The distant lands we read about and imagine are always far more accurately captured by that distant reading,…

The distant lands we read about and imagine are always far more accurately captured by that distant reading, than by going there to visit. Like a probe capturing Jupiter. Going there will take you further from the ‘real’ Jupiter than staying home and looking at it. /1 https://t.co/Tm6vRp3Hg1

Going there would asphyxiate you, crush you. You can only ever imagine being on Jupiter, and that imagining will be far more real than being there yourself. Travel doesn’t understand this. It fetishises ‘being there’. It has no understanding of place, of ‘there’. /2

The distant view can capture a location across multiple dimensions, with minimal disruption to that place. Going there to somehow ‘experience’ it more directly changes the place. What you go to see is fundamentally changed, by you being there. /3

What you go to see is no longer there, when you go to see it. Because of you being there. We’re still that old imperial culture mapping the world so we can accumulate it. We travel through our maps. /4

And today the locations we trash are incidental fodder for our true travel, through our social games of imitative rivalry. We travel to show others, that we have travelled. We don’t actually go anywhere, the ‘trip’ is all within our social media feeds. /5

We arrive at locations and try to reconcile our images, themselves generated by our social media status games, with the ‘real’ physical location. And we take thousands of photos and selfies, to try to get close to the ‘real’ location while there. /6

Which of course is us not moving an inch from our actual home, those photos just feed our feeds. Walt Disney theme parks in some ways were early recognition of living the world from a respectful distance. /7

And when we got jet travel. And we thought we’d go there instead. But all we did was turn those locations into new theme parks. The actual reality was like arriving at Jupiter. Brutal and overwhelming. We needed to tame the ‘experience’, to make it palatable. /8

I’ve heard locals say ‘that one’s a Lonely Planet tourist’, or ‘that one’s a Contiki’. You don’t ever arrive, when you go ‘there’. You travel through the virtual theme park of your imitative status games at home. /end