Screening

 

More and more I'm witnessing a slippage between the proto-metaverse and real life. More than a century ago, the advent of cinema melded film and real life and continues on to today. "It was like something I saw in a movie" is now a fixture of language.

My experience now on the street is that there's a slippage between reality and the metaverse in retail, and is essentially "something I saw in VR".

From the excellent book, Ecology of Fear : Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998), about how Southern California had become the "set" for both utopia and dystopia:

"Perhaps, as William Gibson has suggested, three-dimensional computer interfaces will someday allow postmodern flaneurs to stroll through the luminous geometry of the mnemonic city where databases have metamorphosed into “blue pyramids” and “cold spiral arms.” If so, urban cyberspace, as the simulation of the city’s information order, will be experienced as even more segregated than traditional urban space."

A Wild Fork recently opened in my neighborhood, occupying the space of a former Gap store. It's on a busy intersection and I thought it looked odd. I was expecting that it was going to be a high-end third-place grocery store with cafes and other gathering areas. But rather it's a huge space that has aisles of chest freezers containing shrink-wrapped meat and seafood. The context is at first jarring because it doesn't match pre-existing mental models of a grocery store, especially in an old downtown that 50 years ago had a Marshall Field's and a Wieboldt's on the same corner. [One article I read about it called it a GTA service, but didn't explain the acronym. If you Google it, the highest-ranked result was Grand Theft Auto.]

Adjacent to the Wild Fork is a Sephora which also recently opened, and is similarly odd in that the entrance is at the rear parking lot and the front of the store that faces the street is covered in a cheesy vinyl applique and nothing more than a utility door. Its a Potemkin Village in some ways--or a movie set. (Something you'd see in a movie...) It's like putting a mask on the back of your head making it look like you have your shirt on backwards.

There's a palpable distancing now between real life and life on the internet, probably the result of the pandemic to some degree, but I think it's the cumulative effect of our manufacturing of imagery, before on celluloid, now it's back-lit screens. It's all moving towards alienated activities everywhere you go.

Older people perhaps experience more cognitive dissonance from what was once 'normal' life on the street now entering the uncanny valley now so easily accessible through screens. Once flexible screens are more widely used, perhaps your Wagyu beef, bison, or Berkshire pork will have shrink-wrap that will show videos, but is of course now possible through QR codes.

I was also thinking of Neom, the dystopian city right out of a dystopian movie, and I feel like that it's the pervasive mental model of what the future is supposed to look like.