Hotel California

This could be heaven or this could be hell.

Los Angeles.

In 2011, Hugo Chavez wanted his gold back. It was stored in vaults in London—$11 billion of it; 13,000 bars of it; 160 metrics tons of it; 350,000 pounds of it; a blue whale of it—and that made things complicated: If Hugo Chavez wanted to use the gold to buy cars, or food, or fun Chavismo jackets for his loyal Chavistas, he had to call a bank and say, “please send my gold to the BMW store, or the grocery store, or to Oak Business Center in Brea, California,” and the bank could say no. The people of Venezuela owned the gold, Hugo Chavez controlled the gold, but London had the gold. For Hugo Chavez—a controversial authoritarian with a distaste for democracy and a tempting target for economic sanctions—that was no good.

But he had a problem. Hugo Chavez wanted to put his gold in Caracas, in Venezuela, and Caracas is 4,600 miles from London, with a lot of ocean in between. It is not easy to move an $11 billion mountain of precious metal 4,600 miles. You have to unload it from its vaults, and load it into trucks, and those trucks will ride low. You have to unload the trucks onto planes and boats, but planes cannot fly that far with that much cargo—Boeing’s most capable and fuel efficient freighters can only carry about 100 tons; Airbus’ dopey beluga whale can only fly 1,700 miles—and the ocean is dangerous. You have to land the planes and dock the boats and load and unload more trucks, and you have to trust everyone who does it. You have to have guards, and you have to trust the guards too.

It is easy to forget all this. Most of our money is not a pile of rocks in a vault, but a number on a spreadsheet, with a name next to it. It does not exist in London because it does not exist at all. It is in our phones, in a computer, in the cloud. We cannot Venmo $11 billion to our friends because there isn’t $11 billion dollars next to our name in the spreadsheet, and because Venmo’s terms of service say that we can’t. We can’t do it because software engineers didn’t build in the affordance.

They could, though. If Hugo Chavez wanted to Venmo himself $11 billion of dollars—digital dollars, bank account dollars, database dollars—it could be done with a few lines of code. Make a ticket; move some bits; update the spreadsheet. The only laws are the sharp edge of physics—the speed of light, the size of atoms, the amount of palladium in the earth. It is all on the computer, and on computers, we can make whatever we want.

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A friend once told me that Meta’s Oculus engineers are not allowed to wear the headsets for more than a few hours at a time. If they do, she said, they dissociate from the physical universe. They grow so accustomed to their digital hands that their real bodies start to feel like detached avatars. When you live in the Matrix, the antiquated gravity of the analog world makes you nauseous.

We are not so different, perhaps. A decade of efforts to addict us to our apps and devices made us addicted to our apps and devices, and we are more metaverse now than man. Twenty-year-olds now spend nearly ten hours a day peering into a screen. We live alone, texting, posting, commenting, watching, consuming. Our friends are digitized; our friends are bots; we aren’t sure which is which. Things we don’t like can be swiped away; things that we do can be delivered to our door.

If there’s an app for everything, we forget that we live in a world of high seas and deep oceans; of long journeys; of rocks that are hard to move. Instead, the things that happen to us feel like they happen because someone designed the system that way. Inconveniences are bugs, bad product experiences, or the selfish choices of evil men. The burrito we ordered was not a farm and farmer in Nebraska; an actual cow; a network of trucks and warehouses; a kitchen; a chef; an immigrant with a family driving a scooter through the rain, wondering where they might find the next bathroom. They are manifest, apparated, conjured into existence by a few clicks and the invisible shuffling inside of a bank’s spreadsheet.

When we are so accustomed to the tailored impermanence of internet life—feeds can be curated, text messages can be edited, broken phones can be replaced, bugs fixed, refunds issued—reality becomes unsettling. But we are all jarred back into it, sometimes. That moment when your plane bounces a little too much. When a man follows a little too close. When your gold is stuck in London. When your friend falls sick, unsolvably sick, and you are reminded that the electricity that animates them, however divine its origins, is at the mercy of our humble need for a beating heart. There is no app for that.

—

It is awful, what is happening in Los Angeles. Though the human tragedy is, so far, small—the war in Ukraine has hollowed out an entire generation; in Gaza, unknown thousands are dead; just two days ago, more than a hundred people died in an earthquake in Nepal—the images are nuclear.

We could’ve prevented it, maybe, by being better stewards of our planet. But once the fires were lit, they could not be put out; once the neighborhoods were gone, it couldn’t be undone. We could not swipe them away, revert their devastation, or buy them off.

The newspaper graphics of southern California look like maps of troop movements in history textbooks. The fire is surrounding Los Angeles, squeezing in, executing the pincer maneuver of a Panzer brigade. But this was a war between the most primordial technologies and elemental weapons: Fire and wind versus water and earth. Ash versus air. Life versus death. The fire cannot be programmed. The Santa Anas cannot be bought. There is no app for that either.

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Should days like these make us grateful to be living at this privileged edge of history, in which we’ve tamed so many of the world’s tragedies? Should we accelerate, geoengineer the climate, and move to Mars? Should we cocoon ourselves in our designer worlds, and put all of our remaining inconveniences on Silicon Valley’s collective backlog? Should we touch more grass? Should we call our parents?

No matter. The machine will roll on. The internet is in perpetual motion now; our howling vortex cannot be turned off. Parts of it may go bankrupt or get banned, but a thousand new amusements will fill the void.

—

I am in San Francisco this week, and in San Francisco, the cars drive themselves. I rode one for the first time recently. A few minutes after hailing it from my phone, a Jaguar gracefully pulled up next to me. It was unnerving at first—and then, quickly, delightful. The discomforts of city travel had been slicked away by a luxury motorcar topped with whirling fez and an incomprehensible set of autonomous calculations.

Two days ago, I saw another Waymo. It was double parked. On its right side, the person that it had blocked in was trying to get out. On its left, a city bus—tethered to cables suspended above the road, bound to its path like a train hanging from overhead tracks—was trying to inch past. The two manned cars had pinched the robot in, and it did not know what to do.

I stood watching for a minute, curious how everyone would dislodge themselves. A crush of impatient traffic was building behind them. The car was honking, the bus driver was getting frustrated, and the Waymo sat frozen. How uncomfortable, I thought, to be that passenger, helplessly sitting in their broken escape pod, with the real world suddenly bearing down on them. Our technological armor is thick and getting thicker, but life finds a way.

I wondered if there would be more collisions like this—between Jaguars and city buses, between digital runaways and those who cannot afford to be, between our expectations for instant abundance, and unyielding distances and inextinguishable fires. The more we bend our world to our will, the more loaded its bow. The more we curate our lives, the weaker our immunity to its intruders.

I do not know how long it took for the traffic to disperse. By the time I walked away, I had put my headphones on and blotted out the horns.