Your Future Is Elsewhere

I was living in Afghanistan in 2007 as a freelance reporter when my roommate was nearly kidnapped by a warlord’s goons. That same month, three different US officials used the phrase “baby steps” to describe to me Afghanistan’s “progress” toward democracy. I remember the phrase now because it seemed so tone-deaf. I was walking the streets looking over my shoulder, in a country that did not feel like it was toddling toward free and fair elections, but bounding at alarming speed in the opposite direction. But while I disagreed with the optimistic assessment, I didn’t yet think to question that US-centric premise of that weird decade, a premise that fueled two hubristic wars: that all the countries of the world were inevitably headed, at different speeds and at different times, toward the same finish line.

I mention this now because in these posts I’m revealing some of the origin stories that led to the Rough Translation podcast, which I created in 2016. The previous year saw the publication of Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible, by Peter Pomerantsev, still one of my favorite books of travel journalism. I read it after a 2014 trip to Ukraine where I encountered a brand of disinformation that felt new, as “Fake News” was not yet a buzzword in the US. Ukraine was being used as a laboratory for Russian-backed disinformation for years before it was ready for export.

Reading Peter’s book is the first time I remember thinking that what was past might be future and that we weren’t all headed toward the same finish line. Maybe countries like Russia that seemed behind the times when it came to democracy and economic development were actually way ahead of a different and more sinister game. The idea of linear race of front-runner countries and laggards, the ur-belief of most international journalism, became harder to believe in. Maybe we were the ones taking baby steps?

Sadly, that profound realization made me not one iota better at predicting the future. Why could I read about the contagion of a virus in Wuhan and still be dumbfounded when it hit here? Or hear about layoffs at NPR and be surprised when it happened to me? Sadly, I remain as caught off-guard by sudden moments of change as ever before.

So for this week’s selection from the audio archives, I’m thinking of an episode we called WeChats From The Future. It’s the story of two people who share the same home in Connecticut but are living in two different worlds, because she’s originally from Wuhan and she is staying up very late in their kitchen trying to arrange shipments of masks and medical supplies back to China, while her husband doesn’t share her sense of urgency — yet. This episode was recorded quickly in the pandemic, so forgive the phone tape, but what I find so magical about it is that it captures this moment in real time where an out-of-sync couple suddenly clicks. The clip starts with the husband’s voice.