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.
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 Aud
us
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
THE MASSEY LECTURES SERIES
The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former Governor General of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.
This book comprises the 2010 Massey Lectures, “Player One: What Is to Become of Us, A Novel in Five Hours,” broadcast in November 2010 as part of CBC Radio’s Ideas series. The producer of the series was Philip Coulter; the executive producer was Bernie Lucht.
THE CBC MASSEY LECTURES SERIES
The Wayfinders
Wade Davis
ISBN 978-0-88784-842-1
eISBN 978-0-88784-969-5
Payback
Margaret Atwood
ISBN 978-0-88784-810-0
eISBN 978-0-88784-872-8
More Lost Massey Lectures
Bernie Lucht, ed.
ISBN 978-0-88784-801-8
eISBN 978-0-88784-866-7
The City of Words
Alberto Manguel
ISBN 978-0-88784-763-9
eISBN 978-0-88784-849-0
The Lost Massey Lectures
Bernie Lucht, ed.
ISBN 978-0-88784-217-7
eISBN 978-0-88784-864-3
The Ethical Imagination
Margaret Somerville
ISBN 978-0-88784-747-9
eISBN 978-0-88784-883-4
Race Against Time
Stephen Lewis
ISBN 978-0-88784-753-0
eISBN 978-0-88784-875-9
A Short History of Progress
Ronald Wright
ISBN 978-0-88784-706-6
eISBN 978-0-88784-843-8
The Truth About Stories
Thomas King
ISBN 978-0-88784-696-0
eISBN 978-0-88784-895-7
Beyond Fate
Margaret Visser
ISBN 978-0-88784-679-3
eISBN 978-0-88784-846-9
The Cult of Efficiency
Janice Gross Stein
ISBN 978-0-88784-678-6
eISBN 978-0-88784-880-3
The Rights Revolution
Michael Ignatieff
ISBN 978-0-88784-762-2
eISBN 978-0-88784-892-6
The Triumph of Narrative
Robert Fulford
ISBN 978-0-88784-645-8
eISBN 978-0-88784-894-0
Becoming Human
Jean Vanier
ISBN 978-0-88784-809-4
eISBN 978-0-88784-845-2
The Elsewhere Community
Hugh Kenner
ISBN 978-0-88784-607-6
eISBN 978-0-88784-882-7
The Unconscious Civilization
John Ralston Saul
ISBN 978-0-88784-731-8
eISBN 978-0-88784-896-4
On the Eve of the Millennium
Conor Cruise O'Brien
ISBN 978-0-88784-559-8
eISBN 978-0-88784-870-4
Democracy on Trial
Jean Bethke Elshtain
ISBN 978-0-88784-545-1
eISBN 978-0-88784-854-4
Twenty-First Century Capitalism
Robert Heilbroner
ISBN 978-0-88784-534-5
eISBN 978-0-88784-897-1
The Malaise of Modernity
Charles Taylor
ISBN 978-0-88784-520-8
eISBN 978-0-88784-886-5
Biology as Ideology
R. C. Lewontin
ISBN 978-0-88784-518-5
eISBN 978-0-88784-847-6
The Real World of Technology
Ursula Franklin
ISBN 78-0-88784-636-6
eISBN 978-0-88784-891-9
Necessary Illusions
Noam Chomsky
ISBN 978-0-88784-574-1
eISBN 978-0-88784-868-1
Compassion and Solidarity
Gregory Baum
ISBN 978-0-88784-532-1
eISBN 978-0-88784-851-3
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
Doris Lessing
ISBN 978-0-88784-521-5
eISBN 978-0-88784-874-2
Latin America
Carlos Fuentes
ISBN 978-0-88784-665-6
eISBN 978-0-88784-862-9
Nostalgia for the Absolute
George Steiner
ISBN 978-0-88784-594-9
eISBN 978-0-88784-869-8
Designing Freedom
Stafford Beer
ISBN 978-0-88784-547-5
eISBN 978-0-88784-855-1
The Politics of the Family
R. D. Laing
ISBN 78-0-88784-546-8
eISBN 978-0-88784-889-6
The Real World of Democracy
C. B. Macpherson
ISBN 978-0-88784-530-7
eISBN 978-0-88784-890-2
The Educated Imagination
Northrop Frye
ISBN 78-0-88784-598-7
eISBN 978-0-88784-881-0
Available in fine bookstores and at www.anansi.ca
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, and 2010 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”