Refusing to accept the boundaries of your own and others’ homes is also the definition of a pandemic. A…

Refusing to accept the boundaries of your own and others’ homes is also the definition of a pandemic. A travel culture is a pandemic culture. Ecologically pathogens are controlled by strictly controlling access to territory. But that’s all life too. /1 https://t.co/zB0eftFUzP https://t.co/88a5uLqtvV

All life lives in ecosystems, in niches. The building and maintaining of those niches in interaction with other living things sustains life, making it possible. A culture that respects no place in that way, that thinks only of continuous movement, breeds pathogenic life. /2

At home we trash our own ecosystems, turning them into housing developments and vast acreages of mono-cultural farms. Abroad we transform all locations into theme parks for our enjoyment, forcing locals to become servants in maintaining their own homes as an image. /3

An image of how we want that place to be, for our enjoyment. A theme park, like a Disneyland ‘world’. The locals lose their own homes, and their cultures become FIFO cultures totally dependent on the tourist dollar to survive. It’s a type of ecological rape. /4

All of this is traced back to our own culture, remnant imperial cultures of the conquest and accumulation of territory. For no other purpose than to accumulate it. We don’t even see our travel obsession as a simple continuation of our imperial past. But it’s what it is. /5

The childish philosophy underlying this is that we need to visit these places to ‘experience’ them. As with human relationships, we have no right to experience them, just as we have no right to shag every person who walks past us. A relationship is a commitment, to place. /6

Not a FIFO, Tinder-style enjoyment. We’re literally fucking the world, and we have our ‘bucket lists’ of places to fuck over. When i was a kid you got enjoyment looking at pictures of far flung lands. Them being far away added to their mystique. /7

We kept a healthy distance from them, just as we do in human relationships. We don’t stalk every person that interests us. We leave them alone. We can read about and see pictures and videos of exotic places. Being there actually gives us LESS connection. /8

We’re in tourist zones. Theme parks. I’ve been to Paris, but I felt a much deeper connection to it reading French novelists than I did by being a tourist there. I know a lot about famous thinkers and artists and other historical figures, by reading about them. /9

Not by sitting outside their homes ‘experiencing’ them. (Stalking them.) Which is all we do for places, when we travel. Stalk those places. Place is a relationship. Not a seeing or an experiencing. /10

‘Living with’ a pandemic is an oxymoron. From a moronic culture of dispossession and purpose-less hypermobility. When you destroy places, you liberate pathogens. Whether microbes or tourists. Living things that act outside any ecological or other boundaries. /end