Working from Home

As someone whose worked remotely for most of the last two decades, I was fascinated by this New York Times Magazine article on the future of remote work: “What If Working From Home Goes on … Forever?”

Here’s an excerpt:

“There may also be innovations that let us use video but avoid the fatigue of decoding one another’s faces. One example is Loom.ai, a new chat app that lets you use a regular videoconferencing app — Zoom, Microsoft Teams — except you appear as an avatar. Stylistically, the avatars have the approachable, cartoony style of Apple’s ‘memoji,’ except here they have a torso and arms. Users can customize their onscreen cartoon to resemble themselves if they want.”

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The Future of Porn

The future world I'm foretelling in my novel-in-progress is coming true. Meet deepfakes, if you haven't already. Videos of female celebrities' faces transposed onto the moving bodies of porn stars in homemade, app-enabled content clips. Truly. Fucking. Bizarre. Sometimes it's the lack of the Frankenstein quality that's what's freaky. Sometimes it's the disconcerting placement of an ill-placed face not seamless situated across another's body. As my novel wonders, speculatively: What does this mish-mash do to the entities from which they were taken? When your expression, your limbs, your breath is combined with another's, will it change you?

In the Future of Breast Cancer

In the future, your little black dress will have a sexy cutout that reveals your portacath, or, after treatment, the scar it leaves behind. In the future, your IV bag filled with liquid chemotherapy will bear the logo befitting your economic class (Walmart, J.Crew, Louis Vuitton). In the future, the GM breast implants for your reconstruction will not be optional but required. In the future, your surgical oncologist will appear on QVC hawking his or her branded line of scalpels. In the future, your cancer stage will be trademarked. In the future, you will travel to Las Vegas for treatment, and there will be an entire hotel and casino filled with bald women playing high-stakes games of risk, and you will feel at home amidst the malignancies.