Player One: What Is to Become of Us (21 page)

Random Sequence Buzz

The small, pleasant chemical reaction experienced in the brain when hearing the next song in a randomly sequenced finite song list. Not to be confused with radio sequence buzz, wherein songs are drawn from a reasonably well defined yet still open-ended supply of music.

Rapture Goo

The stuff that gets left behind. The fact that the only thing that really defines you is your DNA. Jesus gets your DNA. That’s all he gets, roughly 7.6 milligrams of you. All the blood and guts and bones and undigested food and everything else within the ecosystem that is your body will simply grace the floor.

Red Queen’s Blog Syndrome

The more one races onto one’s blog to assert one’s uniqueness, the more generic one becomes.

Romantic Superstition

Dislike of having the romantic notion of personality reduced to a set of brain and body functions.

Rosenwald’s Theorem 

The belief that all the wrong people have self-esteem.

Sequential Dysphasia

Dysfunctional mental states do stem from malfunctions in the brain’s sequencing capacity. One commonly known short-term sequencing dysfunction is dyslexia. People unable to sequence over a slightly longer term might be “no good with directions.” The ultimate sequencing dysfunction is the inability to look at one’s life as a meaningful sequence or story.

Sequential Thinking

The ability to create and remember sequences is an almost entirely human ability (some crows have been shown to sequence). Dogs, while highly intelligent, still cannot form sequences; it’s the reason why the competitors at dog sports shows are led from station to station by handlers instead of completing the course themselves.

Sin Fatigue

When hearing about the sins of others ceases to be compelling, a condition most commonly experienced by religious and medical professionals.

Situational Disinhibition

A social contrivance within which one is allowed to become disinhibited, that is, a moment of culturally approved disinhibition. This occurs when speaking with fortune tellers, to dogs and other pets, to strangers and bartenders in bars, or with Ouija boards.

The Social Question

If you were to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you do it facing the city or facing the ocean? In answering, one is forced to wonder about the absolute extent to which social behaviour is embedded in the human psyche. “True suicides” don’t care what side of the bridge they jump from. If one gets up there and considers the question “Do I face the city or the Pacific Ocean?” then the implication is that the suicide attempt is not a hundred percent genuine.

Somnimural Release

The ability of dreams to prevent you from remembering that the dead are dead, or that vanished friends have vanished.

Somnitropic Drugs

Drugs engineered to affect one’s dream life.

Standard Deviation

Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness, yet it is the feeling of uniqueness that convinces us we have souls.

Star Shock

The disproportionate way in which meeting a celebrity feels slightly like being told a piece of life-changing news.

Stovulax

A micro-targeted drug of the future designed to stop fantastically specific OCD cases, in this case a compulsion involving the inability of some people to convince themselves after leaving the house that the stove is turned off. As science further maps the brain, such micro-targeted drugs become ever more plausible.

Technological Fatalism

An attitude positing that the next sets of triumphing technologies are going to happen no matter who invents them or where or how. The only unknown factor is the pace at which they will appear.

Time Lance

Suppose one could send a particle a millionth of a second ahead in the future. By knowing its direction and speed, one could then determine the net overall expansion direction and speed of the universe.

Time Snack

Often annoying moments of pseudo-leisure created by computers when they stop responding in order to save a file, to search for software updates, or, most likely, for no apparent reason.

Time/Will Uniqueness

The belief that awareness of time and the possession of free will are the only two characteristics that separate humans from all other creatures.

Torn-Paper Geography

The phenomenon in which, if you take a sheet of paper and rip it in half, both pieces will probably resemble an American state or Canadian province. If one continues to rip the paper, the phenomenon continues — a reflection of New World geopolitics versus the Old World. European and Asian borders are delineated by rivers, watersheds, and battlefields. New World borders are most often a mixture of rivers and the nineteenth-century Cartesian grid. Old World = people before property; New World = property before people.

Trainwreck Equilibration Theory

The belief that in the end, every family experiences an equal amount of trials, disorders, quirks, and medical dilemmas. One family might get more cancer, another might be more bipolar or schizo, but in the end it all averages out into one big train wreck per family.

Trans-human

Whatever technology made by humans that ends up becoming smarter than humans.

Trans-humane Conundrum

If technology is only a manifestation of our intrinsic humanity, how can we possibly make something smarter than ourselves?

Trigenerational Amnesia

The reluctance of most people to investigate their family tree back more than three or four generations. There are more reasons for not wanting to know than to know. Too much research could possibly destabilize one’s beliefs about oneself, beliefs that may or may not be correct.

Unchecked

“Unchecked, science and monotheism both mean to vanquish nature” — a lovely quote from Christopher Potter in
You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe
.

Undeselfing

The attempt, usually frantic and futile, to reverse the deselfing process.

Universal Sentience

The notion that apprehension of the universe by humans or other intelligence is, in a fundamental sense, the universe’s raison d’être.

Unwitting Permanence

The notion that when you, say, throw a Coke bottle off a ship’s deck to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, that bottle will remain there, unambiguously, until the sun eats up the planet. Most of the world’s landfills display unwitting permanence.

Vision Dysphasia

The counterintuitive manner in which people born blind, given vision later in life through medical advances, tend to very much dislike that vision.

Weather Test

If human beings had never existed, would the weather outside your window right now be exactly the same? Of course not. So we’ve obviously changed things. So it becomes an issue of figuring out how different the earth would have been minus human beings.

Web-Emergent Sentience Theory

The belief that globally linked computer systems will one day erupt into some new form of overriding post-human sentience. Sometimes referred to as singularity.

Web Sentience Release

The belief that this newly evolved web sentience will relieve people of the crushing need to be individual.

Why We Keep Our Distance

Once you’ve seen a person go psycho, you can never look at him or her the same way ever again.

Witness Elimination Program

The myth is that witness relocation exists, whereas people who “enter the program” are simply shot.

Zoosomnial Blurring

The notion that animals probably don’t see much difference between dreaming and being awake.

With thanks to the following for their care, thought, and research:

Thurman Allen

Debbie Audus

Steve Audus

Kathryn Bailey

Ala Bialas

Tim Bieniosek

Eve Brosseau

Jeremy Bye

Dylan Cantwell Smith

Jodi Crisp

Iam Crowley

Chelsea Damen

Monique Daviau

Elizabeth Davidson

Antonella DiFranco

Brian Draper

Elizabeth Dulley

Jaime Endick

Kevin Everest

John Fogde

Laura Foxworthy

Leanne Gebicki

Stephen Gray

K. C. Humphries

Anne Lawrence

Jessica Miller

Erik Mortensen

Kay Müller

Simon Nixon

Stephie Schlittenhardt

Erin Seiden

Goncalo Silva

Mary Silver

Mark Staples

Amanda Traphagan

Nikole Villanueva

Helena Vissing

Maria Wickens

Laura Winwood

Kate Wooley
Lara M. Zeises

DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Douglas Coupland is the international bestselling author of
Generation X
, and eleven other novels, including
The Gum Thief
,
Hey Nostradamus!
,
All Families Are Psychotic
, and
Generation A
, which was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His nonfiction books include
Marshall McLuhan
,
Polaroids from the Dead
,
Terry: The Life of Terry Fox
, and
Souvenir of Canada
. His books have been translated into thirty-five languages and published around the world. He is also a visual artist and sculptor, furniture designer and screenwriter. He lives in Vancouver, B.C.

ALSO BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Fiction

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Shampoo Planet

Life After God

Microserfs

Girlfriend in a Coma

Miss Wyoming

All Families Are Psychotic

Hey Nostradamus!

Eleanor Rigby

JPod

The Gum Thief

Generation A

Nonfiction

Polaroids from the Dead

City of Glass

Souvenir of Canada

Souvenir of Canada 2

Terry

Marshall McLuhan

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