#125: Tears in Rain
One of my favorite McLuhanisms is a 1964 observation about the rise of the automobile: “The horse has lost its role in transportation but has made a strong comeback in entertainment.” It’s a perfect expression of how obsolescence doesn’t necessarily mean total disappearance, as we sometimes expect it will in the moment, but instead just narrows the space in which the outmoded technology operates. Similar fates befell media like vinyl records and mail correspondence, which have since settled into their own happy little corners of the world. Following multiple decades of aggressive, overt technological disruption—a process that seemed eager to fully annihilate its targets—we’ve all been trained to anticipate what will perish next, and sometimes even welcome its demise. The current upheaval we’re experiencing is the ideal petri dish for such ideation: With everything rapidly changing and fewer other ways to engage with the outside world, we sit at home and channel unprecedented collective energy into anxious predictions about what the post-pandemic future will entail. While there’s no strong consensus about what new creations will emerge from this, there’s more agreement about what will be eliminated or severely curtailed, temporarily or permanently. If creative destruction excites you, this is your Super Bowl.
A pandemic isn’t progress, of course. Nobody expects restaurants or gyms to become obsolete, although fear of the next coronavirus will likely become an enduring feature of life in many places, as happened with terrorism twenty years ago. But this event threatens to accelerate many already-developing trends, thereby consolidating the effects of a disruptive progress that was advancing at a slower pace beforehand. So, some portion of work will become remote and stay that way, but not entirely due to the pandemic. Like McLuhan’s horse, much of what’s currently threatened won’t vanish; one reason horses found a new role following the car’s ascendance was that there were still a lot of (distressed) horses around. A year from now, there will still be lots of office space, but as the broad need for it shrinks—as offices become increasingly optional for many—maybe they’ll assume a more whimsical or even nostalgic role, as records and letters did. Danny Hillis once defined technology as “everything that doesn’t work yet,” prompting the following corollary from Kevin Kelly: “Successful inventions disappear from our awareness. Electric motors were once technology—they were new and did not work well. As they evolved, they seemed to disappear, even though they proliferated and were embedded by the scores into our homes and offices. They work perfectly, silently, unminded, so they no longer register as ‘technology.’” Taking this idea one step further, the afterlife of an obsolete technology is the phase when it finds a more modest purpose and finally reenters our field of awareness (now we say “horses” whenever we drive past some horses).
Not every technology is fortunate enough to have an afterlife, though. The persistence of archaic objects conceals the utter disappearance of much else that was less durable and left no trace. Frederic Jameson writes, “What we call modern is the consequence of incomplete modernization and must necessarily define itself against a nonmodern residuality.” Once that residuality vanishes, the idea of “modern” fades with it and the postmodern commences. Hence the permanent postmodernism of the internet, which buries its past much more thoroughly than the physical world does. Myspace didn’t reappear in a new context once its period of original usefulness passed. But again, the inertia of the built environment is one reason for encouragement during a crisis that appears to specifically threaten the physical and spare the digital: The former is ultimately harder to leave behind. Rather than erasing the outside world, the pandemic creates the momentary illusion that meatspace is becoming obsolete and, by breaking it, makes it visible again.
Reads:
Naomi Klein on big tech’s emerging Pandemic Shock Doctrine. “The future that is being rushed into as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent—and highly profitable—no-touch future.”
Rob Horning on minimalist sculpture and its relevance to how we experience quarantine: an art movement that tried but failed to “rescue viewing subjects from the consumerist mentality and re-center them in the uniqueness of their autonomous bodily perceptions of an object.”
Someone built a mall in Google Sheets (thanks Dan).