…but like so much else, the disappearance of the real thing ensured that massive demand for idealized simulations of it would follow. If pure wilderness represents a baseline authenticity, everything humans have done since, from agriculture onward, has added layer upon layer of artifice to our environment.
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
