December 1, 2029. It has been 10 years since “patient zero” developed the first known human case of the coronavirus that swept the globe. Now’s a good time to look back, and see how our popular culture was changed.
As was predicted at the time, businesses that depended on people being in a specific physical location, especially on many people being in the same location, took a huge hit during the pandemic, from which many never recovered. The goods and services provided by these bygone companies are now largely supplied by new thriving industries, some of which didn’t even exist pre-covid.
In-building movie theaters no longer exist, having gone the way of video arcades half a century before. Drive-in movies are back, of course, with every city and town boasting at least one, modeled after (and usually built out of) multi-storey parking garages no longer needed for commuters. In cities still lucky enough to have an active in-person business district, these theaters still provide a daytime service as vertical parking lots.
For viewers who prefer a more immersive experience than can be gotten while sitting in a car, virtual home movie theaters became the rage. The competition between virtual reality home movie viewing and actual home movie viewing was fierce for a couple of years, but the balance was finally tipped by the incorporation of massive-multi-player capability into the VR experience, allowing one to watch in the company of friends. (This innovation was also credited with single-handedly keeping professional sports viewing alive).
VR made it possible to sit in a crowded movie theater or baseball stadium with a group of your friends, or your best girl, or famous players from history, even though they live across the country, or they died 25 years ago, or they never lived at all. Most viewers agree that the audience experience now is even better than in-person theaters and arenas provided back when they existed, especially when you consider that back then you couldn’t even program the rest of the audience to stay quiet, or to not complain when you are loud, or to laugh at exactly the parts of the movie you think are funny. It’s strange to think what we settled for way back then!
Not all new technologies designed for a post-covid world worked out. You may remember the “no-scent perfume” craze of a few years back, which promised that when you finally met your love match in person, you would smell exactly like you did during your torrid Zoom dating sessions: NOT. AT. ALL. The business model seemed sound enough, correctly reasoning that months and months of never leaving your house and doing all of your socializing via the internet resulted in a breakdown of personal olfactory hygiene norms and regimens. This caused mass panic when society started re-opening. What even are people supposed to smell like? was a common headliner in popular and health magazines back in the early 20’s.
The death stroke for no-scent perfumes was probably the same immersive sensation technology that helped VR movie and sports viewing become a hit. The scents that you purchase for personal use can also be subscribed to for remote transmission, so that whenever you videochat with your special someone, a subtle whiff of that self-same fragrance is released. This helps, so the advertising goes, imprint your aroma onto your hoped-for significant other, to cement the bonding experience when you actually meet in person. The best defense against body odor, as they say, is a good offense.
Nontherapeutic face mask wearing has become fashionable, especially among tweens through twenty-somethings. They are taking face-selfies, photoshopping out any acne and poofing the lips, or photoshopping in what you thought the moustache would look like when you started it, and having the new improved face printed on your mask.
Becoming increasingly popular (if you can afford it) are the new “smart” face masks, whose mouth image moves as yours does, guaranteed to be comprehensible to anyone versed in the art of lip-reading.
Nowadays, no one who goes through the enormous expense of chartering one of the few remaining commercial planes to visit a foreign country would think of doing so without a smart face mask with built in real-time voice-to-voice translation (although the deluxe enhancement of simulating appropriate facial expressions, from the japanese scowl to the french sneer, never really captured the public’s imagination).
most pundits of the time correctly predicted that the social isolation imposed by the pandemic would bring about an enormous increase in the usage of electronic social media outlets (with an accompanying increase in wealth for their companies). Some also predicted that when the threat passed, and conventional forms of social interaction were available again, these electronic outlets would continue to grow in popularity and social influence, to the point where they eclipsed many countries and world religions.
It’s easy to forget, for example, that before the epidemic, the idea that Facebook could apply for sovereign nation status with the United Nations would have seemed incomprehensible. Now that Facebook Nation can claim physical existence with its purchase of the Maldives, its eventual confirmation as a member nation seems all but assured (despite the fact that these same islands will disappear under the rising Pacific by 2100).
Should this happen, Mark Zuckerberg has promised to resign from the Presidency of the United States to assume the mantle of leadership over his new nation-state. “Being President of the United States is largely a powerless, ceremonial position anyway,” he was recently quoted, “ever since the reforms of the early 2020’s made it illegal for a President to do all the things that everyone in the twenty-teens assumed were already illegal.”
Thanks,
Dorn
12/01/2029
(pre-publication copy 7/26/2020)
P.S. A blood-curdling epilog has been added to the recent post, Invaders!