Future Sex (26 page)

Some people would remain committed to the institution of marriage, but I hoped that married partnership would cease to be seen as a totalizing end point and instead become something more modest, perhaps an institutional
basis for shared endeavors such as raising children or making art. Open marriages had already lost stigma. Practice would make us better at the emotional management of multiple concurrent relationships. We would have more overt experience in free love, more evidence to work with. “Failed” marriages would no longer be interpreted as personal failure.

I found that I wanted all that, but mostly
I wanted to live in a world with a wider range of sexual identities. I hoped the primacy and legitimacy of a single sexual model would continue to erode as it has, with increasing acceleration, in the past fifty years.

*   *   *

I spent only a few months in San Francisco, but the city just happened to be a synecdoche, where the post-1960s combination of computers and sexual diversity was especially
concentrated. It was like Epcot, in a way, an experimental prototype city of tomorrow informed by queerness and dedicated to sexual experimentation. You could tour it and leave with a showcase world of sexual options in mind.

I first went to San Francisco in 2012. Then I left. When I returned a couple years later, San Francisco felt different. Nobody wore Google T-shirts anymore. Protesters had
begun throwing rocks at the buses that took employees down to the peninsula. The city was going through some changes, shedding a carapace that had kept it in the past. Peace signs still hung in the windows of the head shops and thrift stores on Haight Street, but the city kept getting sleeker, more expensive, more uniform in appearance.

On this visit I stayed at the apartment in the Mission of
a computer programmer whom I had met on OkCupid back in 2012. Now we were friends, and he offered the use of his place while he went east to train for a new job. Before he left, we spent an afternoon walking around the city. We walked to Dolores Park, dazed in the sunshine of the longest drought in California history. My friend ordered a tofu banh mi from a food truck. We sat in the grass in the
warm January sun next to a woman wearing socks, sandals, and a mélange of colorful scarves. We watched as she encountered a man similarly attired, and the way that they saluted each other made us exchange glances.

“Now we’re going to hear people talk about some things that aren’t real,” my companion said. He was the sort of person who had actually tried to find medical evidence for the medicinal
properties of kombucha (very little, it turned out). He had disdain for the apparent suspension of reason he saw practiced around him.

We took a bus to Golden Gate Park, then walked to Hippie Hill and smoked a joint. In front of us, a pod of crust punks dozed peacefully on a picnic blanket, holding the leash of a velvety tabby cat that stared up at the trees in a state of perpetual alarm. One
of the punks, her dreadlocks covered in a scarf, stood up and began hula hooping in a desultory manner. If you took away the signifiers of a crust punk (velvety dogs and cats, hula hoops) would they just be ordinary homeless people? Does political intention make a crust punk different from a mentally ill person, or a drug addict? It was the same old question, whether a declaration of purpose might
protect you from failure. The sun setting in our eyes and the drone of a nearby drum circle produced in me a low-level nausea. A man on Rollerblades tried to sell us one of his glass pipes. My friend wondered if most of the people on Rollerblades in the park were selling things. We stood up and went to Amoeba Records.

On the bus home, a man with leathery tan skin and long hair yelled at everyone
around him about the villainy of our cell phones. “Do you know where the metal in that thing came from?” he said, glaring at a young woman with a phone in her hand. “Have you heard of fire and brimstone?” He pronounced us morons; yelled that the phones were starting wars; described hellish mines and rare-earth minerals. He tried hitting on the woman he had antagonized, asking her out on a date.
“I’m from New Zealand,” he concluded angrily, and got off the bus. He had not spoken with a discernable accent. “Like nobody’s ever heard of New Zealand,” my friend said.

My host left and I dutifully watered his bamboo twice a week, his succulents once a week, and carefully rinsed the epiphytes under the faucet. I did all my favorite California things. I drank expensive cappuccinos, ate cheap
tacos, and listened to his carefully organized collection of house music. Most of the records featured tuneless singing in German or French over synthesized beats. I thought about the little jar he had shown me in a drawer, containing several Altoid mints covered in tinfoil, which he said I should feel free to try, if I felt like it.

One day, on a Thursday around midday, I took one. I lay on
the bed and watched patterns emerge on the white wall in front of me. I felt the sun passing through the windows, filtering between the leafy plants and pressing on my eyelids. I ate a cookie and wrote a line in a notebook about “a post-cookie lull, a feeling I had acknowledged but never admitted to.” I took more useful notes: “Feeling of being led to a sandbox by a child, dumped, and playing with
incredibly heavy sand,” and: “Mind still empty, revolving like a bicycle in an empty velodrome around all the old concerns.”

Several hours in, I walked toward Dolores Park to sit on the grassy hill. I walked down Eighteenth Street alongside the strollers, passing the tourists eating pastries outside Tartine and pizza at Delfina. I sat in the grass in the park. I was looking at my phone to look
normal when a squadron of women flew around me from behind. They ran down the hill in formation, dressed in matching tank tops and short shorts, dispensing Red Bull to picnickers from canisters worn on their backs like rocket boosters. I went back to the apartment and longed for a tactile dome with a light show to amuse me. I did not feel very introspective, only bored and restless. Ten hours in,
when I thought I could act sufficiently normal, I went to Bi-Rite and bought an ice cream.

On my last Friday in town, I used Google to map a route to Menlo Park and went to lunch with a friend who worked at Facebook. Via public transportation, it took something like two hours to get to Facebook, riding first the BART and then switching to the top deck of a clanging red double-decker CalTrain
that vented hot air as it rolled prehistorically along El Camino Real. On a city bus from the train station toward Facebook HQ, the bus stopped at a Veterans’ Hospital—the same Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital, I presumed, where Ken Kesey had taken LSD for the first time. It seemed impossible that anything of cultural import had fermented in such a wasteland but it was here, and within a few miles of
here, that it had all happened: the People’s Computer Company, the creative writing grad students taking acid on Perry Lane, the offices of the
Whole Earth Catalog
, all of it as impossible to transplant to the Menlo Park of now as it was to overlay the memory of a down-and-out folk scene over the Chipotles and Juice Generations in Greenwich Village. After disembarking from the bus, I walked past
a strip mall with a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant and a Starbuck’s. Then the sidewalk dissolved into some sand along the shoulder of a busy six-lane road next to a construction site. The road reached its terminus at a giant thumbs-up, which marked the entrance to Facebook’s offices. Before it was the kind of hellish sun-beaten multifaceted pedestrian intersection that exists only in suburban environments
where there are no pedestrians. I was late, and anxiously pressed buttons on poles to hasten the walk lights to the thumbs-up on the other side. I should have rented a car. They had apps for these situations.

I passed through Facebook’s gates along a street called Hacker Way, the noise of the concrete outside muted into soft black asphalt. At midday, the parking lot that formed a perimeter around
Facebook was filled with stationary cars and empty of people. Electric car chargers emitted a low hum. Perimeters within perimeters, one demanding a finger signature on a nondisclosure agreement drawn up on a glowing tablet computer, some Hi-Chews pilfered from the candy bowl next to it, past a flat-screen television on which a shiny-faced Mark Zuckerberg stood and lectured with the volume on
mute, and then I was with my friend in the inner sanctum, the amusement park village with its simulacra of urbanity. In the screen-printing shop, an archive of Facebook propaganda hung on the wall, brightly colored hand-printed posters that read
EVENTUALLY EVERYTHING CONNECTS
,
PRIDE CONNECTS US
,
SYSTEMS FOR SOCIETY
,
IF IT WORKS IT’S OBSOLETE
, and, in traffic-light colors,
SLOW DOWN AND FIX YOUR SHIT
.

When Stewart Brand described Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence lab in the pages of
Rolling Stone
in 1972, he described the beanbag room, the beards and long hair, the posters against the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, and signs written in
Lord of the Rings
Elvish Feanorian script. He described hackers as “those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology
which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what’s possible.” This was the feeling that Facebook was trying hard to convince itself it was keeping alive.

I left after a lunch of stuffed squash, quinoa, a green juice, and a papaya agua fresca, ejected back into the beating sun and traffic but this time holding a rolled-up
poster of a wrench overlaid with the words “Nothing at Facebook Is Somebody Else’s Problem” and with a button pinned to my tote bag that asked, “Is Connectivity a Human Right?” I waited under the fat droughty sun for a bus, then crossed into the shade of the Jack-in-the-Box and called a cab.

*   *   *

The beauty of science fiction was that its authors never had to work out the logistics of how
we would arrive in the future. The future was presented as a fait accompli, and the difficult work by which a society accepted new social configurations did not have to be explained. From the vantage point of the present, it was easier to think that the future would be like
The Jetsons
, where families would look exactly the same, but labor would be outsourced to robots and intelligent appliances.
The last fifty years of social movements had already rendered that vision of the future obsolete. At the very least, the Jetsons would be a two-income household.

I had spent most of my adult life looking for some scene that did not feel as if its stated ideals were thinly veiled sales pitches but I had found it only a handful of times, in the always-impermanent dynamics of particular groups of
friends at particular moments in time, on psychedelics, in the wilderness, occasionally in writing. I had wanted to seek out a higher principle of life than the search for mere contentment, to pursue emotional experiences that could not be immediately transposed to a party of young people in a cell phone ad, even if it meant delving into ugliness, contracting an STD, or lifting my shirt to entice
someone jerking off over the Internet. There was no industry of dresses and gift registries for the sexuality that interested me in these years, and some part of the reason I wanted to document what free love might look like was to reveal shared experiences of the lives we were living that fell outside a happiness that could be bought or sold.

America had a lot of respect for the future of objects,
and less interest in the future of human arrangements. The history of the sexual vanguard in America was a long list of people who had been ridiculed, imprisoned, or subjected to violence. So it was annoying to hear the hubris of technologists, while knowing that gadgetry or convenience in telecommunication was the easy kind of futurism, the kind that attracted money. A real disruption or hack
was a narration that did not make any sense to us the first time it was told, that would provoke too much repugnance to show in a cell phone ad.

To experience sexuality was to have a body that pursued a feeling, a dot in the distance toward which it must move. We wanted to follow the body into a more progressive future, to think there might be some intuition to rely upon, but the number of people
any one life contained was finite. A data set was just a data set; the flying machines were carcasses of coltan and steel. The future was a discomfiting cultural story, and difficult to discern.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their help with this book, the author would like to thank Mitzi Angel, Edward Orloff, Lorin Stein, Keith Gessen, Christian Lorentzen, Mark Lotto, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Center for the Arts, Lawrence Wilson and Rebekah Werth, Anna Lai, Tobias Bürger, Torsten Bender, Les and Ellen Hersh, Tao Lin, Jessica Wurst, Emily Brochin, the Power Broker Book Club, Chris Mancuso, and Stephen, Leonard, and Diana Witt.

A Note About the Author

Emily Witt
has written for
The New Yorker
,
n
+
1
,
The New York Times
, and the
London Review of Books
. She studied at Brown University, Columbia University, and the University of Cambridge, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Mozambique. She grew up in Minneapolis and lives in Brooklyn. You can sign up for email updates
here
.