It’s a pleasure to be here in Jason’s esteemed garden of links and digressions, celebrating 20 years since we created Snarkmarket. In keeping with our host’s splendid curatorial style, most of what I’ll post here are not little bloggy essays like this one. But there’s one thing I especially wanted to ask this crowd about.
Few people would ever have known about Snarkmarket if not for the short video Robin and I made, EPIC 2014 (and then, a year later, 2015), that went viral in an era of the internet in which virality was difficult. To make a video viral in 2004 meant people mirroring a file on their private servers, linking to it on their blogs, and emailing links to friends and colleagues. But the video itself imagined that friction as a thing of the past. YouTube didn’t yet exist, but we’d guessed that it or something like it was coming. A world where sharing was difficult had already begun to feel obsolete, even while we were still living in it.
I’ve come to find it useful to imagine parts of the world around me in past tense. There seem to be many things these days that we’ve committed to ending or know we can’t sustain, even though they’ll probably be omnipresent for years to come. Many stem from our changing climate and growing sense of the toxic effects of constantly gassing the air. In a few years, for example, most of the new cars sold in California won’t have gas engines anymore, by state decree. But that’s not all of it. Nowadays almost every time I find myself in a retail store that’s not a pharmacy, I get an anachronistic jolt. I don’t know if I’ll ever think about an office commute again the way I have for decades of my life.
The most obvious function of this exercise is to help me consider my own behaviors, wants, and habits in a different light. I hope to someday laugh at the fact that we once found it convenient to encase individual slices of cheese in plastic.
As a habit of mind, it’s also a way of grounding me more deeply in the world I still inhabit. It helps me savor the things I expect to grieve, and mark the things I hope to outlive. When I’m sick, I try to take mental notes for my future selves, reminding me not to take for granted the mundane luxury of breathing easy.
But I think this should be more of a collective exercise. We know that we’re seeing the end of an era and the beginning of another. We’ve pledged ourselves to this, in fact. So what should we look at as having begun to end? When we look back on this moment 20 years hence, what will we strain to remember? What will seem as distant to us as that world two short decades ago when making a video go viral required the distributed muscle of a network of human beings?
Tags: time travel
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