And a shocking number of my friendships were already sustained by interactions on Twitter, on Slack, on Instagram, in group texts.īut, like many teachers and professors, I also found myself teaching through a screen this year, which was new to me. My work meetings here at Vox have happened on Zoom since long before the pandemic, since my colleagues are scattered around the world. I write about movies, so virtually all my work time and a vast amount of my downtime is spent staring at a screen. check.Īll of these actions and habits were both right, since lives were at stake, and not wholly new behavior for any of us.

And buying stuff because it was advertised to me? All too often. Working, teaching, socializing, entertaining, all through the same single screen? Check, check, check, check. It was true for any of us who had the privilege of working from home. Disney/Pixarīy now you’ve caught on, because I can’t be the only person who felt like I was living in Wall-E this year. On the Buy-n-Large ship, you don’t have to experience reality. They’re where people order food, watch entertainment, talk to one another, and, most importantly, learn about what they should buy next. Instead, the screens are portals to their entire reality. In fact, the screens are so engrossing that although these humans are surrounded by other humans on other chairs with other screens, they never actually look at each other. They’ve forgotten how to walk or interact with other people or do anything offscreen at all. Earth’s descendants are effectively blobs - they sit in comfy chairs that cruise around the ship all day, wearing pajama-like outfits that can change colors at the touch of a button, with personalized screens to look at whenever they’re not sleeping. Human civilization, left to its own devices on a giant vessel owned by a corporation, has more or less devolved into full-time consumers. What will he find? Astronauts? Lord of the flies? An advanced, enlightened iteration of the species?

Now Wall-E has found a way onto the ship where the humans are.

Years earlier, when Earth became overrun with the detritus of overconsumption, those humans absconded on spaceships owned by the giant corporation that sold them all that stuff, leaving little robots like Wall-E behind to clean up the planet. By the time the friendly robot Wall-E makes it to outer space in the Pixar movie that bears his name, the audience is ready to meet the humans.

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