flashback, part 114 of n

Foursquare was the signal that Smartphone Time had arrived. A smart device with GPS made location-based social networking plausible in a way that hasn’t been the case at all when Dodgeball was launched. And Foursquare was the toast of SXSWi – back before SWSXi was nothing but Nerding Man and another way to get the swine out of the city for a week – and from where I sat, it felt like something truly revolutionary: you can tell your friends where to find you, see places near you, log your life. It felt like something meant more for people ten or fifteen years younger than me, but there were local people on it and we still had the Castro Street Dining Consortium, after a fashion, and it felt…like the future. Like a new era. Having a Black President ™ and full command of Congress, however briefly, didn’t hurt (and looking back at the blog, things were just as bad politically as they are now, and Obama and Reid were fools not to defend reality against the fabulists and fantasists). But I had a GoPass for Caltrain and was free to run up to the city with ease. And we did, making use of a friend’s place near the ballpark. I made my way through the craft cocktail scene, learned to relish the fog overhead, snapped shitty 2-megapixel pictures that I could post to…

…well that’s the thing, isn’t it? The future was not set in stone. While Facebook was already showing ugly by 2010, it wasn’t the Death Star yet – Twitter was still churning, Google was throwing everything at the wall with Buzz and Wave and eventually Google Plus, Instagram and Snapchat weren’t even a thing and TikTok wasn’t even imagined, and chat apps on the phone meant iMessage. Google, as recorded here, was capable of being the Beast of Mountain View, but hadn’t shoved in on evil for the sake of beating Facebook, and Steve was still alive. Even Foursquare itself wasn’t the whole story: Gowalla and Whrrld were avidly competing in the check-in space. And the smartphone itself had not crossed the finish line yet, and wouldn’t for a couple or three more years. HD video recording, LTE speeds, OLED displays, all day battery life, even the Lightning connector or USB-C were in the future. Every year meant legitimate improvements, and every other year meant you damn well better upgrade the phone while the contract makes it cheaper and you can get the benefits of being on the S-cycle. Back then it was about all the new features, not “are they finally going to take away headphone jacks/one handed size/Touch ID for good”.  Half a dozen manufacturers were tooling up “iPhone killers” in a world where Verizon and T-Mobile didn’t yet have their own piece of the Apple. The iPad, the Chromebook, the Kindle (and Fire!) and assorted Android tablets – it was still all to play for.

It was an era of possibility. An era before stagnation. And, to be blunt, an era before 40. I could say with a straight face before my 20th high school reunion that “I’d like to think my best days are ahead of me” and to some extent, they kind of were – if I had the life I had in 2012 throughout the whole decade of my 40s, I could have been a lot more content. But that wasn’t how it worked out.  I suppose to some extent, that’s why I keep wrangling the social media, in hopes that I’ll somehow manifest Venn or Pal About or the one app that will actually let me stay in bullshit-and-cruft-free contact with all the people I care to stay in touch with, the way Facebook did. And Foursquare. And I’d be lying not to acknowledge that I’m feeling a vibe about going South not unlike eleven years ago, when we were squired around places new and old alike and met friends old and new and took in a world much changed from my old days, in a way that felt like its own sort of new possibility before events made the South untenable if not unsafe.

I’d like to believe that my best days are still ahead. But that’s not a reasonable expectation. I’d settle for a fair run of good days and a new normal I can live with. I guess we’ll see how realistic that is.

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