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  Meanwhile, who’s carrying around the trays of drinks and amuse-bouches? Who’s out back loading the trucks and carrying the trash? Those security staff over there—they must be bored out of their minds. God, what a horrible job that must be. At least it’s a blessing they don’t have an internal 400-level professor in their heads. That would be the worst thing of all: having to be around this stuff eight hours a day, relentlessly, endlessly playing the same monologue over and over inside my head. I’d run off and join ISIS if I had to do that for a living. ISIS. ISIS has production values. It’s waging the first war ever where people look and say, “Wow, I think they’re using Final Cut Pro, not just Final Cut.” And imagine having an about-to-be-beheaded prisoner read from a teleprompter. Those are professional post-production values. And their weapons and their website, too. Really tight and clean. Shiny.

  Notes on Relationships in the Twenty-first Century

  It’s very hard to imagine phoning someone up and saying, “Hey, come over to my house and we’ll sit next to each other on chairs and go online together!” Going online is such an intrinsically solitary act, yet it fosters the creation of groups.

  Last year at a conference about cities, I met this guy from Google who asked me what I knew about Fort McMurray, Alberta. I told him it’s an oil-extraction complex in the middle of a northern Canadian prairie, and because of this, it has the most disproportionately male demographic of any city in North America. Its population is maybe fifty thousand. I asked him why he was asking and he said, “Because it has the highest per capita video-streaming rate of anywhere in North America.” Nudge, nudge.

  I think that, because of the Internet, straight people are now having the same amount of sex as gay guys were always supposed to be having. There’s a weird look I can see on the faces of people who are getting too much sex delivered to them via hooking up online: Wait—is this as good as it gets?

  On the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant asked Mary how many times a woman could be with a guy before she became “that kind of girl,” and Mary thought about it very carefully and said, “Six.” Some psychologists have come to the conclusion that most people have five or six loves, and once they use them up, that’s it. Sixes get used up very quickly in the new information world.

  Q: How many times can a person fall in love? Apparently, if you average it out, two and a half times. Men are slightly more inclined to believe in a third-time love than women.

  People in the pornography industry have found that the magic price point for people subscribing to a porn site is $29.95. The moment you cross that line, potential customers balk. It is called the “porn wall” and it seems to be an impenetrable thing, a constant that’s built into us by nature, like the nesting instinct of birds or the molecular weight of zinc.

  I remember a thirty-year-old Latino guy in the 1990s who passed himself off as a hot teenage Latina in a Florida high school and spent a year and a half there before anyone found out. I think he actually grew stubble once and attended PTA meetings as his own father. I think that in certain ways we’ve all become middle-aged Latino guys pretending to be hot cheerleaders…except maybe you’re not pretending to be a cheerleader; you’re pretending to be a studly cowboy, or whoever it is you wish you could be, to the person on the other end, who has no way of disproving it.

  Sometimes people really connect online but, of course, they live far away from each other. So, ultimately, one of them buys a plane ticket and flies across the country to meet the other. If there’s no physical chemistry, it leads to one very depressing drink and some desultory conversation before they both go home. People in the matchmaking industry call these people NFHs (“next-flight-homers”). Sometimes people really connect online and, when they meet in person, they physically click. People in the dating industry call them “room-getters.”

  I sometimes wonder about people who wake up and spend almost the whole day online. When they go to bed at night, they’ll have almost no organic memories of their own. If they do this for a long time, you can begin to say that their intelligence is, in a true sense, artificial. Which I guess means sex lives have never been as artificial as they are now.

  People seem to be pickier about bodies these days. New high-definition TV cameras have changed the way we look at bodies. Even a faint acne scar looks like the Grand Canyon on a high-def screen. TV casting agents have started to heavily favour actors with perfectly smooth skin. It’s like the dermatological equivalent of the introduction of sound into film in 1927.

  I don’t think people being on their devices all the time is an indicator of social isolation. It’s the opposite. In Manhattan about one person in three on any given sidewalk is using a device. Some people say that’s bad because they’re not “in the moment,” but I think it’s kind of nice because you have visible proof that people need and want to be with other people.

  I watched Looking for Mr. Goodbar a few weeks ago. It starred Richard Gere and Diane Keaton in the 1970s New York pickup scene, and I was horrified by how low-tech it was back then. It was like people lived in badly furnished caves connected by land lines. It was a real eye-opener.

  Once you get used to a certain level of online connection, there’s just no way to go back to where you were before. People are more connected than they’ve ever been before—except they’ve been tricked into thinking they’re more isolated than ever. How did this happen? Wait—what’s that you’re asking me? Am I wearing underwear right now?

  Fear of Windows

  Kimberly Kellog was a well-nourished, upper-middle-class twelve-year-old girl who lived in a good suburb of a good American city. Her parents were happy that she hadn’t yet turned into an insolent shoplifting, purge-dieting, binge-drinking nightmare like all the other girls in the neighbourhood. They counted their blessings.

  One night Kimberly was watching a horror movie with her parents, one about outer-space aliens invading the suburbs. The movie was made in a cinéma-vérité style, so the naturalistic and provocative camerawork made the everyday world seem more charged and real, ready to explode like an ownerless black nylon backpack abandoned in a crowded railway station.

  Halfway through the horror movie, a scene showed a family inside their house; they heard funny noises, so they went from window to window trying to see what the noise could be. When nothing turned up, they stood in front of the living room window for a moment, admiring the front garden. Suddenly a huge, mean-motherfucker alien with tentacles and fangs and a massive cranium jumped in front of them and spat blood and venom and human body parts onto the windowpane.

  Kimberly began screaming and couldn’t stop. In the end her parents had to give her some Valium they’d been saving for an upcoming holiday flight, and still she spent the rest of the evening in her bed with her curtains tightly closed. Through the walls she could hear her parents fighting over whose idea it had been to let a twelve-year-old girl watch an R rated horror movie.

  Before he went to bed that night, Kimberly’s father came up to see how she was doing and said, “Let’s open the curtains and let in some fresh air, young lady.”

  Kimberly freaked out again. It took her father some minutes to make the connection between the curtains, the window and the monster, and by then Kimberly was so upset she ended up spending the night sleeping in her parents’ room, the blinds drawn.

  The next morning Kimberly was fine again—until she remembered the monster. She froze, realizing there were windows everywhere and that the monster could appear at any one of them at any time.

  She willed herself out of the house and onto the school bus, and that was okay because it was moving and raised above the ground, until she realized that an alien could be on the bus’s roof. At school she spent the day trying not to look out the classroom windows.

  During the last period of the day, science, one of her classmates, Luke, said, “Kimberly, come over here, there’s this cool eye-perception test I want to show you.”

  “What does that mean?”


  “It’s to test your eyes to see what you notice more, motion or colour. It’s fun.”

  Kimberly was glad to have something to take her mind off the aliens, and so she went to sit beside him. Luke said, “What you do is stare at this image really intensely.”

  On the screen was a picture of a boring middle-class living room.

  “Let your eyes relax and let your body relax, and then things in the room will move just slightly, or the sofa may change colour just a bit. The image is going to change very slowly—tell me what changes you notice, colour or shape or motion or whatever.”

  So Kimberly sat there and let her body relax for the first time since the horror movie. She stared at the picture and thought how much it matched her own family’s living room. She imagined herself being in the room and feeling safe and happy, when all of a sudden the screen cut to a full-size screaming vampire face, fangs dripping blood, eyes full of murderous, bloodsucking rage.

  Kimberly went totally insane and nobody knew what to do. Finally, her teacher and a few of the bigger students were able to drag her to the nurse’s office, where she was forced to sign several waiver forms and show proof of her family’s fully paid, up-to-date medical coverage before she was given a rich and delicious syringe-load of Dilaudid. Still, the only reason Kimberly didn’t flip out further was because the nurse’s office had no windows and she felt slightly safe there—but she dreaded the fact that she would have to leave the room and walk down windowed hallways and out a door into a car with windows (her mother had been called) and then into a house that had twenty-seven windows as well as one chimney and three ventilation holes for the dryer and the bathroom showers.

  The drive home was traumatic. Once inside the house, Kimberly was unable to leave her mother, even for a second.

  That night her parents tried reasoning with her, but the harder they tried, the more anxious she became. At two in the morning they gave her the remaining eight milligrams of Valium and decided to see if everything would be better in the morning. It wasn’t. It was much worse—a Valium hangover amplified every misfiring neuron in their daughter’s brain. Kimberly, teeth chattering, crept inside the linen closet and shut the door.

  “We have to get her to a doctor,” said her father. “Can you get the day off?”

  “Nope. Today’s our annual End-of-Season Winnebago Blowout. Can’t you take the day off?”

  “Fine. Come on, pumpkin,” Kimberly’s dad said. “Get dressed and let’s go see if we can make these spooky things go away.”

  They drove to the clinic with Kimberly crouched in the well of the front passenger seat, and at the clinic they saw Dr. Marlboro, who was quick to grasp the problem. “Sedatives won’t work,” he said. “Nothing will work. A horrific, lifelong phobia has been created. The most we can hope for is that the fear will dwindle with time and become manageable. Usually the decay rate for young people traumatized by the wrong movie at the wrong time is six weeks—but the aftershocks linger forever.”

  “What kind of quack are you?” Kimberly’s dad said.

  “Language, Mr. Kellog. Goodbye.”

  Angry, Kimberly’s father took his daughter to another doctor, who he’d heard would write anyone a prescription for anything.

  Kimberly spent the next month in a velvet fog. Then the prescription ran out, and when her parents went to renew it, they learned that the pill doctor had fled to Florida to avoid multiple malpractice charges. All the other doctors in town were off duty, watching golf marathons on TV. An unsedated Kimberly returned to her full senses. She was yet again horrified by the world.

  But while Kimberly had been in her fog, spring had turned into summer. Kimberly’s mother had an idea: “Why don’t you sleep outside on the lawn? No windows there.”

  She had a point. That night Kimberly slept in the back garden, midway between the house and the fence.

  “Well, Einstein,” said her father to her mother, “glad to see something works. She can’t be living on sedatives forever.”

  With a 360-degree view all around her, sleep came quickly to Kimberly. The next morning, she jerked awake, filled with fear, then realized where she was and relaxed. This went on for a month, during which time she stayed outside, going inside only when it was absolutely necessary. The weather was good, and so was life.

  Then one morning she woke up to see two men dressed like politicians coming through the carport. They approached the side door and rang the doorbell. Kimberly’s mother answered it and let them in.

  As quietly as she could, Kimberly crept up to the house. She snuck from window to window, looking inside, and as she did, she discovered that windows are perfectly fine if you’re on the outside looking in.

  Finally, she came to the living room window. She looked in to see her parents kneeling in front of the men, whose heads were opening up like tin-can lids. Jellyfish tentacles emerged and wrapped themselves over her parents’ skulls. After thirty seconds the tentacles retreated and went back inside the men’s heads, and the heads snapped shut. The creatures pulled dog leashes from their pockets, which they attached to Kimberly’s parents, then led them out the front door, down the driveway and out onto the road, where other aliens were busy rounding up the neighbours.

  One might wish that Kimberly did a brave thing and fetched the loaded Colt from her father’s bedside drawer and tried to rescue her parents.

  Or one might wish that Kimberly ran after her parents in a vain effort to save them and, in the process, became a house pet too.

  But instead Kimberly looked at her parents’ house, which now belonged to her. She went in the front door, threw open all the windows, let fresh air inside and sang, “The aliens have come and now they’re gone.” She then looked around the empty house. “And all of this is mine now—mine, mine, mine!” She went to the kitchen, found a bottle of Windex and went from room to room, cleaning all the windows one by one.

  Creep

  On May 2, 2015, I was visiting Hall 6 of Paris’s annual trade fair, the Foire de Paris, the site of a Maker Faire. Half of the sports arena–sized space was filled with exhibitors mostly displaying 3D printing devices and the services that support them: printing filament, software and electronic add-ons. Booths tended to be staffed by twentysomethings radiating the cockiness that comes from knowing one is riding the winning historical wave. The hall’s visitors were also on the young side: young parents with palpably creative children, as well as (almost entirely) young men who can only be cheerfully described as nerds. And, as one might expect, everyone was making stuff: 3D-printed dodecahedrons, skulls, anime figurines, bionic arms, gears, doodads, frogs, vaping devices, cats, vases and…well, anything, really. A favoured goal of members of the maker movement is to make something that could never have existed, even five years ago: interlocked polyhedrons; hard copies of algebraic equations; animal forms rendered with slick mathematical skins.

  Nothing I’ve seen more closely resembles the look and feel of the actual Internet than these assemblages of items made at and displayed in a Maker Faire. If you compare requests people enter in their Google searches with the items on display at Maker Faire, there is the exact same sense of predictable randomness; the need to find faster, better and cheaper goods and services; a semiotic disconnect from one object to another; and an embrace of glitches as an aesthetic. If the maker aesthetic strays in any one cultural dimension, it would probably be slightly in the direction of Burning Man, but more along the lines of Maker Faire dads building fire-breathing stainless steel golems to enhance a backyard weekend drum circle.

  After overloading on the noise and imagery of the fair, I found myself at the far end of the hall, taking a breather by a chain-link fence I thought was there to close off unused space. Wrong. It was a drone testing ground. I looked in and there were five or so drones being test flown by a small group of people. And so I looked through the fence at drones, which is something I’ve never done. They’re square and they hover and swoop; they go way up and then down—kind of hy
pnotizing. Then one of the drones, a candy-apple red number I’d been following for two minutes, buzzed right over to me and proceeded to hover directly in front of my face for maybe fifteen seconds. This event actually shocked me. This was not the way I thought I’d first encounter a drone. I always thought I’d be sitting on the sofa when something out the window would catch my eye. A bird? I’d get up to look, and there would be a hovering drone with its many cameras live-streaming to Dr. Evil’s alpine lair.

  Truth be told, I think the first drone encounter scenario most people have in their heads is far more Freudian. The first drone encounter script would go something like this: You’re sunbathing in the nude outside on your secluded balcony. Or roof. You’re covered in oil and you’re Spotify-ing Brazilian jazz and contemplating how to shave your pubic hair—you’re totally vulnerable—and then suddenly you hear a pale humming sound; you look up. It’s a drone. So then what do you do? Call the cops? Cover your modesty? Throw your towel at it? That thing is pretty deft and probably hard to nail, and if you did nail it, could the person operating it sue you? Is it legal to take down a drone? Who the hell is running the damn thing? Holy shit, you realize, it’s not safe up here on my roof anymore. But the thing is, even though you know there’s a 98 percent probability that the person operating the drone is a male between the ages of twelve and nineteen, your head goes not to Kyle or Terry from two doors down the street, but right into Big Brother mode.