The Plan Is There Is No Plan

Back in the early 2000s, a group of SF dilettantes called for an end to space operas. They wanted "Mundane Science Fiction." We only have ourselves, they argued, and this planet. That's largely what we do here, although we don't claim the category. The future is mundane. Predicting it is like forecasting trends; it's just the past, remixed. This story, from Sean Monahan of the trend forecasting collective K-HOLE—a group best known for coining the term "normcore"—is a travelogue of a future so close it may as well be now.

— The Eds.

"If you think your generation's got it bad!" The decrepit hippie/Harvard Professor pauses to glug her red wine. "I was once dumped over Betamax!"

I'm trying not to eavesdrop. I close my eyes and lean into the semi-somnambulant cocktail of nicotine withdrawal, Ambien, and vodka martini, but their conversation is making it impossible for me to find my airport zen.

At one frequency, Terminal 4 is an amniotic sound soup of recirculated air, moving sidewalks, rolling suitcases softly clicking on tiled floor. At another, it's whining jet engines, the sharp squeaks of rubber on laminate, the Professor intoning fascinating in long low syllables that belong on another Coast.

Her crunchy companion is some young paleo-progressive wearing whiteboy dreads and a Mobius strip of tatty fabric the color of a potato sack. This—and the waft of patchouli—were all the pretense the Professor needed to strike up conversation. They'd been playing intergenerational compare and contrast for nearly an hour, pausing only to refill their carafe with cheap red wine. He was born after September 11th. She went to Woodstock. He explained what it meant to be neurodivergent. She told him, "back then, we didn't know drugs were bad!" He bought four-way reversible clothes out of solidarity with the Spectrum. She picked at the threadbare elbows of her misbuttoned Fair Trade oxford.

Their conversation is mesmerizing in its totally scripted normalcy. Uncanny. It's like watching two robots fuck. But when she mentions Betamax, my adrenal glands twitch. This is what I've been waiting for—the possibility that they might get drunk enough to go off script, do a little conversational off-roading. It's a chance to see groupthink solve a problem in the wild. Maybe even the birth of an insight—

"And what, praytell, is Betamax?" asks her companion.

"Oh, you know. Betamax was like a big cassette that played videos. Like off-brand VHS."

"So he sent you a break-up snap?"

"Exactly! But it arrived via snail mail. FedEx. You know! Different technology, same shit."

"More like different technology, same men!" They hoot, clinking their plastic stemware, feeling like they've happened onto the wisdom of the ages. I'm disappointed. Their insight is there is no insight. I want to tell them they got the snowclone wrong. We're not just monkeys with different rocks! But I realize the Ambien's made me lose track of my arm. It's already raised, motioning for the waiter to bring me my check.

People ask what I do and I say I'm an artist and a consultant, some funny hybrid—a tomato with octopus DNA. When I'm drunk and don't feel like going into specifics, I say, "being a consultant is more like being a performance artist than being a performance artist is like being a performance artist." This is my Zen koan. It either makes people laugh or draws me into strange conversations about exactly which bodily fluids my services involve. Blood, sweat, and tears is my stock response.

Once upon a time, my work would've been called trend forecasting. But just like video killed the radio star, the feed killed the trend. We watch hashtags zip up and down sine waves with the regularity of the tides. No one needs more fish-eyed due diligence. The aggregation algorithms do a good enough job of that. I have to find the things that slip through the semantic cracks, name the things that have no names. When the algorithms invade, you move up the abstraction ladder.

Every time I leave New York, I feel like I might not come back. I'm overwhelmed by the fleet of strangers that drive me around, cook my food, do my laundry, suck my dick…but as soon as that tiny overbuilt island begins to recede into the distance, everything that seemed semiotic and certain shatters like an eggshell.

For this exit, I pull some Waiting to Exhale Angela Bassett-style shit, liquidating all my belongings. I substitute the burning car for a pod. At going away drinks, I climb onto a barstool and drunkenly declare: "I want everything I own to be the equivalent of a Bic lighter! Black t-shirts circulating according the logic of lighter karma, ferried in and out of my life by anonymous sex partners!" People laugh, but no one takes me seriously. The sentiment lingers though. What if every day we woke up, everything was different?

After almost everyone's left, I ask my friend, "Am I being an asshole? I feel unfit for human consumption."

"No," she shrugs, "you're just molting." She pauses and clinks an artisanal ice cube around her empty tumbler."You'll feel better after your vacation."

"It's a business trip," I sulk, staring into the patterns covering my own ice, sharp and fractal, gone blurry from the warm whiskey.

I'm going to the Venice Biennale—the biennale that existed before there were biennales. Where the old art world matrix of culture, nationalism, and power intersects with the new matrix of media, celebrity, and money. The friction between the two feels something like history, even if we don't know what history is anymore. We think in moments now—though I'm skeptical we actually know what those are either. What is our moment? Is it bigger than a breadbox? Can we shrink it down and fit it into an exhibition space? Blow it up and package it as an insight?

When I arrive, the Biennale is already in full swing. I run into New York friends in medieval stone corridors. "I thought that was your laugh!" Our air kisses are already discombobulated by being abroad. How many cheeks is appropriate? "Why are you here?" they yell. "It's tax deductible!" I respond. We laugh and merge with the weird Fellini parade of diaphanous dresses, tuxedos, and sweatpants, unsure if this is Italy's current fashion moment or if Venice is a cosplay zone.

In a city of tourists, we are the most conspicuous. We aren't dragging rolly suitcases. No one is sunburnt or wearing a bathing suit. But the arch pantomime of the Grand Tour marks us as especially guilty in this city of dwindling inhabitants and a booming tourist trade. Everyone's chic camouflage only adds to Venice's allure. We fall back into the cityscape and become an attraction in and of ourselves. A strange species of red carpet beamed nowhere, only available here.

The ambling Bienniale crowd grows, shifting through piazzas and over bridges with no discernible purpose, like a frightened flock of birds. Are we looking for the right direction or are we looking for a signal? Maps don't work here. Le droit d'oublier extended citywide. Venice is shrewd. Without secrets there is no romance. And for Venice at least, without romance there is no tourism. I swig prosecco and dream of the creamy leather interior of a water taxi. I'm frustrated. I'm sweaty. I'm confused. But I try to remind myself: I came to Venice to be lost. I came to Venice to be confused.

Pre-Preview openings in San Marco are all LED vitrines, assemblages quivering behind clinking crystal, friends from New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Shanghai, and London. We're on some sort of raft together; I'd call it "post-geographic," but we're always together, always in the same place. Rumors I'm leaving New York travel faster than my flight. "Maybe," cues a conversation about New York's nightlife crisis, its curdled real estate, its frequent storms—"New York is a hard city." We nod solemnly.

"Cities are over," someone I don't know intones.

"We're not living in art capitals; we're living on art's capital," someone in sheer everything concurs.

I wonder if the woman in sheer everything wears sheer everything because she reads too much speculative fiction, but instead I say: "the art world is the first viable example of seasteading. We've beaten Silicon Valley to the punch."

I glad-hand some business cards and stumble out of the opening, past yachts the size of Beijing housing blocs, wondering if perhaps I was right. I casually unzip my pants and piss on the Doge's Palace. Smirking, I think: "I'm doing my part to maintain the historic character of Venice." Centuries of piss have given these stones their particular UNESCO texture.

My preservationist revelry is interrupted by the neon aquamarine that outlines the shore: a perverse nightclub iteration of the lagoon's brackish matte blue. Waves lap over the banks of the fondamente, going dark as they slap the concrete. Acqua alta. I feel slightly less transgressive when I remember the lagoon is a giant toilet flushed twice daily by the tides.

An initiative to install modern plumbing began two years ago. The underwater welders work only at night. The official line is that traffic in the canals makes it too dangerous for them to work during the day. But everyone knows this is just preliminary work for Moses—the giant invisible dam that will permanently seal Venice off from the sea. Strong-worded denials have only made Venetians certain it's true.

I go to the Preview hungover and already tired from walking.

A bird poops on my friend's head. One pavilion is dedicated to sinking nation states. A friend rushes past snapping photos, less as documentation and more as reminders of which pieces to revisit later. "The documentation is great this year." Even the paintings have been printed in 3D. I drink Aperol spritz and shield my eyes from the glare of white gravel at the Arsenale, wondering if I should spend the day alone, waving to people I know.

My ears perk up when I pass an ambient rumor: "the flooding ruined Miami Beach's convention center. Art Basel's moving to San Francisco." It's a tidbit with truthiness. "Tech money" is muttered, as the strangers blur into the crowd. The limestone foundation of Miami Beach is even more precarious than Venice's wooden piles. Not even the Dutch can help. There's almost something refreshing about the hopelessness of the situation. Finally, a problem that's practical, not financial.

I keep moving. One pavilion after another. More pavilions than any one person could possibly see. Separatist pavilions. Insurance pavilions. Death cult pavilions. Fetish pavilions. A pavilion for Narnia and a pavilion for Westeros. It's impossible to ingest all the perspectives. The story is that there is no story. The plan is that there is no plan. I'm overwhelmed by the sense that there's no captain steering the ship. He's swigging gin in his life boat and we're all cruising towards an iceberg.

At the Singularity pavilion, the walls and cupola are paved with sheets of blinking numbers. Couples spoon in the demi-darkness. Splayed out on a field of grass on loan from the Turing Memorial in Manchester, the data fetishists look like teens insisting they can understand the cosmos just from looking at the stars. Content with more data, even if no human mind can make sense of it.

Wandering into the night, I wonder if we'll even notice when superhuman intelligence arrives. Maybe it already has. What if we created an algorithm that knows everything but does nothing, held back by its own special sui generis Prime Directive? How would we know? There's no cipher to deliver the good news. Jesus without his disciples.

Darkness brings events I'm not invited to, doors ruled by bouncers from more countries than I can count. Crashing parties is an act of seduction, something that despite machine intelligence's best efforts remains culturally specific. I get into the party for the Norwegian pavilion because they're using an antique clipboard for the guest list and are tired of flipping sheets of paper back and forth. Just past the door, a group of hysterical laughing people are smashing wine glasses in the courtyard. Guests entering politely look away despite the shards of glass dancing around their stilletto'ed feet. Is it art or is it rich people? The armed security guard watches stone-faced, but I'm still leaning rich people.

Inside the rented palazzo, I touch the gold silk walls and am overcome by the sense that nothing in the building is as old as it pretends to be. How often are all the bits and pieces replaced? How many times has Venice been rebuilt piece by piece? The skeuomorph lightbulbs flicker and imitate candlelight, but this is no candlelight. Where are the silk dresses? Where are the powdered wigs? Where is the ungodly stench of unwashed bodies masked by layers of perfume? I'm having American problems. I don't believe anything is authentically old.

On my way home, the highly articulated light design of the palazzo seems less horrible. The controversial new white LEDs lighting the streets of Venice are too bright and too flat. They've expunged all shadows from the streets, forced them to flee into the courtyards and canals—ruining the historical character of Venice.

Distracted by the HD render of paving stones, I don't see the tuxedoed figure waving at me frantically, cigarette in hand, until he yells. "Hey! Come around!" Squinting past the white LED's I can't recognize him, and the outfit certainly doesn't give any clues. I cross a bridge and an ancient wooden gate opens to reveal a friend, dapper and drunk, collar undone, but still immaculate even under the harsh white lights.

He leads me down a corridor through more gates into a small candlelit garden. It's littered with cocktail napkins and lipstick-smudged champagne flutes. "You missed the party! You missed everyone!" And he lists names of donors, collectors, people I don't know. There is one bottle of prosecco left chilling in a bucket. He pours some into a cleanish glass and motions for me to sit down.

"What have you been up to tonight?" I tell him about my failed attempts, the electrified palazzo. "It's part of the experience, not getting into parties." The fact massages my ego, cracks my semiotics back into alignment. "Who owns the garden?" I ask. "My hotel." It's bounded by clipped hedges. Small flowering plants are potted in pseudo-Grecian urns. It's hidden from view, the only exit a small dock cut into the canal-side shrubbery.

"Why are you here?" he asks, touching my hand. For a moment, Venice is so quiet I can hear the paper of his cigarette burn. Poised perfectly still, he stares at me, balancing his precarious little tower of ash. As my pupils dilate and tears gather in the corners of my eyes, I rack my brain, wondering if this is some sort of trick question. A weird throwback to a time when people had different motivations, led lives with a different sense of purpose, had identities that didn't feel like ink stains on shoplifted department store jeans—

I giggle, breaking his gaze, losing the contest.

"I dunno. To see what I can see."

In the morning, the canal throws quivering liquid reflections onto everything in sight. I drink a cappuccino alone in the now-immaculate garden, carefully handling the note I found on the nightstand. "XOXO see you in NY," it reads. I fold it, feel the weight of the embossed cotton letterhead, and think, "this is absolutely nothing like a Betamax."