The father of era X returns to dissect the anxieties of the person within the period of social networks | Culture | EUROtoday

The yr was 1989. Douglas Coupland, then only a 28-year-old Canadian promoting copywriter employed by a writer to write down an essay concerning the boomerssettled within the Mojave Desert and commenced to form a novel with a fragmented structure—items of cloudy sky, right here and there, that’s, photographs like prehistoric banners— that I had by no means deliberate to write down and that not solely gave title however above all content material, prefiguration, to a era. The stormy and unhappy era romantic love

The clearest instance of what Coupland labeled in Generation It is Ben Stiller’s cinematic traditional The harsh actualitywhich starred Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder, two icons of the time. “I didn’t even pretend to be a writer. “I ended up being one by accident,” Coupland once said, who since the publication of that text in 1991 has delivered a work – novels, collections of stories and essays – every two, three or four years, including the award-winning and extremely visionary novel Microserfs (1995). Until 2013, when he began a hiatus during which he dedicated himself to art—he made a pixelated whale and a sculpture that visitors had to modify with their chewed gum, among other things—which closed in 2021 with the publication in English of Binge (Binge), a collection of 60 short stories edited now in Spanish by Alianza with translation by Juan Gabriel López Guix.

The same label is also preparing the reissue of Generation y Microserfsat a time of renewed interest in the work of the Canadian author. Perhaps because of his ability to dissect the anxieties and challenges of the hyperconnected society. Coupland’s works of fiction, today a 62-year-old guy far from the spotlight to the point that communicating with him is an impossible mission — he has avoided the request for an interview with EL PAÍS for weeks and has not answered questions of any kind for years -, detail a society of unique individuals domesticated, destroyed and collectivized by capitalism, the system that, in search of clients, turns everything it touches into a product – relationships, people, everything that can be felt – and , At the same time, it alienates and distances its inhabitants from reality, subjecting them to an infantilization that prevents them from maturing. All they are is all they desire, and they desire without consequences, like children or, better yet, like adolescents. The only way out of this overdose of oneself is a upgrade of product, to be another, to be reborn in your own body.

It happens to one of the characters in the microstories of Binge. The protagonist of ComRom She doesn’t know why she’s alive. “I contribute zero to society,” it’s stated. “It seems paradoxical to me that, despite my general uselessness, if you killed me, you would still have to go to prison for murder.” “I don’t want to be dead, but I don’t want to be me. I’ve been doing it for 52 years and it hasn’t gotten me anywhere,” he repeats. I am of no use among so much product, so why exist?

More than a critique of the system, Coupland’s fiction performs an autopsy, since in his stories capitalism seems to operate from a beyond in which the human being is a collection of neuroses barely held together by an idea of ​​the self invaded by desire. of being an infinite number of others. Their characters are pieces of a gear that have forgotten that they were once more than just pieces of that gear. What defines them are their weaknesses, what makes them unique, in the worst of ways. The future, for them, is a pure mirage, a hamster wheel that doesn’t plan to stop. All of this developed with an endearingly wild sense of humor, a peculiar pop absurdity that has greatly influenced the fiction of this 21st century, from Alexandra Kleeman to Sheila Heti, through Paul Murray and the Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen.

What mediates between that Microserfsthe first glimpse, precarious and alienating, of life on the other side, that is, inside the computer screen – the protagonists are geeky office workers, an approximation to a prehistoric Silicon Valley devoid of all glamor – and this Binge It is a sophistication of the way in which Coupland approaches the loss of innocence and any type of hope from the most hopeful of worlds: the one that seeks to sell perfection and, at the same time, a standardization that in the age of Instagram has made the human being its own product.

Perhaps the Canadian writer and artist who was born in West Germany has done nothing else in all this time than write what he could not write in the Mojave Desert. A long treatise—in fiction—on the boomersor better, its consequences. After all, his characters are deluded and immature adults, terribly spoiled big children, condemned to live in a world of inaccessible desires. A world divided into clients and employees and in which, as the title of one of his classics says, All families are psychotic (2001), because they cannot not be.

“I am curious about the moment when personality becomes a pathology,” he wrote not too way back, satisfied that the period of social media is accelerating the erasure of what makes us distinctive and selling the product—the self. similar, what he calls “autophobia”, the concern of being totally different. “Let’s be sincere, being distinctive is just not simple. It’s very exhausting. It is best to be like the remainder, and really feel alone and on the similar time a part of one thing. Today’s human being is just not ready to suppose for himself,” he dominated in that very same essay, printed on the event of the thirtieth anniversary of the arrival of Generation to bookstores, in that distant 1991 wherein the top of the century was a menace and, on the similar time, a possibility that the world was clearly going to overlook. Hence all that bizarrely nostalgic anguish that continues to be intact as we speak as a result of all the pieces was misplaced even then.