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This is a more serious one.
Quick facts—I’m supposed to board a flight to the US in a few days, after the USA-Europe travel regulations go into effect. Theoretically, I’m exempt. But will they let me on the plane? Will they let us land? Can I come back? The airline doesn’t know. The best they could do: “We promise we’ll get you there and back home…one day.”
(Don’t judge me—it’s essential travel.)
I saw a Tweet—now seemingly deleted—from an American who flew off to French Guinea to self-quarantine last week.
Other rich Americans are rushing off to the Hamptons, or Idaho (NYT):
This kind of luxurious self-isolation is nothing new for Corona. It’s been their slogan for years:
The beach is outside of society—that’s the whole point.
Vertigo
According to Bruno Latour, our age is one defined by shaky ground, a “sense of vertigo” that comes from “the ground giving way beneath everyone’s feet at once.” The “old protections” of stable ecosystems, ancestral land, welfare states, and stable communities are disappearing. The condition of the migrant, deprived of land to call his own, is generalized to the entire species. So when we fall, there is no rug—just the cold, hard, floor, a shared ground that is in bad shape.
For Latour, there are largely three responses to this new spatial insecurity:
(1) A turn to ethnic nationalism and wall-building—a temporary and unsustainable solution. Think the stereotypical Trump voter. This is the world of travel bans and fictionalized pasts.
(2) A denial that there is a “shared ground” to begin with—jetting off into a kind of spaceship of accumulated wealth and climate denial. Think Donald Trump and other 1%-ers. Think this tweet:
(3) A recognition that the same ground is shared by all—a coming “down to Earth” that reconciles the local and the global, and re-commits to building a protective society for all.
Basically, as the pandemic hits, we’re all trying to find our beach.
The people who are jetting off to Idaho and the Hamptons and French Guiana are embracing option (2). Their retreat from society is more than a self-quarantine. In Latour’s framework, the rich are always in a permanent state of quarantine—insulated from shock and deprivation, from precarity and attachment.
Here is a speculation: The elite’s retreat from shared existence has an aesthetic. We could call it, at the high end, Quarantine Chic, which is accidentally the name of this newsletter. Quarantine Chic might include high-end face masks (they exist) and bespoke doomsday prep (link).
This 13-year old Russian model (??) is impervious to both travel bans and aerial droplets.
But there’s also a poor man’s version of all this.
On the blog Ribbonfarm, Venkatesh Rao has coined the emerging aesthetic of “domestic cozy,” an blankets-and-Netflix retreat into domestic comfort. Domestic cozy seeks to “predictably control a small, closed environment rather than gamble in a large, open one.” Maybe domestic cozy (which has already been Vox-splained) is the poor man’s quarantine chic, which is itself the aesthetic reflection of what Bruno Latour calls the global elite’s “out-of-this-world” orientation of retreat and escape. This is the aesthetic of the spaceship, but on a budget. You can’t get a high-end doomsday bunker that’s periodically restocked by professionals, but at least you can get Postmates.
Emergency Landing
It seems like the shock of Coronavirus, where millions of people will be deprived of economic security, mobility, and control, can be a clarifier on where people stand on the three options above. To the vast majority, it will become clear that their fantasies of option (2)—a cushy retreat from the mess of the world—are far beyond their budget. So option (3)—solidarity—becomes more attractive.
Already, social democracy measures like paid sick leave and free healthcare are being very seriously contemplated at the federal legislative level in the US. Sure, this is an emergency measure, but it’s certainly refreshing to see a “shock doctrine” go the other way, not towards more deregulation and privatization, but towards what’s sometimes called “disaster communism.” Let’s see where things go!