Some Rambling Notes on the Just-Vanished World

If you can’t remember life before the Internet, there’s one reality you probably find it really hard to grok: in the late 70s to early 90s of my youth, you used to have to make pilgrimages to get the cool stuff.

Back in the Analog, all culture was physical. Wonderful things hid, then disappeared, then turned into stories about wonderful things. Memory was the most common recording device. This made culture different than it is today.

You had to travel — bodily! — to weird, obscure shops to even find the most awesome zines, records, games, art and comics. There was a whole hidden world of geekery then, and every city had its local portal in (a bookstore with teetering shelves, a cafe full of stoner intellectuals, a dusty record shop with giant bins of LPs), but each shop had only a little bit of the magic in it. Some of the magic could literally only be found in one store. To get some of it, you had send a stranger a return envelope with postage on it. Some you could only ever get if you were in exactly the right place when a thing was made, before it sank forever into irretrievable obscurity.

You’d go to a show, hear the best song ever in the history of music — one time — and then it would never be heard again. You’d be hanging out at a friend-of-a-friend’s house, read a story that blew you away in some stapled stack of mimeographs and then never be able to find it again. You’d go on vacation with your parents, play an adventure game with some other geeky kids and the rules would be based on some impossible-to-find self-published supplement (heck, even the professionally published ones were pretty obscure — does anyone remember Bunnies and Burrows today?). You’d see an art show, and because no one remembered to bring a camera with film in it, no one would ever see it who wasn’t there that night. And when you could find a bootleg of that song, a copy of that story, rules to that game, photos of that art, you’d share those finds like triumphant archaeologists.

I won’t say that everything was better back then. It wasn’t, at all. Life is better now in a host of ways.

There was, however, a dimension to the experience of certain culture back then that simply does not exist today. A certain intensity was lent to the works by the very pilgrimages needed to find them. Even more, seeking them brought you into contact with a sort of dweeby secret society. Trying to connect to the culture that really spoke to you took on the narratives of mythic adventure. People told you about the incredible thing you might find, but that also might not even exist. It might be a rumor. It might be a fervently wished-for lie. A chance turn at the corner in a strange city might suddenly reveal a trove of awesome. An invitation to a party might open up into a lifechanging encounter with music unlike anything you’d ever heard before. Obscurity itself was an art form, at times. But in the discussion of these relics, and in their sharing, and in their creation and celebration, there was an immediacy, a power of the present moment, a lived community that was made possible by its very transience, by its certain loss.

That lived version of culture not only can’t be replicated now, I’m not even sure it can be understood by people whose worldviews have always been digital. Like I say, in the balance, I think we’re better off. That doesn’t mean we’re not missing something.

When I think about lived cultural experiences — performances, publications, pieces, parties — that had the power to leave me irreversibly changed, I do feel an absence in our digital world. Things can no longer be immediate and powerful in the same way, if for no other reason than that anything cool is probably on Twitter and Instagram before it’s even over, and by tomorrow people will have posted 93 reviews of it. There is a story of a thing before it has a chance to be the thing itself, and in a world of endless data storage that story will never be forgotten. Mediation is the all-encompassing, utterly inescapable cultural reality of the last two decades. And media-ubiquity offers many wonders, but it has also created a negative space around experience.

I think people are drawn to planned ephemerality, to handcrafts, to unplugged weekends, to festivals like Burning Man precisely because they still echo what not all that long ago was a central experience for many, many creative people. They are ways for digital people to hear the analog world echoing around them. Echoes, by their nature, fade away. A new sound must be made.

I spend a lot of my time looking at the future, and new kinds of experience are one of the things for which I hunt. What we think of as the way digital works is no more a permanent state than that just-vanished world was. Something else is coming, and my gut tells me it will be experiential and communal. And I suspect that, right now, futurism itself is actually the cultural endeavor most likely to produce it… but that is a story for another time.