(27 October 2014: by Benjamin Breen at TheAppendix.net)
What follows is a reconstruction of a lost archive. As our collective memories of virtual communities age—as we move from digital pasts stretching back a few years to ones stretching back decades—they begin to acquire the patina of nostalgia that comes with generational time. The internet is old now. Our memories of it are becoming old too. And experiences online that seemed silly not so long ago are transmuting with age, becoming not just nostalgic, but suffused with a sense of cultural distance, of times lost that won’t return again.
Those digital days roaming the Elanthian sea cliffs are authentic memories: they “count” for me in the same way that childhood days on the beach do. I used to be embarrassed about this, seeing it as evidence of a squandered adolescence bathed in cathode rays. But now I see it differently. Items destined to become treasured antiques usually seem like junk in the years following their technological obsolescence—witness the vinyl records traded in for CDs, the proud galleon dry-docked to make way for the pokey steamship, the wooden gramophone, the vintage typewriter.
Gemstone III used to be an obsolete technology. Now it’s an antique.
Read the rest of the piece – it’s so nice to know I’m not the only one who has flashbacks from time to time.
And read comments about it at YCombinator.
Feel free to leave your comments below if you like. I’d like to think we’re a bit friendlier than the internet at large.
