The current pattern, however temporary, of withholding more personal and subcultural information from the Internet, despite its unpleasant cause, might accidentally reintroduce a bygone paradigm that the Internet itself is structurally incapable of encouraging, one of silence and even mystery. That sounds a bit like a Dark Age, yes, but hasn’t the world become a bit overilluminated?
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.
Thinking about the future, at its best, is really just another way to process the present, and there’s never been a better time to do that. but what’s increasingly obvious to me is how this crisis will decisively divide the world in two along many different axes. Some of those fault lines are obvious, and were already splitting open: at-risk or healthy; hourly or salaried; manual laborer or knowledge worker.
The pandemic has fractured the discourse, exposing how many layers of assumptions formed the bedrock. Under quarantine conditions, there is less opportunity to physically signal one’s participation in a culture, so clothing and conspicuous consumption matter less. Knowledge tooling will be extremely important to this new set of online cultural formation. We’ll see a dramatic acceleration of the exodus from clearnet that began a few years ago. Cities will need to put incentives in place for small businesses to take over these spaces, and stem the blight of banks and pharmacies that have eaten ground floor retail, have genericized walkable cities in the last decade. People who left the city due to safety concerns or simply for affordability reasons may not return. Combined with the increasing viability of remote work and zero-hour contracting, we may see further evacuation of the city and a new wave of suburbanization. The increased availability of urban space relative to demand that results from this will create new opportunities for communities and cultural production to manifest themselves in the physical world. in the second, that same realm is reinvigorated and returned to its true stakeholders, the people who live there. Breathe. Read the air. The real knowledge work begins
I spent last week relatively offline in Mexico, which became an interesting experiment in how the internet shapes perception: During the vacation, alarm about coronavirus in the United States escalated, but I didn’t really know because nothing in my offline environment reflected that sentiment. Since returning to the US and resuming my normal internet intake, it feels like my panic instinct missed a formative period in its development. As of now, I’m still less concerned about coronavirus than others seem to be, and while I feel a vague need, if not a civic duty, to step my worry up, I’m mainly just thankful to care less about something than I’m supposed to, for once. Regardless of how I feel, though, the coronavirus discourse is providing an interesting lesson in how these two different layers of reality can handle certain information so differently, and either amplify or suppress it: Usually the internet seems to overamplify things, but right now it seems to be properly amplifying something (although there’s nothing to check that against).
