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A psychiatrist colleague recently remarked that many of her psychotic patients initially reported feeling better as viral fear of a new disease was radically transforming the world.
Why?
Because they felt validated by an external reality that finally matched the horror of their inner worlds.
We knew all along that the world was a terrifying place. Now you all know too.
As the WHO announces that the new coronavirus is likely to become—like HIV, malaria, and influenza—an endemic part of human realities, we need to ponder the choices that lie ahead for the spaces and social interactions of the near future.
Before addressing this question, I want to suggest that the future was already here—before COVID—that it was already psychotic, and that information technologies—screens, computers, tablets, and smartphones, to be precise—were already largely to blame.
By ‘already psychotic,' I mean something like an epidemic of sad, lonely, scary inner worlds already disconnected from one another; split worlds already far mismatched with external reality; worlds in which we had already lost track of so many possible ways of being, moving, interacting, looking, and imagining in the world.
I will also suggest—bear with me here—that the only way out of total collective psychosis, and into better, unknown future space, is to further descend into the grotesque, logical conclusion of this madness.
Picture, then, what the very near future might look like.
Picture the omnipresent whine of police drones, yelling “spread apart” in a Google voice at people gathering in parks or front steps; picture dissenters caught via smartphone GPS tags, automatically fined, their electrical cars automatically grounded, their weekly permitted social times automatically reduced, their FaceTime minutes plan automatically reduced [the Internet has now become much more expensive]. Picture a ‘friend time allowance,’ to be allocated on the merits of good distancing. Picture students being expelled from schools for being caught kissing, wrestling, or playing tag; employees fired for forgetting their mask. Picture workplace harassment policies now extending to violations of 2m mandatory distancing. Picture Grandparents Relocation Camps™, to be placed in glass suburbs. Picture special Grandparents Facetime plans™ sponsored by the Amazon-Apple-Google state governments. Picture good citizen badges (and Facetime plan discounts) for those who report their neighbours’ illegal dinners, BBQs, and children’s birthday parties. Picture, as Scott Galloway recently did, Giant Cyborg Universities monopolizing the education market. Picture children expressing utter incomprehension when watching old movies depicting people herding in hallways, planes, classrooms, public transport, concerts, and stadiums.
“Daddy, what’s a street fair?”
Such dystopian measures, I will suggest, could be the best solution out the most terrible crisis ever faced by our species.
Wait. Best? Why? How?
Because humans like nothing more than the illusion of choice, but do not like to be too obviously told what to do.
Recall again that in the dystopian future of yesterday, people had voluntarily surrendered their every thought, movement, and desire to the psychotic vortex of screens. Recall how the collapsing of distance in time and space, to paraphrase Heidegger in another era, had never brought about nearness.
Recall how instant access to the near-entire cultural memory of humanity online, rather than spawn mental libraries of Borgesian proportions, had monopolized our attention around four or five themes at best: fear, pornography, shopping, moral outrage, and anxious social comparison.
Recall how the promise of connecting the whole of humanity had instead yielded a pinball game of angry political tribes, desperate to find clues confirming the stupidity of the other tribe, and the righteousness of their own worldview.
When the mind is faced with an abundance of choices, it tends to jump to cues — like fat and sugar—that convey a strong survival advantage, and the expense of everything else.
Our hunter-gatherer brains didn’t fare well with fast food, and they didn’t do well with fast information. The tragedy here is not that tech giants have made a fortune from exploiting our flaws—as they are now cynically embracing the social distancing pathology that will make them richer—but that (recall) we all voluntarily surrendered to this vortex.
Why did we surrender?
Because social information, tribal information, and fearful information is as hard to resist as muffins, burgers, a comfortable couch, or a fourth glass of wine.
How then, does one conquer one’s impulse for dark, lonely information?
One solution is to enlist another impulse. This time, the impulse to transgress.
I recall, growing up in France, a mother who had caught her 8-year-old child smoking. She immediately proceeded to force the child to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes, one after the other, occasionally pausing to vomit. The child—now in his 40s—never smoked again.
We are, of course, about to be force-fed the very regime of technologically enforced, big-business-benefiting social distancing we had already created out of our darkest desires.
The solution for misinformation-hungry humans, then, is to let them eat cake. Let them eat cake so rich and sweet, and let them eat so much of it, that they never want to go near cake again.
When faced with an obviously forced choice, or a very strong constraint, the human mind finally opens to making decisions of its own. Constraints, surprise, the unexpected—everything undesired—prompt us to discover possibilities (ways of looking at, and being in the world) that were previously hidden.
Catastrophes and disasters, like illnesses, prompt radical restructurings of attention. One sees what one didn’t know existed. The asthmatic is thankful for the air the rest of us take for granted.
In being deprived of social interactions, for example, one sees, and one finally desires the social possibilities one had forgotten to imagine.
This may not be possible for everyone.
During the “Little Ice Age” of the 17th century, up to a third of humanity perished from famine and warfare. As crops failed and disease spread due to cold weather, conflict. superstition, witch-hunts, and pogroms took hold of agrarian societies in an attempt to find culprits for climate change.
Some societies, like early-modern Holland, flourished in the face of change. The Dutch invented ice-skates at that time, along with ice-breaking technology to make harbours accessible. Merchants and sailors took advantage of changing wind patterns to extend their trade networks. They pioneered insurance policies against natural disasters, which spearheaded a revolution in banking. This period came to be remembered as the Dutch Golden Age. In North America, some snow-equipped Native cultures also extended their hunting grounds, trade networks, and political alliances as white pilgrims succumbed to famine, cold, and disease.
In mid-May on a sunburnt patch of grass in Montreal, I saw a group of young people standing together; perhaps 20 or so youth, around 18 to 20 years of age. A girl from one group approached a boy who was visibly a stranger to her. She asked if he’d trade one of her beers for one of his ciders. They struck up a conversation. In recent memory, I do not recall seeing such spontaneous, effervescent, care-free interaction between unsupervised youth in middle-class North America. There was a sense of joy, of excitement, a sense of possibilities reminiscent of the late 1960s (or what I imagine them to be).
Handshakes, hugs, casual encounters, sex, love, and all rituals of novel social interactions are, of course, going to be affected in times to come. But the sense of deprivation, urgency, and transgression in which they will take place will be marked with a strong sense of specialness.
We will sacrifice more, and we will gain a lot more, in other words, from the renewed specialness of social interactions.
Such spontaneous, subversive, special—as yet unknown—interactions will increasingly take place outside, offline, in spaces that elude the external surveillance and internal surrender to the vortex of screens.
What then, will future spaces look like?
Our youth will show us the way.
