parts of the city that aren’t defined by consumption are specifically what’s still open. Junkspace is closed and we can only occupy the interstitial spaces between establishments searchable on Yelp. The exterior urban environment has unintentionally decoupled from the economy, and to spend time outdoors in these conditions is to re-establish a more direct relationship to space that normally extracts value from us at every turn. The primary way we experience much of that space under normal circumstances is by passing through it on the way to somewhere else; now, momentarily, that “somewhere else” isn’t available. The official act of reopening cities will signify the reintegration of space and the economy, but when that finally happens, hopefully, we’ll remember what we learned during this time—that the two aren’t as inseparable as they seem.
Reads:
Derek Thompson on how the pandemic will change American retail. “In the short term, our cities will become more boring. In the long term, they might just become interesting again.”
Isaac Wilks on the urgency of building things in the physical world, developing Marc Andreessen’s recent post on the same topic and making the point that “building” is unavoidably political. “We lack the means to build…but above all, we lack the ends.”