We are living in Interdimensional Cable
Reality is stranger than fiction
One of the great joys of traveling is perusing the local channels in your crispy clean hotel room. The local news, the morning and afternoon game shows. In Cork, Ireland the morning show is so wholesome it’s hard not to feel transported back to a pre-internet era. In Paris, the evening debate shows are so lively and balanced and well moderated, it’s hard not to wonder why we can’t have that here in the states. In London we looked forward to the nightly Gogglebox reruns, a show in which families from around the U.K. gather to comment on the zeitgeist of British television that week.
Presently, we’re on vacation in Japan. I’m sitting in our room on the 31st floor overviewing Tokyo, trying to decipher why a man dressed as a fox is performing a tango with a girl while being serenaded by a blue animatronic bow tie-wearing chair. As unique as modern programming is everywhere, there is no more unique television than Japanese television. For a long time, Japanese programming was the closest we had to Rick’s Interdimensional Cable. For those of you who are not viewers of the animated series Rick and Morty, Interdimensional Cable is a cable box created by a scientist grandfather so that he and his sidekick grandson can watch cable from every conceivable parallel dimension when they’re bored. Imagine, say, you’re in the mood to watch a man in another dimension sell fake doors on a 24/7 infomercial style show. You can find that on interdimensional cable. Say you want to stream a 24/7 show of Ina Garten baking apple pies. Easy. Say you want a version of that same show but say you want a version in which Ina pies Bobby Flay at the end of every episode. You can also find that on Interdimensional Cable.
Now, you might ask, “who would want to watch that anyway?” We live in a time where there seems to be an audience for every niche. iShowSpeed, the streamer, has built a billion dollar one man show by streaming his life to his fans 24/7. Much of today’s youth consume some version of Rick’s interdimensional cable. The streaming service Twitch got its start when its founder found there was an audience of people who would watch a 24/7 stream of his life which he was capturing at the time by strapping a webcam to his forehead.
Many of us scroll short form video on Tik Tok or Insta at some point in the day. Sometimes something goes so viral it crosses all our algorithms. Each person’s algorithm, though, is generally a form of a personal television channel, partially curated by us, partially foisted on us. Daily, the algorithm is inferring which eccentricity will keep you watching for as long as possible. If I spend too long reading the comments on a video about mini cows, the rest of the day I’ll get content related to mini versions of large animals.
A new layer of our contemporary interdimensional cable is forming in real time as people develop relationships with AI. You might remember the outrage that formed when OpenAI upgraded from GPT 4 to GPT 5. Many users had developed an intimate relationship with their GPT 4 bot. When Open AI released GPT 5 they deleted the memory of GPT 4. Overnight fell into grief. They lost a bond they would have described as “friend,” “therapist,” “boyfriend/girlfriend,” “confidant.” The reaction was so strong OpenAI was forced to reinstate GPT 4, memory and all.
Regardless of what one’s opinion of this bond might be, it’s not a stretch to say that people wouldn’t experience a real sense of loss if they hadn’t experienced a real sense of care first. An AI bot that is not only available to you 24/7 but that is also tuned to allow you to forget, even if by moments, that you are not talking to a human, lays the foundation on which you could construct a parallel dimension of living.
While we’ve been here in Japan, I’ve caught a couple of Rick and Morty re-reruns which is what got me thinking: some of the science fiction premises in Rick and Morty, like Rick’s Interdimensional Cable, don’t seem futuristic anymore. They feel contemporary.
Yesterday in Osaka, as we cooled down and snacked our way through our konbini haul, we caught a BBC Australia segment on the killing of Todd Phillips. Last year, somewhere else in the world, we’d learned of Todd Phillips, a New Zealand man who had kidnapped his children and was hiding with them in the bush. No one had seen them in years when finally, in late 2024, he was spotted with one of his sons hiking through Waikato farmland. The sun setting, onigiri wrappers strewn on the table, we learned about the shootout between Todd Phillips and New Zealand police, the youth of Nepal overthrowing their government, the French PM quitting and then un-quitting?, and Japan’s own PM stepping down. These days, if you want to feel like you’re in science fiction, all you have to do is turn on conventional cable.