We Can't Say We Didn't Know, We Can Only Say We Didn't Care | QMM #4
On Reversals, The Gift of Sight, and Failed Opportunities
On the eve of the launch of the next season of The End of Tourism Podcast, here is a little momento, mixing media ecology and the collapse of tourism. Lest we forget.
Quixote’s Media Meditations #4
Assignment: Discuss “reversals” since the COVID-19 plague/lockdowns.
The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent global lockdowns meant that people in most places, especially in the Global North, were confined to their homes indefinitely. From a free-flowing movement of goods and people via international transportation channels, we arrived at something only our distant ancestors had a lived memory of: both the fear and consequence of a terrible, new cataclysm, alongside the lived experience of being confined to a very small area: the neighbourhood.
By March 2020, the computer, like the internet, had become the main compasses of twenty-first-century living. People could communicate with each other, purchase goods, and work with their colleagues without ever having to open the front door. The pandemic, however, created a “reversal” in this trajectory, a concept written about at length in Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He describes it as such:
“When all the available resources and energies have been played up in an organism or in any structure there is some kind of reversal of pattern.”
The pandemic can be understood as a reversal, one of great retraction, of collapse, in part because of our hubris, because of the house of cards we had built. McLuhan detailed the discovery and subsequent management of electricity as such a change in direction:
“The greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant. With instant speed the causes of things began to emerge to awareness again, as they had not done with things in sequence and in concatenation accordingly.”
As in the pandemic, suddenly, people’s eyes were thrust open even if few were willing to see. In that cataclysm, nothing was certain, while everything was up for grabs. Half a century ago, McLuhan quoted the poet W.B. Yeats who seemed to pinpoint the effects of such a reversal:
“The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.”
Many lost sight of any collective, ontological centre and traded that uncertainty for conspiracies, for the desire and demand to know what was happening (when probably nobody did). Others, however, kept their eyes glued on elsewhere, in the hope of being able to, once again, go on vacation.
The Fate of Destinations
During the pandemic, the global tourism industry collapsed. Hard. For better or worse, travel was no longer possible, in some cases, not even within one’s own community. It became clear that in the previous half-century, people began to take for granted what it meant to be able to travel more or less freely around the world. A screeching halt and reversal of that so-called freedom did not, in the end, offer enough time and perhaps tragedy for people to reconsider the failures of the global village, of global citizenry or their travelling mythos.
As Daniel Pardo, an anti-tourism activist in Barcelona (one of the world’s most overtouristed cities) pointed out on The End of Tourism Podcast, “We didn’t learn anything from the pandemic.” When the moment was upon them, the locals or those who pass for locals there, were frothing at the mouth for a return to an inherently exilic and destructive economic model. In the end, they got their wish, ensuring the slow siphoning of whatever might still be left of culture in that place in exchange for the illusion of financial security.
Pardo, a resident Barcelonian proclaimed, “We can’t say that we didn’t know [that this was going to return], all we can say is that we don’t care.” Such words singe the edges of dreams regarding what could exist outside of an extractive worldview. Those of us who had fallen under the spell of wanderlust had ample time to reconsider our lives and the livelihoods of our communities while we were forced to stay in them.
But the global village persisted and the internet, the Trojan horse of globalization, rooted deeper into the lives of the people, becoming even more of an extension, if not a skin, overlaying the sensuous human frame with the continued promise of simulation, of always being elsewhere, even in one’s own home, even in one’s own community.
Reversing the Reversal
As the travel restrictions slowly lifted, the corporations, noting the risks of a swift return to in-person office work, allowed many workers to continue to work from home. Because the virtual nature of the global village had already eclipsed physical space and place itself, many people began to search for flights, wondering which tourist destination, which foreign city might host their cultural homelessness. It all stemmed from our willingness to understand home not as a skill, not as a place, but rather as a temporary possibility, largely contingent on how we feel about home.
So, while this reality existed in pre-pandemic times, the pandemic gave us an unprecedented moment of how we might come to terms with what we’ve done with wanderlust, with what it’s done to us, and how the global infrastructure put in place by such touristic desires created the conditions for a pandemic to spread, for our capacity to be once again, at home in place. The ability to choose one’s home means that any sense or skill of being at home and being with people the way our ancestors might have continues to be a distant fantasy, increasingly idealized instead of lived.
In the end, whatever the pandemic procured wasn’t enough. What it gave us, wasn’t tourism’s return, but tourism’s revenge. The revenge of our old way of life. A double-reversal, a doubling-down of everything that led us to the calamity of a COVID-19 world. In regards to reversals, McLuhan quoted a passage from the Tao Te Ching, which author Ursula K. Leguin titled “Proportion,” part of which reads as follows:
You can’t keep standing on tiptoe
or walk in leaps and bounds.
You can’t shine by showing off
or get ahead by pushing.
Self-satisfied people do no good
self-promoters never grow up.
The collective opportunity we had to slow down and use that reversal in fortune to reconsider our tools and trajectory was squandered. And here we are, again. In the same simulation and doing the same things that precipitated the rise of a global pandemic. “We can’t say we didn’t know, we can only say we didn’t care.” This will undoubtedly be how our descendants come to know of us. It will stand as the memory not only of what we did during a global pandemic, but what we didn’t do. And they will ask us, “knowing how bad things were then, what did you do?”
These reflections on technology, language, media ecology & literacy are provoked by Andrew McLuhan’s mandatory, must-take Understanding Media Intensive. You can find out more about McLuhan Studies straight from McLuhan’s mouth by reading his Substack, here.