Кори Доктороу - Make Shift - Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

Critics initially feared that jaunts would cheapen the experience of travel and, by being too easy to fit into our increasingly attention-starved modernity, remove leisure travel as one of the only ways left for us to depart from the everyday and reflect on our inner lives. But experience has proven these fears unfounded. Travelers take jaunts far more frequently than physical trips, often returning to the same place multiple times over a period of weeks or months (we all probably know of a friend who goes to the same noodle stall in Taipei every day for ten minutes just to watch the owner pull the noodles by hand). They form deep, sustained connections with a place and the individuals in that place, gaining insights into the human condition deeper and more authentic than could ever be obtained during a week-long physical vacation in a tourist trap overrun with crowds.

Jaunts have completely transformed the landscape of global tourism. Gone are the days when global tours were both too expensive to be truly accessible to the less-than-affluent and too cheap to prevent ecological disaster and cultural commodification. Nowadays, more people are touring distant places than at any point in history, but their impact on the environment, both physical and cultural, is also much lighter and less destructive. Instead of flocking to the same places that everyone else does, tourists can go to places far off the beaten path—the Nene Be has essentially opened up the tourist economy to entrepreneurial residents and communities in remote hamlets and rural sanctuaries without the requirement for costly infrastructure or putting their fragile way of life at risk. By transporting presences instead of atoms, teletourism is a magical spell that has given us the best of all outcomes.

To be sure, not everyone is convinced of the benefits of jaunts. So-called populist political parties in the West as well as repressive regimes elsewhere have taken advantage of the rise of teletourism to further restrict the movements of refugees, journalists, and migrants seeking a better life elsewhere. We must remain ever vigilant against the virulent possibilities when good ideas are twisted to serve dark purposes.

To that end, I also believe that jaunts offer the potential to subvert the traditional power imbalances between outbound tourist source regions—which tend to be more economically developed and Western—and inbound tourist destination regions—many of which are less developed and suffer from a legacy of colonial oppression. While many tourists from Boston, for example, visit Xhong villages in Vietnam and Laos, very few Xhong tourists can afford to visit this city. This is why my company has formed a partnership with anti-colonialist and anti-racist activists to develop programs to help more teletourists from the Xhong and other indigenous peoples to come visit places like Boston. As the United States has grown ever more hostile to immigration and voices from around the world, teletour jaunts, which require no visas and no border searches, may be the best way to challenge this trend.

Joanna Tung is the founder of Teletourists Without Borders, a nonprofit dedicated to developing sustainable models of cultural exchange that reverse the legacy of colonial exploitation. She also hosts jaunts to her office in Vietnam on JauntsNow at the following BnB code: DXHHWU-TCU.

Excerpt from Be My Guest , a documentary series focusing on the lives of JauntsNow hosts and guests, first shown May 203X

[THE CAMERA IS ON AL BURTON, SEVENTIES, STROLLING THROUGH BOSTON COMMON.From time to time, he stops to examine a flowerbed or a birdfeeder by the side of the path.]

I never traveled much back then. In twenty years my wife and I took the kids on two trips, one to Thailand, another to Mexico. After she died, I didn’t go anywhere at all except to fish on the Cape once a year. Running a dry cleaning shop is a lot of work. Too much.

But I had no work for those months during the pandemic. Even after the lockdown ended, business was terrible. The virus moved in and made itself comfortable. People didn’t go to the office; they didn’t get dressed up; they didn’t need to have their clothes dry-cleaned. I had no choice but to shut it down. My life’s work. Gone.

[Ken Burns-style panning over photos Burton took of his shop before he shuttered it. The place had been meticulously and lovingly cleaned.]

I was sitting at home when I got this coupon by email, telling me that I could go on trips to China, Vietnam, Mexico, Costa Rica… wherever I wanted for just fifteen bucks. I thought it was a scam—or maybe the airlines were so desperate to get people to fly again that they were willing to sell tickets at a loss. I knew they were having trouble with the protesters at the airports and the cruise ship docks.

So I took them up on the offer. Put in my credit card info to lock up a spot.

And only then did I find out that they weren’t talking about real trips, but trips where they put you in control of a robot already there.

[Shots of surviving specimens of the first generation of crude Nene Be teletour robots, most of them about the size of a domestic cat. Even controlling them can be a chore. We see Al miming his clumsy attempts to use a phone as a physical gesture control device for the faraway robot, tapping the screen to make the robot move and shifting the phone itself about like a tiny portal to get a look at his remote surroundings.]

At first I thought about backing out and asking for my money back. I didn’t even like the idea of chatting on a webcam with the kids, much less with strangers. It felt like something for young people, not me. But then I thought: why not? If I really hated it I could just hit the “disconnect” button. Not like I would be stuck overseas, right?

Because I paid so little for my ticket, they couldn’t get me into Tokyo or Bangkok or Dubai; instead, I ended up in northern Japan, a tiny town called Bifuka, in Hokkaido. The robot was located at the rail station, which hardly got any passengers, a handful every week, maybe. When I arrived, it was deserted. But I liked how clean and neat it was. Made me feel at ease right away. I could tell it was a place that people loved.

[The camera shows the lone, single-room station next to the train track. The deep blue sky is dotted with sheep-like clouds. Inside, we see a table, a few stools, posters, maps, the floor swept free of all dust, a tiny skittering robot, its single-board computer guts exposed, roaming about.]

I learned to move myself about with my phone until I could climb the wall like a spider and read the Japanese posters with machine translation overlays. I bumbled my way out of the door and rolled along next to the tracks until I reached the limit of the wireless signal at the station. The view went on and on all the way to the horizon, a vastness that soothed my heart. I couldn’t believe how fun it was. I giggled like a kid. I never even thought about going to Japan, and here I was.

I don’t know how to explain it. After months and months of being locked up inside my house, seeing my business crumble, not being able to go anywhere, worrying about friends and neighbors dying—being there, under the sky in Japan, looking at Japanese mountains and grass and trains, that gave me hope. That did.

On the way rolling back to the station, I met a man who was about my age, just out walking. I was never the type to talk with strangers, but it felt odd to say nothing when we were the only two humans—well, human and human-in-a-bot—for miles. I didn’t want to use the machine translation—didn’t trust it. So I just waved an arm and said “Hello” in English. He understood that, at least, and nodded at me through the camera, saying a greeting in Japanese. We stood in the road like that, me looking up at him, him looking down at me in the screen on the robot, not knowing what else to do except smiling and waving. But it didn’t feel awkward, you know? After maybe twenty seconds, he nodded and I nodded, and we parted ways.