Bit Rot

by Douglas Coupland

  The whistling stopped as the orderly loomed in the doorway. Sandra said, “Know what? I leave this planet on my own terms, you freak.” She was dead before the buckshot pounded her chest.

  Nine Readers

  Last summer in Reykjavik, I learned that one in ten Icelanders will write a novel in their lifetime. This is impressive, but the downside of this is that each novel gets only nine readers. In a weird way, our world is turning into a world of Icelandic novelists, except substitute blog, vlog or website for novel—and there we are: in Reykjavik.

  A defining sentiment of our new era is that never before has being an individual been so easily broadcast, yet never before has individuality felt so ever-increasingly far away. Before the twenty-first century, we lived with the notion of oneself as a noble citizen of the world, a lone soul whose life was a story written across a span of seven decades or so. We now live instead with the ever-gnawing sensation that one’s self is really just one more meat unit among seven billion other meat units.

  This twenty-first century crisis of individuality expresses itself in many ways. In Japan there is the phenomenon of the hikikomori. Your child grows up, leaves home and then, after a few years, returns home and never leaves his or her bedroom again. Ever. The rare hikikomori will venture out in the middle of the night to visit a local mini-mart, but that’s it. In 2010 the Japanese government estimated there were 700,000 hikikomori in Japan, with the average age being thirty-one. Yes, you read that correctly: almost three-quarters of a million modern-day elective hermits back with Mom and Dad, and they are psychologically incapable of ever leaving.

  Ever.

  I suspect these young people are experiencing “atomophobia”: the fear of feeling like an individual. After the late-1980s bubble burst, Japan went from being a monolithically homogenized culture, with guaranteed lifetime employment, to its exact opposite: a land of hyper-individuality trapped inside a consumer hyperspace that guarantees nothing, let alone employment. The crazy costumes once worn only on Sundays in Harajuku are now regular, uncommented upon Japanese daywear. One might think that a culture in which its everyday citizens dress in borderline Halloween costumes is a culture of fierce individuality; instead it is a society deeply conflicted about the dark side of enforced uniqueness. “The more like ourselves we become, the odder we become,” wrote Australian critic Louise Adler. “This is most obvious in people whom society no longer keeps in line; the eccentricity of the very rich or of castaways.”

  In North America and England we have the trend of normcore (the normal version of hardcore)—a trend so stupid that it’s more famous for being a stupid trend than it is for being a trend itself. But normcore actually is something real, a unisex trend that very much exists. England’s Heat magazine tells us, “Normcore celebrates the ordinary with its reliance on brazenly bland staples such as stonewashed denim, label-less shirts, and pool sandals that bear a distressing resemblance to Crocs. It’s the ultimate knee-jerk reaction to not only the meticulously dour Hipster look, but the demands of fashion in general.”* Normcore is about dressing to be invisible, the fashion equivalent of renting a mid-size American-made sedan in a large American city: total anonymity that offers abdication from the responsibility of having to be an individual living in real time in the real world. Normcore says, “Screw it. Go ahead: monitor me on CCTVs. Scan the Internet with facial recognition algorithms. Have the NSA read my emails like tea leaves. I’m going to be deliberately un-unique. I am going to punish the world with my blandness, and if you scan my metadata, you’ll fall asleep before you find anything good.”

  In the fall of 2014, driving in a taxi on Clerkenwell Road in London, I saw a huge Gap billboard that read: “BE NORMAL.”

  Huh?

  I wonder if the need for individualism may, in fact, be a form of brain mutation spread lightly throughout a population. I wonder if most human beings are cut out to cope with the psychic vacuum freedom can create. I get the impression from the daily news that there are a lot of people out there, possibly a majority, who don’t actually want progress—or the freedom progress brings. Most people seem happy to belong to a group—any kind of group—and they mistrust someone who doesn’t feel similarly. And I also get the impression there are a lot of people out there who perceive freedom as an invitation to chaos—which is somehow embarrassing. And I sometimes wonder if feeling unique is an indication of actually being unique—even though it is the feeling of uniqueness that convinces us we have souls and are individuals.

  You have a blog. She posts on Facebook three times a day. They have a website. Sigrid wrote a saga.

  The novel made us individuals. The Internet makes us units. Write as fast as you can. Blog like crazy. Vlog your brains out. Be unique. Be the best you you can be. One thousand years ago, you assumed that your grandchildren’s life would be identical to your own. In 2016 we know that 2020, not even a decade from now, is going to be very different and possibly quite scary compared to what we have now. How shall we dress for the occasion?

  * * *

  * Heatworld, “WTF Is Normcore and Which Celebs Are Keeping up with It?” Heat (September 18, 2014). http://www.​heatworld.​com/​Star-Style/​2014/​07/​WTF-is-Normcore​-and-which​-celebs-are​-keeping-up​-with-​it/

  Nine Point Zero

  The king was up in his hot-air balloon, looking down over his mighty kingdom, proud that he had been born to rule over it and silently happy with his lot in life. It was the middle of a sunny weekday and life in the kingdom was happening as usual: the roads were full, the children were at school, and the last of the lunchtime diners were heading back to their workplaces. That was when the earthquake struck.

  It was a nine point zero; within fifteen seconds it had demolished the older, less seismically prepared buildings in the land. After that, the newer buildings began to drop. Throughout the kingdom, survivors did a clumsy dance out onto the wobbling streets to avoid falling debris—shards of glass and masonry.

  The noise of the quake was deafening. Such a roar! It was the planet itself shifting and readjusting. The people on the street couldn’t even hear each other yell.

  The king, up in his hot-air balloon, was the only person who experienced none of the quake’s violence, which continued to roar and roar and destroy—a quake that wouldn’t stop. By the quake’s fifth minute, most of his kingdom’s houses were gone and all the dams had broken. Reservoirs had drowned whole suburbs. Office towers had fallen on their sides, and the quake’s continuing lunging motions shook them until only twisted steel beams remained.

  The king’s heart was broken and still the quake continued! Survivors were becoming seasick from the ground’s lurching—they lay vomiting on the crumbling parking lots and sidewalks. Trees fell. Birds were unable to land on the moving surfaces and were relieved to sit on the rim of the king’s hot-air balloon basket.

  Fires broke out and the rubble burned. The king watched, helpless to stop it, tears in his eyes, flocks of confused birds circling his basket.

  After ten minutes, survivors truly wondered if they were lost inside a dream; the pounding earth was almost boring, like a carnival ride that had gone on far too long.

  After fifteen minutes, there was nothing left to destroy. All the buildings were gone. All statues, all communication towers, all laboratories, all movie theatres, all gyms, all gone.

  And then the earthquake stopped.

  The king, his nerves in ribbons, sobbed as he landed his balloon atop what was once a mighty supermarket. The quake had shaken it so badly that the remains had settled into a grey powder, beneath which the larger chunks slept, neatly graded by size. As he stepped out onto the dust, he remembered a photo he’d seen of the first footstep on the moon.

  The roads and parking lots had cracked open and the pavement fragments above had broken like soda crackers, then shattered, then turned to dust. Front yards had liquefied, swallowing whole houses and trees, which now lay deep within the planet.

  The king tried to
find survivors, and soon he did: stragglers, caked in dirt and vomit, still seasick and crazed by the fifteen-minute quake, feeling they were hallucinating upon seeing their perfectly intact, well-groomed king.

  They began searching for food and water and medicine and liquor, but little could be found in the rubble and dust.

  The king helped a middle-aged woman who was picking away at the spot where there had once been a convenience store. She held up a clear bottle of liquid and asked the king what it contained.

  “Fruit Solutions with Omega-3…but why are you asking me that? It says so right on the label,” he replied.

  The woman ripped off the cap and poured half the bottle’s contents onto her face to rinse out her eyes; she then drank the remaining liquid and groped through the dust for bottles that were identical.

  A former four-lane commercial strip was so destroyed it couldn’t even be called a path. There the king found a couple of hipsters in cargo pants and vintage early-1990s Soundgarden T-shirts. They held up some cans and asked the king what was in them. “Who’s Your Daddy Energy Drink with Caffeine, Taurine and B Vitamins…but why are you asking me that? It says so right on the label.” They quickly opened the cans and guzzled the contents, ignoring the king.

  The king walked farther and met his old high school teacher, who was alive only because he’d called in sick that day and had been stuck in traffic while taking his Jack Russell terrier to the vet when the quake struck, riding out the fifteen minutes in the padded comfort of his 2010 Nissan Sentra. The teacher said, “Oh, King, hello. Such good luck to find you. Please, please tell me, what does this bottle contain?”

  The king looked at it. “Bleach. But why are you asking me that? It says so right on the label.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” the teacher said, “but I can no longer read.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said—I look at the shapes on this label and they look like upside-down Hebrew mixed with right-side-up Korean. No idea at all what any of it says. By the way, I see a tsunami coming. Let’s hope we’re far enough away from the coast here.”

  The king had little time to reflect on the fact that the quake had stripped its survivors of the ability to read. A massive tsunami sloshed inward from the coast, turning the recently powdered city into a rich dark brown cake batter that stopped just inches away from the king’s royal shoes. A small aftershock jiggled air bubbles from the batter. His world fell silent.

  Behind him, a chimney collapsed, the last remaining vertical line to be seen for miles around. The hipsters and the middle-aged lady and the old high school teacher stood beside the king. The woman said, “I’m glad at least one person is still able to read. Otherwise we’d never be able to rebuild from scratch everything that we had before, back to shiny and brand new, as if none of this had ever happened!”

  Another tsunami washed in atop the first one, bright red for some reason. Industrial colouring agents? A trainload of cough syrup? Did it matter? The king stumbled over to the teacher’s destroyed Sentra, half buried with the remains of the road; he leaned against it and retched. With his index finger, he wrote the words “THE KING IS DEAD” on its dusty window, and when he was asked what he’d just written, he told his subjects, “A map.”

  Smells

  At my gym there’s a sign saying, “This is a fragrance-free zone.” I thought about it and, yes, perfume in a gym might be kind of weird, like smelling cooking bacon when trying to fall asleep at night. And then last week a younger male gym-goer showed up and as he walked across the floor, everyone’s eyes started burning and their nostrils flared. This wasn’t because he was, in some way, hot. It was because he was wearing a male body spray. The odour was half industrial, half ultra-cheap soap, and had he been wearing any more, he would have resembled Pigpen from Charlie Brown, going through life with his own visible weather system. Fortunately, the staff at my gym are fearless and they landed on this guy like hawks. He won’t be wearing Satan’s Tears there again anytime soon.

  The incident reminded me of something a teacher friend told me, that the single worst thing to happen to education since the 1960s has been the introduction and wide adoption of body sprays among male teens. “They think it makes them God’s gift to women and they have no idea how bad it is. They don’t shower after gym anymore—fear of pervs—so they arrive in the classroom and it’s like pepper spray in your face. On top of everything, it’s highly flammable and you can turn the cans into blowtorches with a Bic lighter. It’s a marketing perfect storm.”

  One August somewhere in the late 1980s, I returned to my apartment building after two weeks away, and the lobby’s smell was unlike anything I’d experienced. The closest approximation was the time a rat got stuck and died in a roach motel in my bathroom in Honolulu. Mix vomit and shit together and…ugh, it was staggering. Of course, you’ve probably already figured out what it was: a tenant died on August 1 after paying the rent. I returned on August 27. My apartment was in a different wing, so I didn’t have the smell around me full blast, but I could hear the contractors cutting and crow-barring away every single surface in the offending apartment (and the apartment below it—leakage) to take it all away to be burned. The smell even got into the Formica countertops. And then, the next morning, the building’s lobby smelled like…cinnamon candy? Huh? Yes, cinnamon candy. It turns out that smell is a vector, and for every smell there exists an anti-smell, and the anti-smell of human death is artificial cinnamon. You learn something new every day, and this is what you learned today.

  I was in California years ago when they were aerially spraying malathion to stop the spread of pests called Mediterranean fruit flies, or the medfly. From the political noise surrounding the event, you’d have thought they were dropping plutonium on the city, but the spraying went ahead regardless. One afternoon I was almost directly below a spray in progress, and I thought to myself, Well this is interesting—today I get to learn what malathion smells like. And I did. It smells identical to the playground I spent eight years in, from kindergarten to the seventh grade.

  I think everyone has a few unusual smells that bring back happy times and places. On my first trip to Japan, my hotel used an industrial cleaning agent that smelled like artificial peaches. About once a year I’ll smell it in an unlikely place, like a European airport or a mall in the United States, and I’m right back in pre-bubble-collapse Tokyo. I wish they made a cologne that smelled like it. I’d wear it every day. I try to wear Eau Sauvage, but it keeps getting confiscated by airport security screeners because I always forget to not put it in my carry-on.

  There are more odours I wish I could bottle: freshly sharpened pencils; a bag of Halloween candy; car exhaust in the 1960s, back when they put lead in it; a freshly peeled tangerine. A smell I don’t miss? High-end magazines from the 1990s that were laced with scratch-and-sniff perfume cards. Gag.

  A friend of mine worked as a consultant for American Flavors and Fragrances, and he told me that the reason supermarkets have in-store bakeries is because the smell of bread is the one smell, more than any other, that makes people buy more food than they set out to buy. The bakeries themselves lose money. In a similar way, someone told me that the only reason couture designers do couture is to keep the brand healthy in order to sell its fragrance, which is the financial bedrock of most fashion houses.

  It’s actually pretty rare to find people who wear a lot of perfume or cologne these days. I guess it’s like smoking: it’s on the way out, no matter how you look at it. But I think it’s actually kind of gutsy to wear too much scent: Hi, I’m going to colonize the space around me with my Jean Patou/Halston/whatever, and if you object, it means you’re merely trying to recolonize the space I’ve just colonized from you—which is pretty much the formula for war. Bring it on.

  And what is the best smell of all? According to surveys, it’s the vanilla-y, plasticky smell of Play-Doh, a smell for which most people have potent, 100 percent happy memories. Wouldn’t it be nice
if you found a Play-Doh scratch-and-sniff in this book right here?

  Coffee & Cigarettes

  I don’t remember how I started drinking coffee. Yes, I do. I worked at a Chevron gas station in high school, and in the back area, we had this hideous powdered coffee called High Point, which I’d never seen before except in a few TV commercials in which Lauren Bacall (who surely must have been cash starved) was its spokesperson. It burnt out my coffee taste buds forever and desensitized me to all coffee nuances for the rest of my life.

  I started smoking around the same time—peer pressure. But don’t get me wrong, I loved it. I may have stopped smoking on Halloween 1988, but I still consider myself a smoker and sometimes—for some reason, cold, clear, non-windy days are best—I’ll be out of doors and inside someone’s second-hand-smoke slipstream and I fully experience all those same happy chemicals from age seventeen all over again.

  I miss smoking while driving. I miss smoking and talking on the phone, but then I don’t talk on the phone anymore—nobody does—so it’s kind of moot. I wonder what it must be like smoking while using the Internet. It must feel holy.

  The slowness and cluelessness of some Starbucks staff drive me insane. I want a brewed coffee, here’s two dollars, so come on, just pour the damn thing. Starbucks needs an express lane. Do they ever count how many customers leave because they don’t want to wait for ten minutes behind useless people ordering complicated, useless beverages? I think they must have monetized some sort of algorithm that equates useless, complicated beverages and their ridiculous preparation times versus people who just want coffee. And I know which side wins.