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Tourism

Jacqueline Jenkins

[The following transcript is from a presentation made in 2124, during the early drive for member subscriptions to the first EmoTerra resorts. The transcript is included for its early historical value, and forms part of the exhibition that commemorates the completion of the one-thousandth EmoTerra destination, and the tenth EmoTerra interplanetary colony. For more information about the exhibition, please visit EmoTerra: a World of Feelings. Annotations added to this transcript in footnotes are provided by the curator and are offered for historical context only.]

[Transcript begins:]

Hello? … Has everyone found a seat and adjusted their audio? Okay, great, let’s begin.

There was a time, the oldest ones say, when the feelings we felt were as free and uncontainable as the river waters that used to flow. This was long ago now, in the time before the Water Wars, and long before the final pandemic of the modern age. In this time, the emotions we experienced were as vibrant as the colours of the flowers that still grew, our heads teeming with these sensations even as the seas once did with fish, intensity buzzing in our brains like the insistence of long-extinct bees. Anger, grief, fear, love, longing, joy: words in stories now, but then as sharp and vivid as the remembered taste of spice.

This was a time, the oldest among us remember, when emotions could be wildly unpredictable, even unpleasantly so. Emotions made us human, it was argued, but unrestrained emotions, it was also believed, compromised our ancestors’ judgement, caused social disruption and familial discord, undermined logic and logical decision making, upended best laid plans and squandered precious hours more usefully spent in acquiring resources or reputation, for instance. We know now that two things happened simultaneously at the start of the sixth industrial age: the regulation of individual feelings required to engage productively in the full range of social communities began to erode, even as state powers began to identify the long-term possibilities intrinsic in a workforce and citizenry less fettered by emotions.

We can see with hindsight our ancestors’ inability to recognise the role that emotions played in their own mental health as well as in the broader social stability, and we recognise now the speed with which the loss of feeling ramped up as the pre-posthuman age drew to a close. The erosion of the ability to experience emotions naturally and meaningfully seems to have started with a general lack of social empathy, marked by a numbness in response to the sufferings of others far and near, and a rapid decline in civility in the public sphere, personal life, and across all media, but especially what was then unironically called the ‘social media.’ Social numbness and social incivility emerged alongside each other, a chilling product of a century of war and hate politics; hopelessness in the face of unheeded climate crisis and recurring viral pandemics; social isolation and the inward turn towards the virtual and AI companionship. AI companionship in particular is now understood as a principal factor in the severing of the intimate connections which require the interplay of emotion and affective engagement. However, no one in the early years of the technological revolution could have anticipated the long-term and wide-spread consequences of the decline in literacy and the engagement with human-made art: as people read, told and imagined their own and others’ stories less and less, societies lost the capacity for empathy and compassion.1

An unprecedented affective flatness grew up alongside this loss of empathy, such that all emotion, the range of feelings humans used to feel, became increasingly difficult to access as the digital mediascapes and virtual realities continued to evolve, and as humans marched towards their own digital evolution. Ironically, one of the most common fears expressed by the public voices resistant to the dawn of the posthuman age was that those generative machines we relied on in the brave new world would become more like us, become better at being us than we were.2 They couldn’t see the future looming right in front of them: that humans would inevitably, tragically, become more like the machines we now served, emotional registers flattened, the unsteadiness of human feelings replaced with a consistency of affect that left no capacity for the terrible highs and terrible lows of bio-emotional life.

At the same time, the leaders of these societies accepted the philosophies of those who proposed that the most effective form of altruism would be to limit human capacity for emotional excess, as excessive emotion was understood to stand in the way of the necessary evolution of the species.3 Persuaded of the moral value in the long-term view, these same leaders adopted measures we now recognise as central to the modification in our emotional capacity and the transformation from bio-sentience to digital-life and the new digital-mind. Initially, the measures were passive: simply allowing the growing pharma-pollution to seep through the public water supplies had an enormous effect in developing emotional flatness in the larger cities and silencing the voices of those most urgently pressing for social change. For instance, the records demonstrate that in the decades following the last great civil protests, the increase in pharma-pollution coincided with decreasing social unrest and decreasing public demands for social justice. This period of civil peace in the city-states was celebrated by the political and technology leaders as the Great Revolution, and silently adopted as a pharma-solution in towns and villages over the rest of the world, where the citizenry was increasingly exposed to deliberately adulterated drinking water. Nearly simultaneously, the new virtual worlds that began to open up as the natural world around us burned exceeded our ancestors’ wildest imaginations, and the flatness of their emotional lives and affective experiences only increased. Emotions were now widely understood to be inconvenient to the march of humanity’s progress: they impeded individuals’ own easy lives by asserting desire and disagreement, and obstructed the larger, long-term visions conjured by the leaders.

Yet not all of our ancestors agreed.4 Resistance to the posthuman programme can be traced across the period, though it was cautious and often coded, as bio-sentients or legacy humans (the term most commonly used then) feared being easily identified. In defiance of the virtual realities, early bio-sentients nurtured a collective sensory nostalgia for experiences and engagements most could only dimly recall, and worked to preserve the capacity to live an embodied life. They clung to literary and visual and auditory sensations, and slowly in their resistance small groups of legacy humans found each other. It is because of their struggle and their refusal to submit that we are able to be here today, that EmoTerra resorts exist, and that you have the opportunity when you visit us to feel again the emotions they fought to preserve knowledge of.

EmoTerra resorts are committed to providing share-holders with a place to feel freely, a promise built into our name and our brand, a combination of those emotions we celebrate and a tribute to the place where we once experienced those emotions openly. As you will see, at EmoTerra we honour legacy humans’ early resistance in several of our buildings, décor and resort activities: for instance, in our many activities we memorialise the historic opposition to the loss of emotional experience that shaped pre-posthuman popular cultural texts and visual sources. You can, as only one example, play with your children on the rides and games that recall the antique training manual of human emotions known at that time as ‘Inside/Out,’ the historic film that retells the important roles each emotion plays in pre-posthuman characters’ minds.5 You will also find many areas at our resorts where you can explore curated sensory experiences, for instance, of music keyed to highly emotional auditory chords and melodies, or performative scenarios where members may explore the feelings associated with grief or anger in thoughtfully managed environments. We cannot guarantee that you will cry in these treatments, but we can assure you that many of our recent guests have been able to cry when listening to these moving sounds or participating in these carefully structured conversations – please see the many testimonials included in the information package you received at the door.

Before we move to a discussion of the privileges and obligations of membership in EmoTerra resorts at the open-house event next door, I’m happy to answer any questions you might have at this time.

[inaudible comment….]

Yes, thank you, that’s a good question. Share-holders pay a one-time fee to become resort members; that membership provides you with the opportunity to secure your annual holiday at any one of our resorts. The cost to members for one of our one-week, or multi-week, packages is provided in the package you have received, and we will provide more detail in the next part of our meeting. But, yes, you pay a one-time fee for membership, and then the costs related to securing your chosen annual holiday package. You are not committed to visiting only one resort (though differential fees for the different resorts may apply), and I want to assure you that only vetted members may enter any of the EmoTerra resorts.

[inaudible comment …..]

That’s also a great question, thank you. Right now we have curated experiences for all of the recognised emotions at our resorts, but as our research advances, we will continue to develop new and deeper experiences for our guests. We have had particularly good success accessing experiences of joy and pleasure, as well as those of grief and sadness, and loneliness and betrayal. Several of our newer resorts have already built curated experiences of anger and rage, as you may have heard, and we are intending to expand these curations to all of our existing resorts within the next year.

Any last questions?

[inaudible comment …]

Absolutely, I can attempt to speak to this briefly here, but our medical scientists will be better able to explain the process in the following session. We have developed a proprietary bio-based supplement, derived from ancient plant-life used historically in spiritual rituals; this anti-blocker supplement overrides the chemical blocking agents pervasive in our environments; moreover the bio-based properties open up the cognitive pathways that lead to emotional perceptiveness. When you have booked your annual holiday, we will provide you with these anti-blocking supplements; you will need to start the process before arriving at your resort, but once you arrive, our staff will care for you during the detox period before your holiday begins.

Okay, thank you all for your patience and I invite you to move to the next room for the following sessions. I look forward to meeting each of you at the reception later.

[applause and scattered sounds of conversation follow. End of Transcript.]