Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

5 Jaunt ^{Ken Liu}

Archival VNN footage of Ruutuutuu Protests at the Port of Seattle, Pier 91, July 10, 202X

[A MAGNIFICENT CRUISE SHIP, PACIFIC UNICORN, IS DOCKED AT THE PIER, READY TO begin its seven-day tour of the Inside Passage. Luggage is being loaded; passengers in long lines are embarking; everything seems perfect: a normality that everyone has been craving for many months during the pandemic.

Except… a swarm of small boats—dinghies, speedboats, kayaks, even a few fishing trawlers—numbering in the high hundreds have congregated in front of the cruise ship, filling much of Elliott Bay and blocking its course. Protesters throng the pier, holding up signs with the mustachioed cartoon rutabaga that has become the symbol of the movement and shouting “Shut it down!”]

“See the World Like You’ve Never Seen it Before”—video advertisement for Unicorn Travel Enterprises, produced by TIDE=/=AL Partners, September 202X

[THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA LOOMS IN OUR VIEW LIKE A MOUNTAIN.

The camera holds still as time speeds up. The sun rises and sets; the stars spin overhead; shadowy figures flit in and out of frame like mayflies dancing with eternity; the pyramid’s shadow sweeps across the sand like the gnomon of a world-pacing sundial. New Age music plays.

Then, just as the sun is low in the west once more, the music stops, time returns to normal, and the camera begins to move forward, swaying slightly from side to side.]

[We’re running toward the base of the pyramid. Faster and faster. Despite the optical stabilization, the swaying becomes more pronounced.]

[We reach the bottom of the pyramid. The camera tilts up. The jagged blocks seem to scrape heaven.

We climb. Although the action cam is clearly streaming the POV of the climber, we don’t see her hands or feet. In fact, for viewers who are used to consuming such footage, there’s something distinctly odd about the camera angel and movement—too close to the surface, perhaps?]

[Up-tempo, pulse-pounding music plays. We hear the sounds of her exertion over sped-up footage of the ascent. Most of the time, the unsteady camera is focused on the limestone block or blocks right in front of the climber. But from time to time, it swerves for a peek at the apex. Closer. Closer. It’s frantic, thrilling, exhilarating.

Finally, we reach the top.]

[The camera swings around to give us a dizzying view: the Pyramid of Khafre nearby, which appears even taller than our summit; the sprawl of Cairo in the distance, reminding you that almost five millennia of history have been compressed under your feet; the hazy horizon all around you, promising unknown, arcane knowledge; the vertiginous sensation that you’re about to plunge hundreds of feet to your death…

Only then do you notice the unusual scene on the slanting face of the pyramid below you: dozens of robots scrambling up the limestone blocks after you. Each robot is about the size of a large dog, with four padded feet that grip tightly onto the limestone blocks, a camera in front, and a screen that shows the face of a climber-teleoperator. A quick scan of the screens reveals that the climbers come from all over the world.

A robot hand rises into the camera’s view, waving.

The screen splits to show a woman in climbing gear strapped into a full-motion harness waving. Her movements have been mapped into the movements of the robot. She lifts off her full-immersion goggles, wipes the sweat from her face, and proudly holds out her watch for the viewer.]

[The Unicorn Travel logo swerves onto the screen, followed by a link to their web site.]

[Text on screen: A NEW WAY TO TRAVEL: EVEN BETTER THAN BEING THERE.]

“Opinion: It’s Time to Admit It: We Were Wrong to Oppose the Ruutuutuu Movement,” by Johanna Tung, Boston Globe, July 10, 203X

LIKE MANY OF YOU, I WAS DISMAYED WHEN THE RUUTUUTUU PROTESTS ESSENTIALLY shut down the global tourism industry shortly after the annus horribilis that was 2020. As the owner of a company specializing in curating and creating unique experiences for tourists from all over the world interested in sampling Xhong culture, my life’s work would be destroyed by the movement to abolish global tourism.

The protesters’ immediate concerns were to prevent COVID-19 from flaring up again, or, even worse, the emergence of another pandemic, but over time, their mission evolved to saving the planet from our relentless drive to consume experiences without regard to the future.

I found myself in a hard place. Having devoted much of my career to the intersection of economic development and sustainability, I understood the math behind their protest signs better than most.

The people who bought my tour packages came from Europe, the United States, Japan, Australia, the biggest cities in China and South America. They were the kind of individuals who recycled, drove electric vehicles or even biked, tried to be good to Mother Earth. They thought of themselves as good people, with expensive educations, the right opinions, virtuous intentions. That was why they wanted to spend a week living in a Xhong village and attempt to understand a way of life different from their own.

But all their efforts at conservation were wiped out and more the moment they decided to get on that plane. A jet flight to carry a family and all the luggage needed to sustain their Western comforts across an ocean or a continent is among the most wasteful activities ever invented by the human race. And that’s without even accounting for the environmental cost of transporting them from the airport over new highways, across new bridges, through mountain tunnels and flattened forests until they reached their vacation destination.

The mountainous regions of Southeast Asia, where the Xhong people live, contain some of the most vulnerable ecosystems in the world. Droughts, storms, mudslides, and other consequences of climate change have already wrought havoc with their lives. Each new airport, road, bridge, tunnel, and tourist meant more cement—perhaps the most destructive, poisonous, and unsustainable construction material ever invented by humans—more fossil fuels, more wrecking of forest, soil, aquifers. It meant another step closer toward the day when the area would become uninhabitable by the very people the tourists came to visit.

Moreover, I was acutely aware that my tours were perpetuating a colonialist legacy of violence and exploitation. Though I tried to design my tours with input from Xhong elders and artists and strove to make the villages who hosted my guests equal partners in the business, activists had for years argued that my cultural-immersion tours differed only in degree, not kind, from the exploitative vacation resorts and “cultural showcases” operated by mega corporations and centralized governments, which had little interest in preserving Xhong culture. My customers were of course not overtly exploitative, unlike those who went on sex tours or hunted for exotic animals in Southeast Asia. But they wanted to play at living another culture, to consume a way of life, to find “spiritual meaning” by reducing the traditions and practices of the Xhong into processed trinkets and pseudo-New Age pap that reaffirmed their own choices and sense of superiority. The very notion of tourism in the modern sense is an act of voyeuristic pleasure experienced by the Western (and would-be Western) colonizer subject gazing upon indigenous populations, an act of vicarious subjugation; the global tourism industry is rotten at its foundation.

And yet. And yet.

Without airplanes bringing tourists from across the globe, how was I supposed to keep paying my tour guides and drivers? Without the dollars and euros and WeChat balances, how would the Xhong families who had planned their entire lives around housing and feeding tourists make a living? Without their cameras and phones and excited chatter, who was going to buy all the handicrafts made specifically for them? The Xhong had become dependent on tourism, even as it further eroded their world. Entire villages, which had already suffered enormously through the tourism drought of the pandemic, would now tip over into ruin. While many villagers remained terrified of tourists bearing another wave of infections, many more clamored for the economic life raft they represented. I had no room to think about the planet’s future or the ramifications of colonialist structural inequality when I needed to figure out an immediate way to save the families who were my employees and partners.

Many independent tour providers, including myself, tried to band together to push back against the Ruutuutuu Protests. But like many movements of the era, the Ruutuutuu protesters were a loose coalition with divergent, even contradictory demands. Some were concerned about the cultural and environmental externalities of global tourism, which I sympathized with. But others were motivated by less noble concerns. Some were convinced that tourists from Asia had caused the pandemic in Europe and the United States. Some were isolationists who wanted to seize the opportunity and reverse globalization. Still others believed in conspiracy theories that argued cruise ships and jumbo jets were UN-sanctioned experimental vehicles for Chinese and North Korean spies working under the direction of Russian scientists funded by Bill Gates. Our advertisements and calls for a dialogue made little impact.

There was a cultural shift. Celebrities posting photos of getaways to faraway tropical paradises were now shamed as though they had posted pictures of hunting trophies. People looked at those who flew around in jets the way we used to look at smokers.

Dire warnings were issued about the collapse of tourism-driven developing economies and the hollowing out of indigenous communities. Many of us experienced a sense of helpless rage at the protesters who seemed too blinded by their own zeal to have compassion for those who depended on the cruise ships and jumbo jets. But gradually, as the protests raged on and global tourism numbers remained depressed, we learned to adapt.

The first to try something new were the giant cruise lines and resort owners. As their ships remained docked and their hotels empty, they started to sell “remote tours,” which tapped into VR and telepresence, two technologies that saw unprecedented adoption during the long pause forcefully imposed on much of the world by COVID-19. Many of these packages relied on gimmicks that allowed teletourists to do things they couldn’t have done even in person. Governments, desperate for tourism revenue, readily relaxed various restrictions for these teletourists.

For example, Unicorn Travel, one of the largest cruise lines, ran a program that gave customers the chance to climb the Great Pyramid of Giza when embodied in a telepresence robot, an act that was (and still is) illegal to perform in person. Supposedly, the telepresence robots, being light, electric, and well-padded, posed little risk of damaging the pyramid (and could be programmed to prevent the operator from carving graffiti into the limestone). Similar programs allowed teletourists to stroll through the Taj Mahal at night, to “climb” glaciers in Alaska, to watch tortoises in the Galápagos Islands, to scramble over the ruins of Tulum and Chichen Itza, and numerous similar feats.

But these packages were aimed at the luxury-travel market. They didn’t help the rest of us: the independent tour providers, the cultural experience curators, the local guides who relied on one-on-one tips.

The game changer was the Nene Be, an open-source specification for a small telepresence robotic platform built around single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi. The Nene Be (and its successors) relied on cheap cameras, cheap screens, cheap processors, cheap manipulators and batteries, cheap (but fast) wireless networking, and open-source software. They were easy to make and even easier to operate. They gave the teleoperator the ability to talk to people on the other end, to control their view, and to move around and manipulate objects (with severe limits). They didn’t give one VR-like immersion, but they were just good enough to make you feel like you were doing more than chatting through a webcam. You were there.

The Xhong, like people dependent on the tourism economy around the world, soon built new business models based on the Nene Be. Instead of serving xoi ngai ngai noodles to tourists in person, the stall owners now gave cooking tutorials to paying students from around the world, hosted competitions among teleoperators to see who made the best noodles, and partnered with Southeast Asian grocery stores in the home cities of the teletourists to sell them the ingredients needed to create the dishes at home. Instead of catering to the needs of a tourist family who wanted to pretend to be rice farmers for a week, now Xhong families could simply set up a few Nene Bes near the paddy (fenced in so they didn’t accidentally fall into the water—though telepresent “paddy races” were also a thing for some) and charge people who wanted to drop in from time to time to do some telepresent farming or help chase off vermin as a way to unwind. Instead of selling tourist-pleasing wax-dyed prints, Xhong artisans now could teach workshops, take on teletourist apprentices, or license their unique designs for 3D printing or one-off dyeing in the tourists’ own countries. The possibilities were endless.

Involving no jets traversing oceans, no SUVs bouncing over winding mountain roads, no giant staff to tend to the passengers’ every whim, even accounting for the investment in network infrastructure, a visit through a Nene Be requires less energy than it takes to keep the lights on in an average American house for an hour. Because a teletour can be booked with so little friction, the average visit lasts only twenty-eight minutes. In the trade, we call them “telejaunts” or just “jaunts.”

Critics initially feared that jaunts would cheapen the experience of travel and, by being too easy to fit into our increasingly attention-starved modernity, remove leisure travel as one of the only ways left for us to depart from the everyday and reflect on our inner lives. But experience has proven these fears unfounded. Travelers take jaunts far more frequently than physical trips, often returning to the same place multiple times over a period of weeks or months (we all probably know of a friend who goes to the same noodle stall in Taipei every day for ten minutes just to watch the owner pull the noodles by hand). They form deep, sustained connections with a place and the individuals in that place, gaining insights into the human condition deeper and more authentic than could ever be obtained during a week-long physical vacation in a tourist trap overrun with crowds.

Jaunts have completely transformed the landscape of global tourism. Gone are the days when global tours were both too expensive to be truly accessible to the less-than-affluent and too cheap to prevent ecological disaster and cultural commodification. Nowadays, more people are touring distant places than at any point in history, but their impact on the environment, both physical and cultural, is also much lighter and less destructive. Instead of flocking to the same places that everyone else does, tourists can go to places far off the beaten path—the Nene Be has essentially opened up the tourist economy to entrepreneurial residents and communities in remote hamlets and rural sanctuaries without the requirement for costly infrastructure or putting their fragile way of life at risk. By transporting presences instead of atoms, teletourism is a magical spell that has given us the best of all outcomes.

To be sure, not everyone is convinced of the benefits of jaunts. So-called populist political parties in the West as well as repressive regimes elsewhere have taken advantage of the rise of teletourism to further restrict the movements of refugees, journalists, and migrants seeking a better life elsewhere. We must remain ever vigilant against the virulent possibilities when good ideas are twisted to serve dark purposes.

To that end, I also believe that jaunts offer the potential to subvert the traditional power imbalances between outbound tourist source regions—which tend to be more economically developed and Western—and inbound tourist destination regions—many of which are less developed and suffer from a legacy of colonial oppression. While many tourists from Boston, for example, visit Xhong villages in Vietnam and Laos, very few Xhong tourists can afford to visit this city. This is why my company has formed a partnership with anti-colonialist and anti-racist activists to develop programs to help more teletourists from the Xhong and other indigenous peoples to come visit places like Boston. As the United States has grown ever more hostile to immigration and voices from around the world, teletour jaunts, which require no visas and no border searches, may be the best way to challenge this trend.

Joanna Tung is the founder of Teletourists Without Borders, a nonprofit dedicated to developing sustainable models of cultural exchange that reverse the legacy of colonial exploitation. She also hosts jaunts to her office in Vietnam on JauntsNow at the following BnB code: DXHHWU-TCU.

Excerpt from Be My Guest, a documentary series focusing on the lives of JauntsNow hosts and guests, first shown May 203X

[THE CAMERA IS ON AL BURTON, SEVENTIES, STROLLING THROUGH BOSTON COMMON. From time to time, he stops to examine a flowerbed or a birdfeeder by the side of the path.]

I never traveled much back then. In twenty years my wife and I took the kids on two trips, one to Thailand, another to Mexico. After she died, I didn’t go anywhere at all except to fish on the Cape once a year. Running a dry cleaning shop is a lot of work. Too much.

But I had no work for those months during the pandemic. Even after the lockdown ended, business was terrible. The virus moved in and made itself comfortable. People didn’t go to the office; they didn’t get dressed up; they didn’t need to have their clothes dry-cleaned. I had no choice but to shut it down. My life’s work. Gone.

[Ken Burns-style panning over photos Burton took of his shop before he shuttered it. The place had been meticulously and lovingly cleaned.]

I was sitting at home when I got this coupon by email, telling me that I could go on trips to China, Vietnam, Mexico, Costa Rica… wherever I wanted for just fifteen bucks. I thought it was a scam—or maybe the airlines were so desperate to get people to fly again that they were willing to sell tickets at a loss. I knew they were having trouble with the protesters at the airports and the cruise ship docks.

So I took them up on the offer. Put in my credit card info to lock up a spot.

And only then did I find out that they weren’t talking about real trips, but trips where they put you in control of a robot already there.

[Shots of surviving specimens of the first generation of crude Nene Be teletour robots, most of them about the size of a domestic cat. Even controlling them can be a chore. We see Al miming his clumsy attempts to use a phone as a physical gesture control device for the faraway robot, tapping the screen to make the robot move and shifting the phone itself about like a tiny portal to get a look at his remote surroundings.]

At first I thought about backing out and asking for my money back. I didn’t even like the idea of chatting on a webcam with the kids, much less with strangers. It felt like something for young people, not me. But then I thought: why not? If I really hated it I could just hit the “disconnect” button. Not like I would be stuck overseas, right?

Because I paid so little for my ticket, they couldn’t get me into Tokyo or Bangkok or Dubai; instead, I ended up in northern Japan, a tiny town called Bifuka, in Hokkaido. The robot was located at the rail station, which hardly got any passengers, a handful every week, maybe. When I arrived, it was deserted. But I liked how clean and neat it was. Made me feel at ease right away. I could tell it was a place that people loved.

[The camera shows the lone, single-room station next to the train track. The deep blue sky is dotted with sheep-like clouds. Inside, we see a table, a few stools, posters, maps, the floor swept free of all dust, a tiny skittering robot, its single-board computer guts exposed, roaming about.]

I learned to move myself about with my phone until I could climb the wall like a spider and read the Japanese posters with machine translation overlays. I bumbled my way out of the door and rolled along next to the tracks until I reached the limit of the wireless signal at the station. The view went on and on all the way to the horizon, a vastness that soothed my heart. I couldn’t believe how fun it was. I giggled like a kid. I never even thought about going to Japan, and here I was.

I don’t know how to explain it. After months and months of being locked up inside my house, seeing my business crumble, not being able to go anywhere, worrying about friends and neighbors dying—being there, under the sky in Japan, looking at Japanese mountains and grass and trains, that gave me hope. That did.

On the way rolling back to the station, I met a man who was about my age, just out walking. I was never the type to talk with strangers, but it felt odd to say nothing when we were the only two humans—well, human and human-in-a-bot—for miles. I didn’t want to use the machine translation—didn’t trust it. So I just waved an arm and said “Hello” in English. He understood that, at least, and nodded at me through the camera, saying a greeting in Japanese. We stood in the road like that, me looking up at him, him looking down at me in the screen on the robot, not knowing what else to do except smiling and waving. But it didn’t feel awkward, you know? After maybe twenty seconds, he nodded and I nodded, and we parted ways.

After that, I took many jaunts, practically one every day.

[Footage of various teletours taken by Al: a busy kitchen in Yangzhou, China, where teletourists are perched on a shelf above the cooks, skittering from side to side as they watch the complicated, hours-long process for making the famous shizitou meatballs; somewhere in the Great Barrier Reef, where submersible teletour robots on fiber-optic cables can dive and observe the ecosystem with minimal impact or damage; a village in Indonesia, where a traveling shadow-puppet troupe is putting on a show not for Western tourists, but for an audience that is in sync with the story, with just a few teletour robots in the back perched on a tree, no translation, no explanation, no intervening guide; Chobe National Park in Botswana, where teletourists dangle from helium mini-airships and watch a pride of lions going about their business…

Over time, the control rig used by Al has been upgraded, allowing him to be more immersive with the teletour robots.]

I got to visit just about every country in the world, and I’ve met so many, many people. Teletours are different from the physical trips I took as a tourist back in the past. When I was in Thailand and Mexico, I could never feel comfortable: people were catering to me, and everything I did I couldn’t stop this nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me that it was a transaction, and I needed to get my money’s worth, even if that meant being petty, demanding… an ass.

With a teletour, it didn’t feel like that at all. Precisely because the stakes were so much lower, it also felt, oddly, as if my host and I were more like equals, not two sides of an unbalanced coin. I’m sure that sounds naive and wishful, but it’s how I feel.

I felt so good about the tours that I started hosting visitors myself.

[Footage of Al hosting jaunts at home: Al chatting with one of the cooks from the restaurant in Yangzhou as he attempts to recreate the shizitou, with the cook laughing and offering critiques; Al taking a group of teletourists fishing on a pier, the old man walking behind the row of robots and their fishing poles, advising, bantering, encouraging; Al showing two Xhong visitors how to eat a steamed lobster the New England way, struggling to describe the taste while the teletourists dined on a platter of crayfish to approximate the experience…]

Some of my hosts and guests have become my friends. I know it always seems odd to say that you can become friends with someone you’ve never met, but it’s not just chatting through a webcam, you know? You actually do things together. That, to me, makes all the difference. Maybe if the president went and did things with other people he wouldn’t sound so angry all the time.

[The camera pulls back to show that a teletour robot has been gliding along next to him this whole time. It’s squat, cylindrical, about the size of a small lobster pot so that it could be easily transported by one person when necessary; it has wheels as well as segmented feet for all-terrain operation; a camera is perched atop, along with two manipulators; a high-resolution screen shows the face of the visitor.

Al turns to speak to the visitor in Japanese, subtitled for our benefit.]

Takahashi-san, would you like to visit the Swan Boats next?

[The visitor assents.]

Are there swans in Hokkaido? You must show me next time…

[Together, Al and his teletour guest stroll away toward the Public Garden lagoon in the distance.]

Statement by President Bombeo, September 3, 203X

MY FELLOW AMERICANS, TODAY OUR GREAT REPUBLIC FACES AN UNPRECEDENTED challenge to its preeminence in the world. Hostile foreign powers are emboldened while feckless allies cower and dither. However, if there’s anything that history teaches us, it’s that the great American nation can defeat all enemies and overcome all challenges when we are decisive and take bold action.

My administration has been distinguished from the very start by a robust, potent foreign policy. In contrast to the previous administration, I made it clear from the day I took office that no one can defy, defraud, or deceive the United States without paying a heavy price.

To secure American borders, protect American jobs, and free the American people from unwanted foreign influence, my administration closed loopholes in the immigration and visa laws, voided suspicious naturalizations, rationalized birthright citizenship, and deported numerous foreign nationals who may harbor dual loyalties. We attempted to get Congress to reenact and expand the scope of U.S. Code Title 8, Chapter 7, though the effort was contemptibly blocked by the quisling opposition. We also drastically reduced the number of foreign students allowed to come to our great universities to study advanced technology and science—research funded by American taxpayers—only to take the knowledge back to their home countries. I specifically made it impossible for students from hostile or untrustworthy nations such as Iran, Russia, China, and many others to study in our country unless they first take an oath of loyalty to the United States. Despite the outcry from radical-left academic elites, these steps have unquestionably made America safer and stronger.

However, many of these prestigious universities, instead of faithfully carrying out my executive orders, have sought to bypass or subvert them, to the detriment of the American people. As Vice President Gossy’s investigative report shows, top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale all attempted to route around the restrictions. Many created so-called remote-residency programs that make heavy use of advanced telepresence robots. Taking advantage of the mobility, dexterity, and advanced sensors enabled by these machines, students in foreign countries can attend classes alongside American classmates, make use of expensive laboratory equipment, and even experience much of the joys of campus life. Although these foreign students are, for all intents and purposes, here on American soil, the universities argue disingenuously that visa requirements don’t apply because they are simply engaged in “web-based remote learning.”

But the universities are hardly the only scoundrels.

Life in America has been fundamentally transformed by ubiquitous telepresence. In the aftermath of the great pandemics of the last decade, telepresence robots helped many Americans return to work and saved our economy. A general-purpose household robot, for example, allowed nervous homeowners to receive services from cleaners, electricians, plumbers, hairdressers, piano teachers, and so on without having to let strangers enter the house. Moreover, the robots could be programmed to limit their operators’ movements inside the house via geofencing and audit trails of actions performed. The social distancing enabled by telepresence saved many American workers from economic ruin.

But today, many of the remote operators you permit to inhabit your household robots are not Americans at all, but foreigners stealing American jobs without even leaving their own houses. Companies, greedy for profit, have shirked their patriotic duty. The gains we’ve made by reducing and regulating immigration have been lost through telepresence, with real Americans suffering the consequences.

Moreover, teletourists from abroad, without having to pass through comprehensive vetting at ports of entry or during the visa process, now visit America in greater numbers every year. Although teletour bots open to operation by foreign visitors are in principle subject to strict regulation that prevents their operators from wandering outside of specific designated tourist zones, enforcement is spotty, and many teletour bots owned by small consumer-providers are exempt.

Thus, our streets today are clogged with foreigners embodied in robots, subject to little surveillance or control. It defies common sense to think that these foreign operatives in disguise would not poison our public discourse with unfiltered foreign propaganda. After repeated demands from me and Vice President Gossy, our intelligence services have uncovered vast and sophisticated attempts by foreign states to influence American policy and elections. For example, the PNA sent waves of teletourists to describe alleged conditions in Palestine to the American people in February this year, in advance of the planned peace summit, and Chinese trolls disguised as ordinary tourists flooded the District of Columbia in June to participate in the “Million-Bot March” against our deployment of advanced tactical nuclear weapons in the Pacific. Indeed, the recent waves of demonstrations by anti-war radicals in California and New York appear to have been directed and amplified by Russian intelligence using hired teletourists from around the world.

Despite this clear and present danger to our democracy, my attempts at regulating the speech of teletourists have consistently been rebuffed by the courts. My order that all teletour robots be equipped with a filter that automatically refused to translate or silenced utterances of ideas and phrases not compatible with American interests has been voided by extremist left-wing judges defying my constitutional authority. They appear to hold the mistaken notion that foreigners, present in the United States only by remotely operating a robot, somehow enjoy the same God-given constitutional rights as real Americans. The very idea is absurd. This is especially so when regimes like China have erected virtual walls that make it extremely difficult for American citizens to take jaunts into China. We cannot remain open when our enemies do not extend us the same courtesy.

We cannot allow telemigration to undo all the gains we’ve made in regulating immigration. Thus, in order to protect American jobs from unfair foreign competition, to defend our technological secrets from foreign spies, to ensure that our citizens are not subjected to foreign propaganda delivered in the guise of teletourism, I am issuing an executive order that immediately bans all attempts to connect to telepresence robots within the United States from abroad. Secretary Narro will have the details.

Don’t tread on us.

God Bless America.

Factchecking Notes on President Bombeo’s Statement by Teletourists Without Borders, September 3, 203X

…(39) “THUS, OUR STREETS ARE CLOGGED WITH FOREIGNERS EMBODIED IN ROBOTS.”

According to the Association of Teletourism Providers, the largest US-based trade organization for the industry, foreign-based teletourists were only 3.4 percent of the total number of teletourists in the United States. According to JauntsNow, less than 5 percent of the jaunts booked on US-based teletour robots were from addresses abroad. In any event, it seems clear that the vast majority of jaunts in the United States are taken by other Americans.

…(43) “Our intelligence services have uncovered vast and sophisticated attempts by foreign states to influence American policy and elections.”

The President’s examples of bot-swarms by foreign nations attempting to influence American politics have been well publicized, but there is considerable skepticism among security experts because the reports were produced by the spy agencies under intense political pressure and thus considered not entirely reliable. The President also failed to note some other instances of foreign-sponsored bot-swarms that may have been more in line with his preferred policies (see below). Thus, the picture he presented is misleading.

…(45) “Indeed, the recent waves of demonstrations by anti-war radicals in California and New York appear to have been directed and amplified by Russian intelligence using hired teletourists from around the world.”

The report from a privately funded Washington, D.C. think tank that a large number of demonstrators were Russian operatives controlling multiple bots has been dismissed by most security researchers as based on flawed metrics and over-aggressive machine-classification algorithms. The lead authors of that report are also known for arguing that the Black Lives Matter protests from the last decade were instigated by Chinese and Russian trolls, a position that has been comprehensively debunked.

…(47) “My order that all teletour robots be equipped with a filter…”

The President failed to make it clear that his order not only applied to foreign teletourists, but also could potentially be applied to American citizens and permanent residents using telepresence robots as well.

README.txt

NENE HUDDLE IS A HIGH-PERFORMANCE, PRIVACY-FIRST, ADAPTIVELY STRUCTURED, peer-to-peer network to facilitate anonymous, hard-to-trace connections between telepresence robots and operators.

Running the Nene Huddle software turns your machine into a node (called a “pylon”) on the Huddle network. The pylons communicate with one another through encrypted channels that are constantly multiplexed and switched to defeat attempts at tracing metadata. The ultimate goal of the network is to enable operators anywhere in the world to connect to telepresence endpoints without leaving a traceable record linking any individual operator with any individual endpoint.

It is primarily useful for getting around the restrictions various states have imposed on inbound and outbound telepresence connections. For instance, if you don’t live in the United States or one of its four “Deep Trust Allies,” then currently the only way to take a jaunt into the US without going through the onerous and Orwellian televisa process is routing yourself through the Nene Huddle network. It is also one of the only avenues left to enter China without giving up all your data at the border.

Note, however, that the Nene Huddle network doesn’t directly provide any consumer-oriented functionality such as searching for open telepresence endpoints, advertising to jaunt customers, paying to use open endpoints, disguising yourself as a domestic teletourist on JauntsNow, and so on. You’ll have to use other applications built on top of Nene Huddle.

It is already confirmed or at least very likely that running the Nene Huddle software is considered illegal by authorities in countries such as the United States, Russia, India, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom (the list of such states is growing). Before installing and joining the movement, weigh your risks carefully. It is simply a fact of life that freedom requires you to be ready to pay a price, to have skin in the game.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who makes Nene Huddle? Volunteers who have made it a point to not know one another’s identities.

Why do you make it? There is no way to answer this question for everyone who has contributed to the project. By design, we don’t know one another’s real names, real jobs, real nationalities, real motivations, anything at all, really.

Based on posts in the project forum, the most popular (self-reported) reasons for people to contribute to this project are:

• Dislike of the actions or policies of the United States / China / Russia / India / Saudi Arabia / the UK / some other country

• That freedom of movement, including telepresence, is a fundamental human right

• The world is a better place when people can move around and get to know one another and teach one another—telepresence is the best way to do that without polluting and ruining the planet

• The world is a better place when people stay where they are and stop crossing borders and trying to change how other people live—telepresence is the best way to do that without turning everyone into a prisoner or forcing them to starve for lack of economic opportunities

• It’s fun to mess with governments and see politicians’ heads explode

How can I trust the software? By reading the source code. That’s it.

As you can see from the answers to the last question, the self-reported reasons for why volunteers contribute code here are often mutually contradictory, as is the case with all leaderless, distributed movements.

Every state thinks there’s a way it can turn Nene Huddle to its own advantage; spies, like everyone else, want to jaunt. Nation-states’ self-interest and mutual suspicion redound to our benefit: no other open-source project has received as much adversarial code review and scrutiny. Out of swords, secure telepresence tunnels.

Still, you can’t trust people’s motivations, only the result. Read the code, verify for yourself that it’s safe to run. You have the freedom, which means you have the responsibility.

Doesn’t your software facilitate crime/enable money laundering/hurt democracy/perpetuate imperialism/etc.? You’re asking the wrong question.

All right, maybe this is worth elaborating a little more.

Is it true that people can use the network to do terrible things? Without a doubt. But that’s true of any technology. (However, every single instance where the United States claimed that our network facilitated terrorism—so far at least—has turned out to be a lie.)

What do you want to do with Nene Huddle?

In a world where borders are increasingly impenetrable, Nene Huddle is often the only way for us to remain together. Those with skills but no markets at home use it to secure for themselves and their loved ones a better life. Students, scholars, and researchers use it to find the collegiality and inspiration that feeds invention and free thought. Journalists use it to tunnel into oppressive countries to get the facts and shoot footage that can’t be obtained any other way. Activists from across the world use it to bot-swarm protests in the United States because American policies have a disproportionate impact on the rest of the world even though most of us don’t get to vote in your elections. Religious leaders who have been forbidden to speak at home can preach abroad through telepresence. Individuals who are not free to date, love, express their own identities at home can live the lives they wish to live remotely through a long-jaunt tether, a literal lifeline.

Every technology that begins in the hope for freedom eventually risks being co-opted by centralized power. Telepresence was originally a way to allow people to move more freely without the costs associated with transporting physical bodies. It has also, over time, turned out to be a great way for those in power to regulate and control the exchange of ideas and peoples.

The only way to oppose centralized power is to become its very opposite: distributed, leaderless, inventive, formless. If you want your freedoms back, don’t count on a wise leader to save you. Join us.

Download. Encrypt. Jaunt.