Does Travel Have a Future?

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by

bernhard

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For many decades now, the culture industries have relied on travel to bring an air of glamour to any proceeding. Whether a runway show, art biennial, or music festival, the very fact of getting on a plane and landing somewhere else made any event more serious: anyone who was there was worth importing. Travel brought new voices to new places; you could have a little bit of New York City in Bali, or vice versa. Plus there were the hotels to think about—boosting local business and giving the visiting dignitaries a vacation. Travel was a fundamental part of culture, the thing that enabled exchange, even though everyone was already talking on the internet all the time. We followed each other on Instagram but wanted to hang out in person. That’s how creativity happened, through the randomness of real-life interaction, in a bar, at a party, hand-to-hand.

It’s a glamour captured by William Eggleston’s famous 1978 photograph, Untitled (cocktail on a plane), of a sparkling drink on the seatback tray of an airplane. Blue skies dotted with clouds are out the window, the sun is casting a long shadow through the glass, and a slim hand stirs the drink with a straw. The possibilities seem both endless and elegant: who can tell where the plane will land?

Here’s how things used to work: In 2016, I was invited to a conference in Berlin. The hosts paid for my flight from New York City, five nights in a hotel, and any incidental expenses along the way. In exchange, I gave a brief presentation on my writing as a critic and hung out at the conference’s parties, which other people bought tickets to. Both sides were more than happy with the arrangement. I stayed at the Michelberger Hotel near Kreuzberg, a spot known as a bunk for DJs playing sets at Berghain. The hotel had a cafe open twenty-four hours, a restaurant serving Black Forest specialties, and its own signature brand of coconut water: a perfect mix of local and international, for the local and international scene it sought to cultivate. At the end of the week, I left the city like slipping out of one of the hotel’s bathrobes; one easy place ride and I was back in my usual New York routine.

In 2021, we have a much different perspective. We knew flying was bad for the environment, with each flight costing its own chunk of melted Arctic ice, but in the COVID-19 pandemic, its consequences are even more blatant. Travel was part of what caused the pandemic in the first place, with conferences blamed as super spreading events. Mobility was the first thing to stop: in China, Hubei province sealed itself off from the world and soon other countries followed suit. Airports emptied and then subways did, too. Quarantine brought an eerie feeling of stillness everywhere at once. Travel stopped, particularly the indulgence of travel for cultural events.

We have an uneasy relationship with travel right now. Essential travel is still happening, whether to help family, carry out job responsibilities, or go on the odd vacation. But the pandemic has changed the future of travel, it seems permanently. While we don’t have the creative benefits of in-person conversation and open-bar collisions, the lack of travel has opened up new possibilities both for the planet and for our culture.

Studies over the course of 2020 have shown that the lack of travel during the pandemic has actually helped the environment to bounce back and recover from some of the damage done in previous decades—such a radical shift meant an immediate drop in greenhouse gas emissions, oil consumption, and carbon footprints. Water quality improved, wildlife returned to less occupied habitats, urban air was cleaner, and noise pollution decreased. While some memes that showed utopian scenes like dolphins returning to canals in Venice were too good to be true, the pandemic did have a real effect, such as decreasing the number of cars on the road.

Human mobility is a big part of why climate change happens in the first place; stopping movement could help fix it. But we do need something to take its place, to help make culture happen. During the pandemic, Zoom has come to the rescue, providing a facsimile social life to the point that we’re all sick of it. Now, Zoom is also the way we consume the culture that we used to attend out in the physical world, presenting bookstore talks with authors, live-streamed movie screenings, interactive fashion shows like Balenciaga’s video game, and even life-drawing sessions.

We travel through our screens, hosting and attending conversations that we perhaps wouldn’t have otherwise if we were stuck by geography. In some ways this could be freeing: I went to book launches that were theoretically taking place in New York City though I stayed in my apartment in Washington, DC. The internet is a smorgasbord of content because everyone still wants to connect and communicate in the absence of physical meeting or movement. And culture is what happens when people connect. Though I couldn’t go anywhere, I had virtual studio visits, participated in panels, and conducted discussion groups over FaceTime.

Travel means something different, I found, when you can only do it online. It meant finding people in places different than my home: I got on TikTok and discovered that it was a great way of traveling without having to go anywhere. The app’s minute-long videos provide perfect containers for any kind of content, but my favorite are daily routines and apartment tours, especially the ones that take place in an unfamiliar city or country: clips of getting coffee in berlin, sitting on the beach in Bali, or walking a dog in the Arctic Circle archipelago of Svalbard. TikTok accounts serve up daily video diaries from users all over the world, offering glimpses that enliven our own surroundings.

The streaming platform Twitch has grown as a place for video game live streamers—people who put themselves on camera while playing video games, narrating the action and interacting with a digital chatroom of viewers. It’s not mainstream quite yet, but I found watching a friend play hours of the Tokyo-set video game Yakuza transporting, both because of the scenery of the game and because it was a form of ambient socializing, the kind of experience that you only have being in a different place passively, immersed in it.

Can travel be virtual? It’s a dream as old as virtual-reality goggles, to suddenly feel like you’re in another place, to be able to gaze out at distant mountains or transport yourself to a tropical island. But I think we’ve found that virtual travel is best when it’s contained to worlds that are also digital. During the pandemic, a new edition of the video game Animal Crossing became particularly popular. The game is a “life simulation” in which players create their own tiny island communities populated with cutesy animal villagers; once developed, you can visit other people’s islands and give them tours of your own, trading items or sending letters.

My own chosen form of virtual travel was the video game Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. During the spring, when pandemic fears made any kind of outdoor excursions difficult, its digital landscape was the widest view of nature I had. In the game, players can traverse a world that feels huge, with environments that react to your actions: rocks crumble, rain makes paths slick, snowdrifts. It provided a sense of travel without any of the danger—the landscape’s breadth and interactivity lent my virtual journeys some of the surprise of actual travel. I never knew quite what would happen.

When the pandemic recedes, we’ll be faced with the question of how to travel going forward. Some changes are already happening: The persistence of remote work means that we can travel for longer periods at a stretch or even continuously, without a home base. Artists, curators, and designers have already been accustomed to creative residencies and working from anywhere, but that lifestyle is expanding. It’s easier than ever to spend a month in Mexico or Thailand as long as you have your laptop.

This lifestyle of so-called digital nomadism—working remotely while traveling—had already been growing, with new hotels and communities popping up to serve the hypermobile demographic. But the pandemic actually normalizes it. Without the demands of office life, why travel for less than a few weeks at a time? This new mode of travel is bringing people to different destinations—less dense cities, more rural areas. Airbnb has seen a boom in requests for cabins and accommodations for entire families.

Pieter Levels, a digital nomad tastemaker and entrepreneur who founded the website NomadList, told me that people begin to develop tastes for living in particular areas and build communities that way, creating new relationships that might take the place of those originally centered on the office.

“You get favorite places you keep going back to and match with other people who have the same personality as you,” Levels said. Yet virtual communication is still very important, because nomads tend to keep moving, seeking new inspiration or just a change of scenery. It’s a lesson the pandemic has taught us, too: don’t take your community for granted, because it could change. “It’s as if the human spirit is making it work; it has to work because otherwise we’ll lose these relationships,” Levels said.

It seems unlikely that we’ll return to the previous decades’ version of travel, undertaken on a whim, as a kind of casual pleasure. And perhaps it’s better that way, given the long-term threat of climate change. Travel should be a commitment, not just a mode of escape for a few days. Otherwise, we now know that quite a lot of our cultural conversations can happen through virtual space instead of physical.

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PHOTOGRAPHER: @thomaslhorstudio
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