Make Shift

by Gideon Lichfield

  For example, Unicorn Travel, one of the largest cruise lines, ran a program that gave customers the chance to climb the Great Pyramid of Giza when embodied in a telepresence robot, an act that was (and still is) illegal to perform in person. Supposedly, the telepresence robots, being light, electric, and well-padded, posed little risk of damaging the pyramid (and could be programmed to prevent the operator from carving graffiti into the limestone). Similar programs allowed teletourists to stroll through the Taj Mahal at night, to “climb” glaciers in Alaska, to watch tortoises in the Galápagos Islands, to scramble over the ruins of Tulum and Chichen Itza, and numerous similar feats.

  But these packages were aimed at the luxury-travel market. They didn’t help the rest of us: the independent tour providers, the cultural experience curators, the local guides who relied on one-on-one tips.

  The game changer was the Nene Be, an open-source specification for a small telepresence robotic platform built around single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi. The Nene Be (and its successors) relied on cheap cameras, cheap screens, cheap processors, cheap manipulators and batteries, cheap (but fast) wireless networking, and open-source software. They were easy to make and even easier to operate. They gave the teleoperator the ability to talk to people on the other end, to control their view, and to move around and manipulate objects (with severe limits). They didn’t give one VR-like immersion, but they were just good enough to make you feel like you were doing more than chatting through a webcam. You were there.

  The Xhong, like people dependent on the tourism economy around the world, soon built new business models based on the Nene Be. Instead of serving xoi ngai ngai noodles to tourists in person, the stall owners now gave cooking tutorials to paying students from around the world, hosted competitions among teleoperators to see who made the best noodles, and partnered with Southeast Asian grocery stores in the home cities of the teletourists to sell them the ingredients needed to create the dishes at home. Instead of catering to the needs of a tourist family who wanted to pretend to be rice farmers for a week, now Xhong families could simply set up a few Nene Bes near the paddy (fenced in so they didn’t accidentally fall into the water—though telepresent “paddy races” were also a thing for some) and charge people who wanted to drop in from time to time to do some telepresent farming or help chase off vermin as a way to unwind. Instead of selling tourist-pleasing wax-dyed prints, Xhong artisans now could teach workshops, take on teletourist apprentices, or license their unique designs for 3D printing or one-off dyeing in the tourists’ own countries. The possibilities were endless.

  Involving no jets traversing oceans, no SUVs bouncing over winding mountain roads, no giant staff to tend to the passengers’ every whim, even accounting for the investment in network infrastructure, a visit through a Nene Be requires less energy than it takes to keep the lights on in an average American house for an hour. Because a teletour can be booked with so little friction, the average visit lasts only twenty-eight minutes. In the trade, we call them “telejaunts” or just “jaunts.”

  Critics initially feared that jaunts would cheapen the experience of travel and, by being too easy to fit into our increasingly attention-starved modernity, remove leisure travel as one of the only ways left for us to depart from the everyday and reflect on our inner lives. But experience has proven these fears unfounded. Travelers take jaunts far more frequently than physical trips, often returning to the same place multiple times over a period of weeks or months (we all probably know of a friend who goes to the same noodle stall in Taipei every day for ten minutes just to watch the owner pull the noodles by hand). They form deep, sustained connections with a place and the individuals in that place, gaining insights into the human condition deeper and more authentic than could ever be obtained during a week-long physical vacation in a tourist trap overrun with crowds.

  Jaunts have completely transformed the landscape of global tourism. Gone are the days when global tours were both too expensive to be truly accessible to the less-than-affluent and too cheap to prevent ecological disaster and cultural commodification. Nowadays, more people are touring distant places than at any point in history, but their impact on the environment, both physical and cultural, is also much lighter and less destructive. Instead of flocking to the same places that everyone else does, tourists can go to places far off the beaten path—the Nene Be has essentially opened up the tourist economy to entrepreneurial residents and communities in remote hamlets and rural sanctuaries without the requirement for costly infrastructure or putting their fragile way of life at risk. By transporting presences instead of atoms, teletourism is a magical spell that has given us the best of all outcomes.

  To be sure, not everyone is convinced of the benefits of jaunts. So-called populist political parties in the West as well as repressive regimes elsewhere have taken advantage of the rise of teletourism to further restrict the movements of refugees, journalists, and migrants seeking a better life elsewhere. We must remain ever vigilant against the virulent possibilities when good ideas are twisted to serve dark purposes.

  To that end, I also believe that jaunts offer the potential to subvert the traditional power imbalances between outbound tourist source regions—which tend to be more economically developed and Western—and inbound tourist destination regions—many of which are less developed and suffer from a legacy of colonial oppression. While many tourists from Boston, for example, visit Xhong villages in Vietnam and Laos, very few Xhong tourists can afford to visit this city. This is why my company has formed a partnership with anti-colonialist and anti-racist activists to develop programs to help more teletourists from the Xhong and other indigenous peoples to come visit places like Boston. As the United States has grown ever more hostile to immigration and voices from around the world, teletour jaunts, which require no visas and no border searches, may be the best way to challenge this trend.

  Joanna Tung is the founder of Teletourists Without Borders, a nonprofit dedicated to developing sustainable models of cultural exchange that reverse the legacy of colonial exploitation. She also hosts jaunts to her office in Vietnam on JauntsNow at the following BnB code: DXHHWU-TCU.

  Excerpt from Be My Guest, a documentary series focusing on the lives of JauntsNow hosts and guests, first shown May 203X

  [THE CAMERA IS ON AL BURTON, SEVENTIES, STROLLING THROUGH BOSTON COMMON. From time to time, he stops to examine a flowerbed or a birdfeeder by the side of the path.]

  I never traveled much back then. In twenty years my wife and I took the kids on two trips, one to Thailand, another to Mexico. After she died, I didn’t go anywhere at all except to fish on the Cape once a year. Running a dry cleaning shop is a lot of work. Too much.

  But I had no work for those months during the pandemic. Even after the lockdown ended, business was terrible. The virus moved in and made itself comfortable. People didn’t go to the office; they didn’t get dressed up; they didn’t need to have their clothes dry-cleaned. I had no choice but to shut it down. My life’s work. Gone.

  [Ken Burns-style panning over photos Burton took of his shop before he shuttered it. The place had been meticulously and lovingly cleaned.]

  I was sitting at home when I got this coupon by email, telling me that I could go on trips to China, Vietnam, Mexico, Costa Rica . . . wherever I wanted for just fifteen bucks. I thought it was a scam—or maybe the airlines were so desperate to get people to fly again that they were willing to sell tickets at a loss. I knew they were having trouble with the protesters at the airports and the cruise ship docks.

  So I took them up on the offer. Put in my credit card info to lock up a spot.

  And only then did I find out that they weren’t talking about real trips, but trips where they put you in control of a robot already there.

  [Shots of surviving specimens of the first generation of crude Nene Be teletour robots, most of them about the size of a domestic cat. Even controlling them can be a chore. We see Al miming his clumsy attempts to use a phone as a p
hysical gesture control device for the faraway robot, tapping the screen to make the robot move and shifting the phone itself about like a tiny portal to get a look at his remote surroundings.]

  At first I thought about backing out and asking for my money back. I didn’t even like the idea of chatting on a webcam with the kids, much less with strangers. It felt like something for young people, not me. But then I thought: why not? If I really hated it I could just hit the “disconnect” button. Not like I would be stuck overseas, right?

  Because I paid so little for my ticket, they couldn’t get me into Tokyo or Bangkok or Dubai; instead, I ended up in northern Japan, a tiny town called Bifuka, in Hokkaido. The robot was located at the rail station, which hardly got any passengers, a handful every week, maybe. When I arrived, it was deserted. But I liked how clean and neat it was. Made me feel at ease right away. I could tell it was a place that people loved.

  [The camera shows the lone, single-room station next to the train track. The deep blue sky is dotted with sheep-like clouds. Inside, we see a table, a few stools, posters, maps, the floor swept free of all dust, a tiny skittering robot, its single-board computer guts exposed, roaming about.]

  I learned to move myself about with my phone until I could climb the wall like a spider and read the Japanese posters with machine translation overlays. I bumbled my way out of the door and rolled along next to the tracks until I reached the limit of the wireless signal at the station. The view went on and on all the way to the horizon, a vastness that soothed my heart. I couldn’t believe how fun it was. I giggled like a kid. I never even thought about going to Japan, and here I was.

  I don’t know how to explain it. After months and months of being locked up inside my house, seeing my business crumble, not being able to go anywhere, worrying about friends and neighbors dying—being there, under the sky in Japan, looking at Japanese mountains and grass and trains, that gave me hope. That did.

  On the way rolling back to the station, I met a man who was about my age, just out walking. I was never the type to talk with strangers, but it felt odd to say nothing when we were the only two humans—well, human and human-in-a-bot—for miles. I didn’t want to use the machine translation—didn’t trust it. So I just waved an arm and said “Hello” in English. He understood that, at least, and nodded at me through the camera, saying a greeting in Japanese. We stood in the road like that, me looking up at him, him looking down at me in the screen on the robot, not knowing what else to do except smiling and waving. But it didn’t feel awkward, you know? After maybe twenty seconds, he nodded and I nodded, and we parted ways.

  After that, I took many jaunts, practically one every day.

  [Footage of various teletours taken by Al: a busy kitchen in Yangzhou, China, where teletourists are perched on a shelf above the cooks, skittering from side to side as they watch the complicated, hours-long process for making the famous shizitou meatballs; somewhere in the Great Barrier Reef, where submersible teletour robots on fiber-optic cables can dive and observe the ecosystem with minimal impact or damage; a village in Indonesia, where a traveling shadow-puppet troupe is putting on a show not for Western tourists, but for an audience that is in sync with the story, with just a few teletour robots in the back perched on a tree, no translation, no explanation, no intervening guide; Chobe National Park in Botswana, where teletourists dangle from helium mini-airships and watch a pride of lions going about their business . . .

  Over time, the control rig used by Al has been upgraded, allowing him to be more immersive with the teletour robots.]

  I got to visit just about every country in the world, and I’ve met so many, many people. Teletours are different from the physical trips I took as a tourist back in the past. When I was in Thailand and Mexico, I could never feel comfortable: people were catering to me, and everything I did I couldn’t stop this nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me that it was a transaction, and I needed to get my money’s worth, even if that meant being petty, demanding . . . an ass.

  With a teletour, it didn’t feel like that at all. Precisely because the stakes were so much lower, it also felt, oddly, as if my host and I were more like equals, not two sides of an unbalanced coin. I’m sure that sounds naive and wishful, but it’s how I feel.

  I felt so good about the tours that I started hosting visitors myself.

  [Footage of Al hosting jaunts at home: Al chatting with one of the cooks from the restaurant in Yangzhou as he attempts to recreate the shizitou, with the cook laughing and offering critiques; Al taking a group of teletourists fishing on a pier, the old man walking behind the row of robots and their fishing poles, advising, bantering, encouraging; Al showing two Xhong visitors how to eat a steamed lobster the New England way, struggling to describe the taste while the teletourists dined on a platter of crayfish to approximate the experience . . .]

  Some of my hosts and guests have become my friends. I know it always seems odd to say that you can become friends with someone you’ve never met, but it’s not just chatting through a webcam, you know? You actually do things together. That, to me, makes all the difference. Maybe if the president went and did things with other people he wouldn’t sound so angry all the time.

  [The camera pulls back to show that a teletour robot has been gliding along next to him this whole time. It’s squat, cylindrical, about the size of a small lobster pot so that it could be easily transported by one person when necessary; it has wheels as well as segmented feet for all-terrain operation; a camera is perched atop, along with two manipulators; a high-resolution screen shows the face of the visitor.

  Al turns to speak to the visitor in Japanese, subtitled for our benefit.]

  Takahashi-san, would you like to visit the Swan Boats next?

  [The visitor assents.]

  Are there swans in Hokkaido? You must show me next time . . .

  [Together, Al and his teletour guest stroll away toward the Public Garden lagoon in the distance.]

  Statement by President Bombeo, September 3, 203X

  MY FELLOW AMERICANS, TODAY OUR GREAT REPUBLIC FACES AN UNPRECEDENTED challenge to its preeminence in the world. Hostile foreign powers are emboldened while feckless allies cower and dither. However, if there’s anything that history teaches us, it’s that the great American nation can defeat all enemies and overcome all challenges when we are decisive and take bold action.

  My administration has been distinguished from the very start by a robust, potent foreign policy. In contrast to the previous administration, I made it clear from the day I took office that no one can defy, defraud, or deceive the United States without paying a heavy price.

  To secure American borders, protect American jobs, and free the American people from unwanted foreign influence, my administration closed loopholes in the immigration and visa laws, voided suspicious naturalizations, rationalized birthright citizenship, and deported numerous foreign nationals who may harbor dual loyalties. We attempted to get Congress to reenact and expand the scope of U.S. Code Title 8, Chapter 7, though the effort was contemptibly blocked by the quisling opposition. We also drastically reduced the number of foreign students allowed to come to our great universities to study advanced technology and science—research funded by American taxpayers—only to take the knowledge back to their home countries. I specifically made it impossible for students from hostile or untrustworthy nations such as Iran, Russia, China, and many others to study in our country unless they first take an oath of loyalty to the United States. Despite the outcry from radical-left academic elites, these steps have unquestionably made America safer and stronger.

  However, many of these prestigious universities, instead of faithfully carrying out my executive orders, have sought to bypass or subvert them, to the detriment of the American people. As Vice President Gossy’s investigative report shows, top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale all attempted to route around the restrictions. Many created so-called remote-residency programs that make heavy use of advanced telepresen
ce robots. Taking advantage of the mobility, dexterity, and advanced sensors enabled by these machines, students in foreign countries can attend classes alongside American classmates, make use of expensive laboratory equipment, and even experience much of the joys of campus life. Although these foreign students are, for all intents and purposes, here on American soil, the universities argue disingenuously that visa requirements don’t apply because they are simply engaged in “web-based remote learning.”

  But the universities are hardly the only scoundrels.

  Life in America has been fundamentally transformed by ubiquitous telepresence. In the aftermath of the great pandemics of the last decade, telepresence robots helped many Americans return to work and saved our economy. A general-purpose household robot, for example, allowed nervous homeowners to receive services from cleaners, electricians, plumbers, hairdressers, piano teachers, and so on without having to let strangers enter the house. Moreover, the robots could be programmed to limit their operators’ movements inside the house via geofencing and audit trails of actions performed. The social distancing enabled by telepresence saved many American workers from economic ruin.

  But today, many of the remote operators you permit to inhabit your household robots are not Americans at all, but foreigners stealing American jobs without even leaving their own houses. Companies, greedy for profit, have shirked their patriotic duty. The gains we’ve made by reducing and regulating immigration have been lost through telepresence, with real Americans suffering the consequences.

  Moreover, teletourists from abroad, without having to pass through comprehensive vetting at ports of entry or during the visa process, now visit America in greater numbers every year. Although teletour bots open to operation by foreign visitors are in principle subject to strict regulation that prevents their operators from wandering outside of specific designated tourist zones, enforcement is spotty, and many teletour bots owned by small consumer-providers are exempt.