A Dispatch from the Infected Future§
News from the year 2027
A Dispatch from the Infected Future§
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[[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2560/1*tTKzBo_TsrhTECRI0Hz-Iw.jpeg]]
Header image by Phoebe Edith
In this text, I tried to extrapolate some of the most pessimistic
projections of the COVID-19 pandemic (along with some other trends) by 7
years, and merge it with the familiar style of first-generation cyberpunk
writing.
The countermeasures to infection have been rolled out swiftly & mark a
substantial departure from the recent norm. Just as nomadic precarious
contract work became ubiquitous, weβre seeing exactly that sort of work shut
down as a medical risk.
Because those folks have had their social safety net eroded away, even
right-wing politicians have been forced to adopt policies that have been among
the most far-fetched dreams of radical leftists for decades β basic income,
rent jubilees β just as the popular demand for those policies has reached
near-revolutionary levels. These responses are supposed to be temporary β but
as any engineer or administrator knows, ostensibly-temporary fixes are among
the hardest to discard.
Life will change in other, less easy-to-predict ways.
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[[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*wABhEFXPGjo2XrHI]]
Photo by Amelia
Brown
on Unsplash
It was 3:14 AM and Tim was out of Pocari Sweat.
He had spent the past four hours practicing triceps β the little ones, with
just a hint of shading, and the bigger ones, with big dark deep lines β and
while he had managed to avoid cramping in his drawing hand, that kind of
abnormal exertion is thirsty work. He liked to use not just his wrist, not
just his arm, but even his core muscles when drawing, and when he did speed-
sketching, it became an aerobic affair. Electrolytes are important for health,
and must be replenished: despite all the precautions, people still got the
corona (or something milder). He knew that those bedridden with even milder
diseases sometimes died of dehydration and werenβt discovered until somebody
sent a drone around to find out why they havenβt deposited their past three
monthly UBI checks.
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[[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*5Wnttn_2LG46cAyV.jpeg]]
The fashion industry relies upon laborers working physically close together
β obviously a danger (even to the upper-class managers). As the labor
necessary to mass-produce clothing out of cloth ceases to be logistically
viable, we might see a return of paper
clothing β especially if people
are spending most of their time indoors.
Paper clothing can be produced automatically by machines that arenβt much
different from regular printers, & can be recycled in the home. The same
processes can be used to make masks, although they may not be up to the same
specifications as mass-produced medical masks.
With ingenuity, papercraft clothing and accessories can be made striking or
attractive, although they cannot be made particularly durable.
He moved aside the stack of cardboard violins sitting atop the sartomatβs
touch panel, selected a new mask and jacket (a leopard-print deal in magenta
and lemon, with day-glo whiskers on the mask β custom from a furry artist
friend in Singapore), printed them, and left the house.
In a world where people donβt go outside much, public infrastructure will
need to be low maintenance. Construction work often cannot be done with a
small crew, so it will be done less often. Solar-powered street lights already
exist, but will probably become more common.
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[[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*XAh_9k8B7gjKi1fX]]
Photo by Joe
Ciciarelli
on Unsplash
Although car traffic will become less frequent as people stop commuting to
work, repeated freezing and thawing will still create and widen cracks in
asphalt, eventually breaking it up entirely. Paved streets will become gravel,
as they have in some parts of Cleveland as the result of lack of maintenance.
Lowered emissions from traffic is not enough to keep the world from warming,
& so we should expect the trend of increasingly mild winters to continue. Of
course, lots of people who would normally have cars for commuting purposes
will get rid of them, and these warmer winters will be more comfortable to
walk in.
We should expect telepresence control of cars to take the place of ride
sharing β but probably along the same general business model as Uber and Lyft.
The slightly higher risk from tele-operated vehicles (due to lag & the threat
of actual disconnection) will be compensated for by the substantially lower
traffic, and even without taking that into account, folks will probably
consider it safer than riding in a car with another human being.
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[[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*Ml6_FPboWF3UN8cs]]
Photo by Max
Bender
on Unsplash
The asphalt on the street was already beginning to revert into gravel, and
his steps crunched loudly despite the soft drizzle. The fog made opalescent
halos around the streetlights, except those whose solar panels had become
obscured by birdβs nests or creeping vines. In the distance, coyotes and foxes
howled duets to the autumn moon. He had heard rumors that mountain lions had
been sighted again β mostly by home security cameras, but a few by delivery
drone or telecab. They didnβt know to be afraid of the street lights or the
glowing windows of houses anymore, though he doubted that he would meet any
wildlife in his current neon-alien-predator getup.
He liked nights like this. The two block span from his home to the
convenience store had become the site of a weekly meditation. In the summer
only night-walks were tolerable, but in the winter the nearly constant gentle
rains changed their meaning for him and became an excitingly crisp
counterpoint to the homeyness of the glow from the windows along the street.
He occasionally saw a stranger or two in the distance, and this too became
part of his meditation: featureless silhouettes taking on the feel of
mysterious icons in a dream-cathedral. These nameless figures felt as unreal
to him as the rest of the outside, and sometimes he almost expected them to
teleport, disappear, shapeshift, or take on sudden ominous significance the
way dream-figures often do.
When he was a child he had a recurring dream that his grandmother would
arrive unexpectedly at his door but when she opened her mouth, waves of static
would pour out. In recent years, that dream has transformed: the shadow people
in the distance in the perpetual backlit fog of the dim outside sprout mouths
like shimmering Os of television static, widening to consume their whole head,
letting out smoke that chases him.
None of the silhouettes have ever done this in reality β as far as he can
tell β but Tim cannot reliably distinguish the dream-street from the real
street, or the dream-fog from the real fog, especially when his sleep has gone
accidentally polyphasic again, so he remains vigilant. This, too, is part of
his meditation.
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[[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*mPEZsoepalvEaL2s.jpg]]
[Image from National
Geographic](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2018/february/japan-
hikikomori-isolation-society/)
We can learn a lot about how people would act in a world where going out is
discouraged by looking at the behaviors of hikkikomori and the technologies
that enable them. Vending machines and 24-hour convenience stores are a
godsend for the pathologically socially anxious, and a lifesaver in a
prolonged pandemic.
Contact with human clerks can be avoided altogether using automation, but
many of the tasks that must be performed by convenience store clerks, while
they can be performed by robotic arms paired with a skilled operator, cannot
be performed by current AI today. We should expect telepresence to bridge this
gap, with clerks working from home along the call-center model.
Since a prolonged pandemic gets rid of whole classes of service jobs
(waitstaff, much of restaurant kitchen staff, taxi and rideshare drivers), we
should expect UBI or something similar to be instated. This will probably
lower the number of people willing to work as clerks in convenience stores.
However, since those stores will get less frequent traffic, telepresence
multiplexing makes sense: have one person administer many stores.
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[[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*O1SImkwDcF8foury]]
Photo by Glenn Carstens-
Peters
on Unsplash
On the other hand, we should expect performance-oriented jobs like video
game streaming, vlogging, and streaming-video sex work to become much more
common, as the difference between doing it as a hobby & doing it as a real job
blurs.
Some previously-unnecessary tasks can also be fully automated. For instance,
if the portion of the store that customers have access to is kept separate
from the portion of the store where stock is kept & food prepared, that
section can be automatically sanitized, so long as there are no customers in
the store.
The conbini was on the street corner, surrounded by floodlights. Its small
parking lot β enough for two or three cars β felt vast in its emptiness. A
small unit on the roof projected an advertisement for imported daifuku on the
underside of the clouds.
The vending machines were out of toilet paper, so he went inside.
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[[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*53oBKpy2ocXn0qpf.jpg]]
The yawning girl on the monitor was sitting on a toilet, a framed print of
Magritteβs The Large Family behind her head, idly manipulating a controller;
since none of the waldos in this store were moving, it must be in one of the
others. The monitor emitted a beep β end of shift β and the girl was replaced
with a teenage boy, engrossed in a physics textbook. Tim couldnβt understand
why somebody would choose to have a job. Perhaps the boy was being encouraged
by his parents.
With the eraser side of his stylus, Tim pressed the button marked βtoilet
paperβ in curling label-maker tape, then the one with a faded ink-jet-printed
Pocari logo wedged under the plastic. Then, in a spurt of whimsy, the one with
the masking tape sharpie-scrawled βegg salad sandwichβ in shaky block
letters.
_The arms behind the perspex in the sealed half of the store that delivered
the pocari and TP moved quickly, with a feline grace β clearly automatic. He
watched the boy look up from his textbook & hunt for his controller. _Work
for your neetbux, counter-revolutionary pig-dog .
He was a little disappointed to see that the kid made his sandwich quickly
and efficiently β cracking and removing the shell of the egg with a practiced
swirl of two pairs of gripper claws, cross-chopping with another arm whose
attachment was a grid of gleaming knives as a fourth arm dumped the egg into
the mixing bowl. By the time the blender had squirted its clotted stream of
mayonnaise, the boy was already back at his book. The automatic spreading
system squished the bread on one side as it tried to flatten the filling with
its broad steel spatula.
The deformed sandwich, freshly cellophaned, dropped into the bin with the
pocari and the TP, and then all three were cellophaned again before the
airlock switched modes and the whole package was dumped out onto the floor. He
picked it up and hurried out, hearing the hiss of disinfectant spray and the
hum of UV behind him as the door closed, the puddles reflecting the glow
through the crooked gaps in the storeβs automatic security slats.
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[[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*acFbwVm5hZf2opw_]]
Photo by Andrik
Langfield
on Unsplash
The popular (though controversial) article [Flattening the Curve is a Deadly
Delusion](https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-deadly-
delusion-eea324fe9727) suggests that the social isolation policies necessary
to produce an eventual 70% infection rate without overwhelming hospitals would
need to extend out for ten years. This would mean there would be teenagers who
were too young to remember the concept of a sit-down restaurant, a school, a
concert, or a movie theatre.
Smart phones have only existed for 15 years, and most of us have a hard time
imagining life without them. After a decade of self-isolation, how many of us
would find going out to eat equally unimaginable?
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[[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*WtDniDS3euChTvVg]]
Photo by Lianhao
Qu on
Unsplash
While he was in the store the rain clouds had gotten their second wind, and
he felt the gazes of the outdoor cameras as he squelched home past the cozy
nests of all the good, self-isolating people of the city. In another three
years, when the meeting ban was lifted, would they leave? How many of them
would remember things like movie theaters and restaurants (other than from old
movies)?
Meeting with another person had for so long felt gauche β only the
rebellious youth did it now, meeting in twos and threes in secret in old
underpasses where cameras were never repaired. Anyhow, polyamory is so much
easier when you can ghost your way out of problems, and Tim owed his current
romantic success largely, he thought, to the fact that none of his partners
ever had to be in the same room as him. Once, he went to concerts, danced in
mosh pits. He used to spit on the street sometimes, just to punctuate a point.
He couldnβt imagine himself doing those things. He couldnβt put himself in the
shoes of his younger self. The plague years had changed him in ways that his
imagination could not make up for.
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[[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*CMuNHWHIuowXIUx4]]
Photo by Tirza van
Dijk
on Unsplash
A society of people living indoors and communicating over video chat will
probably take full advantage of the creative possibilities of custom clothing.
To the extent that most people perform labor, they will probably do so by
performing for each other in exchange for tips, and just as youtubers have
embraced elaborate sartorial statements, we should expect the larger amateur
entertainment industry produced by lower barriers to entry and lower barriers
to profitability to engage in an arms race of creative fashion.
When he got home, he threw his mask and jacket in the pulper, printed a new,
daring outfit β one with a lime green tie-dye cape (perhaps it would get him
some patrons?) to match his Caligari cardboard guitar and a lemon-yellow
fascinator to match the papier-mache wings and sculpted codpiece (a tryptich
of lions and sword-wielding cherubs in relief) β and swiped away spam from
three cam-enby sites. He stuffed the disappointing sandwich in his mouth and
started his livestream.
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By John Ohno on March 20,
2020.
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Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.
