What would it be like to spend my days with my head up, immersed in reality?
That question is what prompted me to buy the Freewrite, a nouveau word processor dismissed by some as hipster nonsense, and others as a boon to their daily word count.
It was this review that convinced me: “While it takes a bit of getting used to, the touch-typist eventually stops looking at the screen entirely, and begins instead to look around the environment. I can’t overstate how liberating this feels. For so long knowledge workers of all stripes have been stuck behind screens or in front of displays, their glass-and-aluminum surfaces shielding them from the world, and it from them. …The Freewrite removes that shroud.”
The Freewrite wasn’t my first pandemic impulse purchase. That honor goes to $300 worth of books from Powell’s when I saw that the venerable Portland bookstore was in danger of closing. But it was certainly the largest, spurred by the desperate notion that my life was becoming just one long Zoom call.
The prevalence of these calls is perhaps the most remarked-on shift in the ways that Covid-19 is changing our digital habits. But there are many others: The hesitance we now feel when reaching for the keypad at the grocery store. The sense of revulsion at the thought of sharing a VR headset at a festival. The way you might recoil when I now say that smell is the next frontier in immersive experiences.
These and many other interfaces, both everyday and promising, will recede, at least for awhile, while others that promote social distance will surge.
As marketing expert Martin Lindstrom suggests in a March article for WWD, the fear instilled by the rapid escalation of this pandemic will create a “somatic marker” in our collective psyche that will influence our habits for years to come.
“A Somatic Marker is a psychological process that controls your decision-making, an emotional bookmark so powerful that you’ll never forget it,” he writes. “Just like 9/11, coronavirus is causing a major behavioral change in our society. …We’re likely to shop differently, touch the shopping cart differently, visit fitting rooms differently, touch elevator buttons differently. And those are relatively trivial changes. Consider train stations, airports, political rallies, and demonstrations. We might call it a paradigm shift. In many cases, it will weaken and even replace entire industries and institutions.”
As a result, even the most benign and familiar ways of connecting with the digital will take on new forms of repulsion. Your phone: a surveillance device that might force you into isolation, a germ vector that needs to be sanitized like an open wound. An ATM—that mystical link between you and your money—now a taboo surface spewing bills that too might be tainted.
So what will soar? The touchless toilet. Contactless credit cards. Animal Crossing. Oddly, for a moment before the strictures rained down, the drive-in movie theater. That and the things that are yours and only yours — public VR exhibitions may be out, but the sales of consumer headsets have spiked.
There is no shortage of predictions, even as people are dying, even as unemployment rates suddenly hit unimaginable numbers, about how new markets will be spawned.
What we can’t know, rarely predict, though, is the backlash. Hence me sitting here tapping away on a keyboard that feels like an ’80s office workhorse, on a screen reminiscent of an early flip phone — driven by a need for lack of input. A need to be immersed in the world and my body instead of pixels and pretendscapes.
We find ourselves newly submerged in our own houses and lives — and those of others, as children and dogs wander into the frame. We squint to read the titles of the books in the background as we catch a glimpse of the homes of newscasters, celebrities, comedy hosts. We are also freshly exposed to raw grief in social media, to an unfathomable cascade of stories about death and bravery even as much around us stays the same. Like a global game of musical chairs: the music suddenly stopped, and we scrambled to take the closest seat. Some of us are safe. Some of us are out.
On the one hand, this is the moment many of us have been waiting for, perversely. The thing we’ve been predicting for years: the movement of life, work, play, school onto the internet. We saw it coming, but not like this, not all at once. This is not the apocalypse we were looking for.
For those of us lucky enough to work from home, it is instead a strange pajama catastrophe. All of our faculties and functions are intact, our systems still mostly standing even as individuals and families experience their own irreparable losses.
What will this mean for our connections to technology? The pandemic has accelerated the timeline on robots taking our jobs, on mediated holidays and funerals. It has put a spotlight, too, on the limitations of our scientific and medical knowledge. We are not gods, bending genes to our will, conquering death. We are fragile, permeable beings caught in dubious societies not optimized for our wellbeing.
Usually a column like this wraps up in a neat bow–taking the reader back to the beginning, or positing a conclusion. But here in this moment of uncertainty I don’t have a ribbon to tie it together. Instead, I have many loose ends, new questions. What I do know is that we’ll keep trying to answer them. Hopefully, we will be around to find out what the new reality will bring.
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