<nettime> 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'

[d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

Just read an eerie and insightful essay by Nick Couldry and Bruce 
Schneier's
'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'
which Identifies the fact that although we may not all be depressed we 
are more likely be suffering from  the condition of Acedia. A malady of 
medieval monks described as no longer caring about caring, a feeling of 
dislocation when all the normal future contexts that give our lives 
meaning are suspended no longer providing stable temporal horizon. Here 
is an extract. At the bottom is a link to the full essay.
"Six months into the pandemic with no end in sight, many of us have been 
feeling a sense of unease that goes beyond anxiety or distress. It’s a 
nameless feeling that somehow makes it hard to go on with even the nice 
things we regularly do.
What’s blocking our everyday routines is not the anxiety of lockdown 
adjustments, or the worries about ourselves and our loved ones — real 
though those worries are. It isn’t even the sense that, if we’re really 
honest with ourselves, much of what we do is pretty self-indulgent when 
held up against the urgency of a global pandemic. It is something more 
troubling and harder to name: an uncertainty about why we would go on 
doing much of what for years we’d taken for granted as inherently 
valuable."
"It’s here, moving back to the particular features of the global 
pandemic, that we see more clearly what drives the restlessness and 
dislocation so many have been feeling. The source of our current acedia 
is not the literal loss of a future; even the most pessimistic scenarios 
surrounding Covid-19 have our species surviving. The dislocation is more 
subtle: a disruption in pretty much every future frame of reference on 
which just going on in the present relies.
Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need horizons. 
Covid has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on, 
even if we don’t notice them very often. We don’t know how the economy 
will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be 
changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or 
local commerce will survive.
What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It’s that, if we can no 
longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, 
retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a 
future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This 
fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right 
now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the 
value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, 
such as education or institution-building. That’s what many of us are 
feeling. That’s today’s acedia." Full essay here...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/22/opinions/unrelenting-horizonlessness-of-covid-world-couldry-schneier/index.html

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