Patrick Moreau is a professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words which think for us (Liber, 2017) and contributed to the collective work edited by R. Antonius and N. Baillargeon Identity, “race”, freedom of expressionwhich has just been published by PUL
Suddenly, in the spring of 2020, the world was remotely rocking. Almost all of us started working online, holding meetings on Zoom. Our social life has shrunk to a trickle, reduced to a shy little hello to masked people we met in the street, if they hadn’t changed sidewalks first.
The human has withdrawn into his home and his loved ones, if they were lucky enough to live at the same address – and so much the worse for those who found themselves alone in their bubble! The ballet of delivery trucks invaded deserted neighborhoods where cars were scarce. Somehow, life however continued its course, even if our old parents in CHSLD did not understand why it was now on the phone of an attendant that they could see their grandchildren saying goodbye to them. as if saying goodbye to the world before.
What is most surprising, basically, is that this distancing from the world was done without much hesitation and rather easily. Everything happened as if we were prepared for it. Of course, there was a pre-pandemic that we looked back on with nostalgia, but these upheavals that we were experiencing were made possible by means that were part of what existed long before this virus spread; a little as if this one made us realize, certainly constrained and forced, the potentialities of a future which had already pointed the tip of its nose.
To take just one example, when the Quebec government decreed that courses would henceforth be given online, universities had had more or less elaborate MOOC (open and massive online courses) projects in their boxes for several years.
In the same way, this distance learning could only be seriously envisaged, in secondary school, when the teacher had become a facilitator helping the learners to construct their knowledge. This change in the act of teaching, the fruit of the latest pedagogical reforms, carried within it, as potential, this evolution towards the virtual classroom.
Internal exile
The shift of almost all our professional activities online would not have been possible either without a tertiarization of our economies which dates back to the last decades; in any case, the transition would have been much more complicated.
In this regard, the confinement has only confirmed a break between white collar workers who have not experienced any loss of wages and have even been able to find advantage in working from home, and blue collar workers who have suffered the full brunt layoffs, the risks inherent in the contagiousness of COVID and the most annoying constraints of health measures. Miracle of globalized capitalism: this pause has not even prevented the big wheel of the economy from turning, nor Amazon and co. from reaping tremendous profits; everything was going to be fine as long as the cloistered human continued to consume.
If this confinement moreover seemed more or less tolerable to most people, it is also because we had become accustomed to this substitution sociability which had developed over the previous years by these networks which we call “social” by antiphrase. These relations by interposed screen induced, at the same time as a false familiarity with our friends who were more distant than ever, a preventive confinement of each one in his bubble.
Human relations reduced to the bare minimum, that is to say, to temporary and strictly utilitarian contact with masked delivery men did not come out of nowhere. Living together seemed to take it for the cold, but perhaps it rather revealed its superfluous nature. Indeed, human existence in this covid era was like two drops of water to that which prevailed before, when close relationships withered to the heart of families. Strangers within our relatives as well as in the neighborhood, many of us cultivated junk friendships with other lonely Internet users who did not live in the same city, or sometimes the same country.
To take such relationships seriously, we had to have already slipped a foot on the other side of the mirror and entered another universe, the result of the slow but resolute dismissal of reality. Again, our screens had something to do with it. Fifteen long years that we had our heads down, obsessed by this skylight of our telephone which did not open onto any starry sky.
Fifteen years that we lived this collective hallucination, with the added bonus of scoliosis and assured weight gain. Fifteen years since the world was chopped up, torn to pieces, reduced to its kaleidoscopic image and bursting before our eyes into billions of videos and tweets. Fifteen long years of cultivating the illusion that there was still a common world apart from that generated by algorithms behind this shimmering surface which locked us each in our reflection, in these ” clusters where opinions flourished in greenhouses. The claim of pontificating demonstrators to form the majority comes from this burning dilution of public opinion in this labyrinthine cyberspace where it is wandering.
If only this internal exile had allowed us to become aware of this other confinement which locks us up in a trompe-l’oeil window and had reminded us that the primary role of screens is to screen and therefore to put the world at a distance. If only he had led us to cultivate the stubborn feeling that life is not that, then he would not have been entirely useless. But it is to be feared that he did more than exacerbate these tendencies already present before him.