The Blog

2021-

2021-01-17 a
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT (when the élite lose control)

     He sat up and noticed the death of screens. They died not all at once, the screens, but in droves, like creatures of the warmed oceans, like those hundreds of manatees washing ashore that same day in Boca Grande who, just weeks before, Journeyman had found uncompelling, and deleted from his feed. He'd unfollowed the manatees. No hard feelings.

     Television died first. Television contracted a hemorrhagic ailment, Ebola or some other flesh-melting thing. The channels bled, signals fused, across time as well as virtual space, a live Rod Serling Playhouse 90 broadcast from 1956 sputtering into last agonized life and expiring in the middle of episodes of season two of Big Little Lies. The Vietnam War came back, and Family Ties too. Until these boiled and melted along with the rest.

     The Gmail, the texts and swipes and FaceTimes, the tweets and likes, these suffered colony collapse disorder. Each messenger could no longer chart its route to the hive, or returned only to languish in the hive, there to lose interest in its labors, whether worker or drone. All at once, the email quit producing honey.

     So many other ecologies depended on the pollinations, the goings-between of the now-fatigued drones and workers. Without them, nothing worked. Air-conditioning units stalled, planes fell from the sky. Thew honey of emails and texts had been the glue holding the worls together, it appeared. Now the smart devices all evidenced wasting disease. They had to be put out to a level pasture to let them graze out the last part of their lives. There they crumpled to their knees, starved, incapable of grazing.

     People kept on swiping at the phones and mashing at the keyboards. Some tried giving the voice-activated devices mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Some proposed fixes or work-arounds. Those more mystically minded placed phone or remotes beneath their pillows at night or built shrines in which to to surround their devices with crystals, hoping to spark them from their silence.

from: Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest, 2020, first edition, pp. 14 - 15

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