Place still matters
DECEMBER 10TH, 2016 — POST 333
I spent December 9th over the Pacific Ocean and lost it when I crossed the International Date Line. Despite committing on January 5th of this year to publishing to Medium every day, yesterday I wasn’t able to get a post out. WiFi is shitty at 40,000 feet. After four months in North America — 3 months in New York, 1 month in Vancouver — I’m back in Sydney. In the last week alone, I’ve travelled 20,000 kilometres over the best part of 30 hours. Travel by air is distinctly modern — something I don’t think at the age of 24 I would have been able to do as recently as 50 years ago.
And yet, being 24 in 2016, air travel feels perhaps the most brutal technological miracle I can participate in. Because, as an internet native, I’ve existed for so long on the false assumption that these 20,000 kilometres — and thousands upon thousands more — can be traversed instantly with a keystroke, mouse click, or squeeze of touch-sensitive glass. Building a concept of the 4D Man — that is, the human augmented by current technological interactions — in The Four-Dimensional Human, Laurence Scott writes:
The terrifying thing about the 4D Man is that nothing can restrain his body.
Here Scott is drawing on video-chat apps like Skype and FaceTime, apps that carry spectral chunks of our bodies — more often than not our heads — across any distance in an image on a digital display. These are perhaps the most obvious instances of an “everywhereness” the internet promises its users in every check-in, log-on, and sign-up. This everywhereness is, of course, a lie. You don’t need to spend an hour driving to an airport, 3 hours in various lines of security and passport control, and 22 hours with your knees cut into by the seat in front to realise that. But there’s nothing quite like the experience to illustrate the painful embodiment, the unarguable “hereness”, we’re all subject to. The internet shows the escape route — sometimes literally traced in blue across Google Maps — but does little for those wanting to evacuate.
During the time I spent in Vancouver, I noticed something about my (typically morning) loop around news sites like The Atlantic and The Outline, as well as Product Hunt. In Vancouver, in the same timezone as the U.S. West Coast, doing this loop at 9AM made me feel behind the news coming out of the New York media sites. Conversely, Product Hunt — which when checked early from New York hasn’t yet seen much action for the day — felt as if it was bubbling with the activity of people on the BART in San Francisco, hunting products and commenting during their morning commutes or first hour at their desk. The circadian horizon of Vancouver mapped atop that of the West Coast served only to distance me from the East Coast I had just left. I was doing the same things online and they started to feel radically different.
Growing up online in Sydney, I was long seduced by the promise of everywhereness. Consuming the same news, watching the same shows, being part of the same conversations on the same “places” online as those overseas, I felt it was only my body that lived in the southern hemisphere. I had expressed on numerous occasions since leaving the U.S. after my film festival circuit last year that my “head was still there”, that I couldn’t shake a sense of connection to cities I didn’t live in. Buoyed by the headiness of the cyberspacial fourth dimension, by the “truth” of a technologically shrunk globalised globe, I felt the only passport one needed was an internet connection. Having had my real passport pummelled constantly in the past week, the brick and mortar in which one finds their flesh and blood are far more consequential than the internet would suggest.
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