COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped big cities’ future
In 1957 Isaac Asimov published “The Naked Sun,” a science-fiction novel about a society in which people live on isolated estates, their needs provided by robots, and they interact only by video. The plot hinges on the way this lack of face-to-face contact stunts and warps their personalities.
After a year in which those of us who could worked from home — albeit served by less fortunate humans rather than robots — that sounds about right. But how will we live once the pandemic subsides?
Of course, nobody really knows. But maybe our speculation can be informed by some historical parallels and models.
First, it seems safe to predict that we won’t fully return to the way we used to live and work. The pandemic, by temporarily making our former work habits impossible, has made us better at exploiting the possibilities of remote work, and some of what we used to do — long commutes so we can sit in cubicles, constant flying to meetings of dubious value — won’t be coming back.
If history is any guide, however, much of our old way of working and living will, in fact, return.
A decade ago many observers believed that both physical books and the bookstores that sold them were on the verge of extinction. And some of what they predicted came to pass: e-readers took a significant share of the market, and major bookstore chains took a significant financial hit.
But e-books’ popularity plateaued around the middle of the last decade, never coming close to overtaking physical books. And while big chains have suffered, independent bookstores have flourished.
Why was the reading revolution so limited? The convenience of downloading e-books is obvious. But for many readers this is offset by subtler factors. The experience of reading a physical book is different and, for many, more enjoyable. And browsing a bookstore is also a different experience from purchasing online. I like to say that online, I can find any book I’m looking for. But what I find in a bookstore, especially a well-curated store, are books I wasn’t looking for but end up treasuring.
The remote work revolution will probably play out similarly.
The advantages of remote work — either from home or, possibly, in small offices located far from dense urban areas — are obvious. Living and work spaces are much cheaper; commutes are short or nonexistent; you no longer need to deal with the expense and discomfort of formal businesswear, at least from the waist down.
The advantages of going back to in-person work will, by contrast, be relatively subtle — the payoffs from face-to-face communication, the serendipity that can come from unscheduled interactions, the amenities of urban life.
But these subtle advantages are, in fact, what drive the economies of modern cities. The rise of remote work may dent that, but it probably won’t reverse it.
The revival of cities won’t be entirely a pretty process; much of it will probably reflect the preferences of wealthy Americans who want big-city luxuries and glamour. But while cities thrive in part because they cater to the rich and fatuous, they also thrive because a lot of information-sharing and brainstorming takes place over coffee and after-hours beers; Zoom calls aren’t an adequate substitute.
So the best bet is that life and work in, say, 2023 will look a lot like life and work in 2019, but a bit less so. We may commute to the office less than we used to; there may well be a glut of urban office space. But most of us won’t be able to stay very far from the madding crowd.
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Ross Douthat
A slight giddiness is overtaking prognosticators as the pandemic nears its end. Economics writers, normally a cautious bunch, are speculating about how a Biden boom might really be different — bigger, longer, its fruits more widely shared. Tech and science watchers are talking about the 2020s as an age of breakthroughs.
But what about culture? If stagnation in the economy has been matched by sterility in artistic pursuits (it has), what would signify cultural acceleration? Here’s one possibility:
We’ll know we’re entering a new era when sex and romance make a comeback at the movies.
Note that I said sex and romance. Traditionally these were somewhat separable movie-industry commodities.
But in the last 15 years the “sex movie” and the romantic comedy have both declined or disappeared. This means that if you’re a proud anti-puritan
Ross Douthat Star Parker Jonah Goldberg TBA
Pat Buchanan Marc A. Thiessen George Will who misses “adult themes” in your movies or an old-fashioned filmgoer who swoons for true love triumphing, you can reasonably complain that Hollywood isn’t telling your kind of stories.
In the modern blockbuster, as the film writer R.S. Benedict put it: “Everyone is beautiful.
And yet, no one is horny.” Movie stars have never been so ripped and chiseled and godlike; they have to be, if they aspire to play a superhero. But unlike the old Olympians, these gods rarely seem to have the hots for one another.
A lot of different forces have marginalized movie sex and romance. The blockbuster industry has been bad for all kinds of adult movies, because it’s assumed that superhero fight scenes travel better internationally than more complex and culturally specific plots. Some of the audience for sexually themed stories has migrated to cable and streaming services; some of that appetite has been sated by online porn.
In general there’s a cultural void where romance used to be. And it doesn’t seem coincidental that this void opened at a time when the sexes are struggling to pair off — with fewer marriages, fewer relationships, less sex.
Courtship structures, formal in the old days and casual in the 1990s, were always useful to the romantic comedy. But lately even the casual structures have collapsed, with a Darwinian ecosystem of online dating (much less charming in reality than in “You’ve Got Mail”) supplanting older, more cinematic alternatives.
Ideological trends have also made it more challenging to portray happy relations between the sexes. The dramatic material of traditional romance is male and female distinctiveness, but these differences sit uncomfortably with the current progressive emphasis on the interchangeability of the sexes — which may be why the recent cable hits with the most sex or romance have been set in historical and fantasy landscapes, from “Game of Thrones” to “Outlander.”
Just consider the contrast between Netflix’s “Bridgerton,” a multiracial bodice-ripper set in an alternative but safelypast-tense 19th century, and best picture nominee “Promising Young Woman,” set in a present-day dating landscape so bleak it makes you want to cancel heterosexuality.
But maybe the popularity of “Bridgerton” is a foretaste of a very different 2020s. Maybe it’s a sign that an age of libertinism lies just around the corner. Or maybe the show’s concern with married sex is a signpost on the path to a new traditionalism.
Either way, everyone should be rooting for the cinema of desire. For artistic reasons, yes — but also for the sake of the continuation of the human race.