A series of circumstances forced me to create a new user account for myself on my work laptop, and in the course of trying to replicate my data, I inadvertently loaded my browser with all my old bookmarks going back to around 2007 and running through 2011 or so. So I’ve gotten lost trying to look through them lately.
The first thing that stands out is that 90% of them are dead links. Blogs, vendors, just the passage of time. Links to shows on Virgin Radio, or the Sports Junkies, or old Gawker Media articles are all 404s at best. More frequently, there’s a warning because the bookmarked domain now redirected to a Chinese gambling site or a domain reseller. So in a lot of ways, all that remains is the stored page title in the list.
Going through and looking at the topics from days gone by, it’s not hard to tell what had my interest: Android devices (still unsure who was going to prevail), steampunk (as an aesthetic generally), Maker Faire and its adjacents, things of interest in San Francisco, the netbook and its possibilities…it was a time when I was still interested in technology writ large, an era when the same five companies didn’t have everything in the world by the nuts. New players could still emerge, things like Foursquare or Instagram could catch fire and run wild without the presumption that they would be immediately eaten, smartphone time was just arriving – the confluence of finding out what was possible with a camera, a GPS and an internet connection all in your pocket with a 4-inch screen.
But there were other things there too. American-made clothing and footwear, the beginnings of what would eventually take over my entire wardrobe. Two different links to the Wikipedia article on the Episcopal Church, part of that first fumbling exploration that eventually led to 2023. And looming through all of it, articles and commentary on the Tea Party and the increasing Confederate radicalization of the Republican Party. Which, of course, went on to bear toxic fruit in the years to come. But it’s not like anyone can plausibly claim no one saw it coming or what the risk was.
It was a different era. There was still possibility. It still felt like the future could somehow get better. It certainly didn’t feel like the world was a decade away from going to the point of no return.
But what really stands out are the blogs. Mostly untouched for fifteen years or so. Personal blogs from friends who moved away, who gave them up, who aren’t even friends anymore in some cases. There was a whole life there, and it feels like William Gibson’s remark about being the last survivor of Atlantis: there is a whole world there and no one knows.
Things foundered and died, or turned to slop and silage. Vox, the first one. LiveJournal and Tumblr. Yahoo and ultimately Twitter. Gawker Media in its necessary form, especially Deadspin and Valleywag. Facebook choked social networking and blogging to death and became the AOL of the 21st century. Twitter became a symbiote that poisoned journalism to death. Amazon became yuppie Wal-Mart. Microsoft crumbled into a business than made the stuff you use at work with a gaming console as a side hustle. Google…Google became a tax on everything, the boss you had to pay a vig to if you wanted to be known or found by anyone else. And Apple was content to sit back and make the finest tools for infecting yourself.
The greatest scam Silicon Valley ever pulled was convincing the Obama administration that just because some of them were gay, they were fundamentally Democrats. When in fact the VC culture of libertarian greed was underpinning the whole thing and eventually empowered the worst people in the world, because they weren’t taxed into submission when we had the chance. Tech convinced us that Uber wasn’t a cab company, that AirBnB wasn’t an unlicensed hotelier, that Facebook wasn’t an advertising company, and that apps meant you weren’t an employer, just matching people up as if DoorDash was actually Tinder.
The title of this blog is fitting. Gibson and Stephenson and Ridley Scott and all the others led me to believe that living in a corporatist cyberpunk dystopia would be a Hell of a lot cooler than it is.
I was misinformed.