Ken's Blog

In a sense, to be human is to live a virtual life. We are, after all, creatures of language, which means that we think of everything symbolically.

Say the word “elephant”, and people picture an elephant in their heads. As far as we know, we are the only species with this particular superpower.

Now, during this time of pandemic, when things are moving from the physical to the virtual, it may seem as though our world is changing radically.

But maybe this is just one step — albeit a very sad one — in the relentless march of our species to become ever more virtual. I guess we’ll just need to see.

There are certain assumptions we make about continuity: Things will continue the way they have been. The people we know will not surprise us too greatly.

These very challenging times have tested our assumptions about continuity to an extraordinary degree. Our individual lives, and the world itself, are rearranging themselves at a dizzying pace.

Human beings have highly adaptable, but there are limits on how much change we can rapidly absorb and integrate. I wonder whether there will be a breaking point, when everything happening during this crazy year just gets to be too much for everyone.

Or will we adapt? Will continual change and lack of continuity become the new normal? And after we have adapted to that, how much will we ourselves have changed?

I used to think there was such a thing as “mainstream culture”. But the more I observe people, the more I think that is a myth.

As you get to know people, you gradually realize that everybody is engaging in outside culture. People naturally cohere into groups that focus on the rejection of some form or other of mainstream thinking.

People generally don’t think of themselves as being part of an outsider culture. Rather, they think that some aspect of mainstream thinking is fundamentally flawed.

Generally there is some larger issue involved. The issue might be education, or the environment, or religion, or government, or individual rights. There are lots of issues to choose from.

The important thing is that people within any given social group all agree that in at least one particular way, most people in society are crazy. They comfort themselves — and each other — by knowing that at least they’ve got it right.

There is an irony here, and it is this: Being part of one outsider culture or another is the most mainstream thing there is.

I have been watching Itaewon Class on Netflix. I’ve been pretty much glued to the TV, completely rapt and fascinated by every twist and turn of plot and surprising reveal of character.

And I find that I have just one question: Why can’t American drama be as good as Korean drama?

Today I have been keeping track of every moment. Rather than simply letting the events of the day slip by, I have been savoring each moment, like a sip of fine wine.

It is astonishing how rich is a day, when you pay attention to every moment. So many things happen, and each is significant and beautiful in its own way.

But you only know this if you remember to take the time to drink in each of those moments. Today I drank deeply.

I notice that when I am stressed, I start to listening to a song in my head. I do this silently, so nobody knows I am doing it unless they ask.

Usually it is a song from my youth, one I have listened to many time, and know very well. I generally am hearing it the way it was first recorded, with the voice and instrumentation of the original artist.

I wonder whether this is a common thing to do. For me it sure works to help me relax. You might want to try it.

There are many things in the physical world that are not needed in a shared virtual world. Some examples are washing machines, lawn mowers, dishwashers and automobiles.

These are very familiar objects, which we all grew up with, yet they would serve no actual purpose in a socially shared virtual world.

So should we keep them when we are in such worlds?

I find it to be a fascinating question. In a way, it is a question about the nature of fiction itself.

In a movie, we see a character load a dishwasher, and we know it is fake. Yet the presence of the dishwasher, and witnessing the act of loading it, allows us to lose ourselves in the fantasy of the movie’s fictional universe.

I suspect that something similar will happen as VR worlds become mainstream. Physical devices will be reiterated as literary devices.

But what happens when more and more of our daily lives become virtually experiences while being increasingly automated behind the scenes? Will we still hold on to appliances that have become obsolete?

Will a dishwasher eventually become like the quill pen — something quaintly amusing that we love to see in fiction, but that we no longer expect to see in reality?

Much of superhero literature focuses on physical capabilities. Some heroes have superior strength, others can fly, still others can grow, shrink or stretch their body in amazing ways, or turn themselves into fire or water.

But if we are truly going into a world in which social distancing will become the norm, we might see corresponding cultural shifts in literary superpowers. There will be less emphasis on the physical, and more on those superpowers that manifest in the absence of physical presence.

I suspect there will be a greater emphasis on such superpowers as superior intellect, telepathy and pre-cognition. In the absence of physical presence, the potential capabilities of the human brain will become the aspirational focus.

Of course this is only a theory. I can’t tell you for certain whether it will actually happen because I don’t possess the superpower of pre-cognition.

And maybe that’s a good thing.

Every science fiction story posits a particular world. That world has very specific properties, which are often different from the properties of our own world.

There might be aliens, spaceships, time travel, shrink rays. There might be lots of things. But they all need to add up to a single coherent alternate reality.

Some of those scifi realities are grounded in the premise that people will physically gather. Others are not.

I’ve been going through different scifi realities to see which ones anticipated the restrictions of our current pandemic.

Star Trek is clearly inconsistent with social distancing. Even on the Holodeck, people spend a lot of time in close proximity to one another, in a fairly small room with no windows.

But Ready Player One is a reality very consistent with our current one. Nobody ever really needs to be in the same physical room. Your location in the social world is independent of your geographic location. That’s true of Snow Crash as well.

I wonder whether we could rank scifi stories along a COVID continuum. Some would be utterly inconsistent with the reality we now face. Others would seem eerily prescient.

Prescience is good in science fiction. Unfortunately, the reality turns out to be not so fun.

I wonder whether, as this pandemic goes on, masks will become a normal part of social attire. Rather than being seen as a harbinger of something bad, they will just be part of going out of the house.

I can think of a rough analogy with shoes. You can’t really leave your house these days with bare feet. Unlike the old days, you would now encounter sidewalks and paved roads, which are very unfriendly to the human foot.

But we don’t think of shoes as something bad. In fact, we have turned them into objects of fashion and desire. Shoes have been integrated into our social and cultural discourse on many levels.

I wonder whether that will happen with masks.