Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland

Author:Douglas Coupland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2016-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

Church bells were the Internet of the 1500s, but churches didn’t play them twenty-four hours a day. Back then they knew that as a species we’re not cut out for endless noise from endless sources, yet in the past century I think we’ve maybe tricked ourselves into thinking we are. There’s a message from those bells or, rather, the absence of a message.

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Last month I stayed in two über-trendy hotels, one in Berlin, one in London. What sticks out in my mind about both hotels is their lobbies, restaurants and coffee areas: every single chair, every ledge, every flat surface had been colonized by well-nourished-looking twenty-eight-and-a-half-year-olds gazing into open laptops, buds in their ears, and a phone or tablet to the side. The only exceptions were obviously agitated twenty-eight-and-a-half-year-old men and women standing in the lobby, obviously awaiting a (cough, cough) Tinder or Grindr hookup.

And nobody was talking to anyone.

The only sound was the tippy-tap of MacBook Pro keys editing a sound file or sorting out photo files. Was this kind of creepy? Yes. Yes, it was. Spooky too. And then I got over the spookiness and began to see the room before me as a gentleman’s club in 1900, with everyone reading newspapers in total silence—this is just the twenty-first-century version, except this one contains women and some sense of limitlessness. And then I got to thinking that these twenty-eight-year-olds could have been upstairs in their rooms with their laptops, doing what they were doing, except they chose to be downstairs among their own kind, finding warmth in numbers. It made me feel good about people wanting to be with people, albeit dressed up slightly on the hot side…But then, one never knows when Tinder or Grindr might buzz.

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