Well, it’s early January and time for a brand new Covid surge! And so our new friend JN.1 is here, daring our culture to metabolize it in this putatively “post-pandemic” era.
Now that we’ve entered the fourth year of this still pretty damn novel coronavirus and have exhausted the Greek alphabet, the new variants sound less like ‘70s conspiracy thrillers (the Delta Affair, Omicron File, etc) and more like hip new designer drugs (XBB.1.9.2 EG.5 HV.1). Which all makes sense in a digital landscape.
These crafty new spike-protein arrays sneak past our antibodies just as crafty synthetic drug analogues sneak past the DEA’s schedule of banned substances. In one case, you might get a new and briefly legal high or trip. In the other, you might get a new and barely understood constellation of symptoms that pulls you out of life indefinitely.
Two years ago, I was on the phone with a reporter friend who’d somehow missed news of the troubling variant omicron.
“Give me the elevator pitch,” he said.
“It’s Delta meets OG SARS-CoV-2,” I told him. “Only with lower fatality, more transmissibility, no love interest, and fewer franchising opportunities overseas.”
This week, I’m trying out a new way of looking at all this. I was struck by it yesterday morning, when something in Douglas Rushkoff’s substack essay made me table today’s intended topic to respond with this post.
Rushkoff, a career-long digital enthusiast, recently contracted Covid for the first time, and shared an impression of the disease that really shook me: that the virus actually feels digital: “Palpably synthetic,” he writes. “If the flu could be likened to a vinyl LP, and a cold to a 45 single, Covid is more like an early CD or under-sampled MP3. Discontinuous, plastic, alien. Not indigenous.”
I was struck by this partially because it’s exactly what my Boston homeboy John, also a Covid newbie, shared with me a day earlier. Having contracted the virus on a trip back home to Jamaica Plain, he reported a chilling, bone-deep perception of a viral agent that truly felt engineered. Like Rushkoff, he began his account with the disclaimer “not to seem conspiratorial,” since this virus that burned out his sense of taste and smell and flattened him for days truly felt as if it had indeed been designed in a lab. Not to seem conspiratorial.
As a Covid virgin who’s been dealing with mysterious, lingering autoimmune-related symptoms for over 20 years, the very idea of this still-novel agent our society pretends to have metabolized is, to be frank, fucking with me. All the more so since I was stupid enough to read Tom Scocca’s excellent first-person account of a related condition in NY mag, sections of which read very like a piece I did for the same damn magazine decades ago, only with the added financial trauma of a professional writer-editor in the age of “content.” It’s the one piece I can think of that actually merits a trigger warning, customized for Chris Norris.
Anyway, Rushkoff pursues the Covid-as-digital metaphor to describe what he calls a core problem of contemporary society, “which is to substitute abstracted, digital metrics for on-the-ground, organic and analog sensibilities.” He writes that we are “mistaking the synthetic for the real, and doing it across some truly important features of our society.”
I’m torn between thinking that this point is so obvious as to signify Covid brain and feeling galvanized by thoughts of a fellow traveler. This is because I’ve already pursued this theme to the tune of 200,000-odd words of a book I’ve yet to sell. I’ll save the elevator pitch for now, but the general idea is a collection of reported essays that document the transition from what the writer Eric Davis calls “the analog sunset” to the digitally-mediated reality we’re currently drowning in, a new world that was fully formed by the end of this century’s first decade.
My topic is not “the internet” but what preceded and enabled it, technologically but also artistically, socially, politically. And how all this played out in the years-long lurch into a new consensual hallucination, one in which every bit of recorded, filmed, painted, or photographed reality gets transmuted into ones and zeros. For this, I tend to borrow Plutarch’s figure of the Ship of Theseus. That’s the mythic vessel whose every single part—oarlock, jib, helm, keel—gets replaced over a period of time, “preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus,” since “they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.” Put me down for the latter camp.
Modern philosophers tend to use this figure to explore questions of personal identity and the philosophy of mind. I use it to describe a civilization-wide exchange of hard work with semi-malleable materials for instant replication, of painstaking craftsmanship for “curation,” of slow growth for connectivity, and of soul for content.
So I’m struck by a new post that resonates so fundamentally with ideas I’ve been exploring for a good 15 years, but also by its source, since for a good 20 years Rushkoff seemed really close to a cheerleader for this brave new digital world. Now he’s saying things like “in our digital media environment it seems as if the synthetic has also been embraced as superior, universal, and infinitely more scalable than the organic. Or at the very least, interchangeable. And this may be a dangerous distinction to miss…that we confuse digital phenomena with real life at our own peril.”
I should add that I speak as a born participant in analog technology, the visual kind. My sister and I were two of the most photographed non-celebrity children of our era since we grew up as test subjects for our manic father’s work producing much of Polaroid’s iconic SX-70 camera. Fresh out of MIT, his first real project for Polaroid was named for a numerical designation it held in an experimental logbook kept by the company’s iconic founder Edwin Land, an early hero of Steve Jobs, in many ways an analog version of the Silicon Valley pioneer. My father saw much of his life through a viewfinder — snapping shot after shot, year after year, as he devised and refined imaging technology to eventually hold more patents than anyone at Polaroid but its founder Land. For each of these, he was paid the nominal fee of $1 and continued to tinker as a wage slave until digital imaging technology nudged Polaroid into Chapter 11 in, fittingly, 2001.
It’s amazing to recall a time when as basic a fact of human existence as instant photos was a breathtaking new invention. And the sheer force of brain-draining interdisciplinary work this required last century — in optics, chemistry, physics, material sciences — is its own forgotten Parthenon. These photos directly captured light-reflecting objects onto film, with varying results but no mediation. In this way, they’re like analog recordings, which directly inscribe sound vibrations onto their medium. Or like radio, which transmit these sound vibrations through airwaves.
All these may look and sound like slowly, clumsily manufactured versions of today’s bright, crisp digital products, but you don’t have to be Neil Young to know they’re not. Digital products are data. Analog products are reality before it becomes data. They’re unable to lie.
Ten years ago, I wrote: “These things clearly don’t translate from one medium to another, and it’s not just a matter of low-sample rates, dubbing, compression, or conversion. The dopamine spike from a Facebook ‘I love you’ flicks at the same synapses but doesn’t really hit them.” Yesterday, Rushkoff wrote: “Digital networks can transmit only data, things that can be reduced to some ones and zeros, even if they are reconstituted as music or graphics on the other side of the transmission. …expecting the transmission to contain the essential, organic quality of looking into a lover’s eyes, holding a child’s hand, or even just sitting silently in the same room as another person, is not just futile but frustrating. Compassion, as well as the way it metabolizes pain, is decidedly analog.”
Today, as I quake in fear of a digital virus my analog immune system can’t handle, I think of something that Roger Ebert wrote, after cancer had robbed him of the ability to speak and he was producing some of the best work of his career on his own proto-substack blog (the closest contemporary analogy of which is Hanif Kureishi’s essential The Kureishi Chronicles). Ebert wrote that in these final years he often felt as if he were in the final scene of Spielberg's (quaintly-titled) AI: Artificial Intelligence. “You know, the scene where the elongated, ethereal robots of the future study the artificial child David. They want to learn all they can from him, because ‘he's the last one who knew humans.’”
Help me out: Am I overdoing this? Do you relate? Should I continue in this vein or stick with the quirky takes on cinema, maladaptive parenting, and the glories of hip-hop’s golden age?
If you’re not a computer, do me a solid and comment. And for real: Happy New Year.
COVID is better than the MATRIX as a movie.