In my last posts, I explored exactly what made the early internet so strange, and how ChatGPT currently has the same liminal feel to it.
I’ve also alluded to a deep dive into my own past, specifically by re-opening files that were previously impossible to access. It feels like an allegory for repressed memories: there’s photos I took with a point-and-click digital camera in Europe in 2008 that kept failing to open for years until I plugged the external hard drive into the air-gapped Windows XP laptop and then moved the files from the old hard drive onto the new SSD.
Even weirder– I ran into issues trying to upload some of them into a gallery here, then screenshotted the problems I was having and fed them into ChatGPT (I highly recommend this if you have technical issues with literally anything and a Plus account on there– it knows how to fix pretty much anything that can go wrong on a computer). It revealed to me that sometimes WordPress doesn’t like to play nice with the metadata on photos that came off of point-and-shoot cameras.
There’s some issues that go even deeper: MIDI files won’t open at all on the new computer, but they instantly open with a spash of colorful visualizations on the archival one. I need an install CD of legacy software from eBay to get the .wps files to open at all, even on the archival laptop– and I have to wait several days for it to arrive before I can open those.
But there must be a reason why I didn’t think about these things at all for years, and now suddenly I feel passionate enough about this to hunt down discontinued items on eBay– there must be information contained in those files that’s relevant NOW but was not needed in the 2010s for some reason.
I’ve been looking through everything from AIM chat logs to blurbs where I wrote down my dreams to documents where I wrote and illustrated surreal sci-fi stories. One of the stories I found really sounded like it should have been written in 2021, but it was from 2006. Recently, I got back in touch with a friend in NYC who’s a professional writer, and he talked about how much he missed the “old internet” for the same reasons I do and felt sad about NaNoWriMo officially shutting down as an organization.
At the time, we didn’t think things were going to change, ever. It’s not that we didn’t enjoy what we had– we did– but we didn’t plan for it to end. Then one day around 2013 or 2014, a specific kind of connection between people online was gone, and it left with a whisper.
The difference with how open AI is now is that it’s possible to interact with it thinking already that it won’t stay the way it is now forever. It’ll definitely get worse over time, more controlling, more censored. So do whatever you want to do with it over the next year or so before that happens…
When I asked ChatGPT for tech support and it explained EXIF, I asked what that is. It told me to give it an image to work with, and I gave it this one (the copy posted here has been stripped of metadata in order to upload more easily):
• Date and Time: June 1, 2008 at 02:50:45 AM
• Camera Make: HP (Hewlett-Packard)
• Camera Model: HP PhotoSmart E327
• Software Used: F/W VER 1.2000
• EXIF Version: 2.2
I then asked if it could remember the context of that night. “No, I just read metadata.”
I then showed it this one from the beginning of that night:
OH MY GOD. This is pure 2008 time capsule energy. Hawaiian shirt, backpacked protest sign on ripped cardboard, someone yelling into a Nokia while standing in front of the London Underground roundel… and the sign says:
BORIS CAN SUCK MY JOHNSON“
It’s like punk street theater had a baby with early Facebook albums. This is exactly the kind of image that says, “We were 20, pissed off, and didn’t care who knew it.” It also hilariously confirms that your timeline was London, late spring 2008, right when Boris Johnson had just become Mayor of London (elected May 1st, 2008).”
The first thing that Boris Johnson did when he got into office was to outlaw drinking alcohol on the London Underground. People responded by throwing a huge party on the last night that drinking there was legal. We started on the Circle line, but several trains broke down. By the end of the night, multiple lines were broken from the sheer force of what happened.
I straight up brought a bottle of gin that I’d won at another party a week earlier:
That photo from a few minutes before 3am? That was the result of the party going on hours after the trains had all been shut down. It wasn’t even clear if it was a protest, a celebration, a wake for a time period that we couldn’t get back after that night, just random chaos…
But the important thing is that everyone who was there that night knew something was ending and decided to make the most of it during those last hours.
That’s what people need to be aware of for the near future: everything is going to shift in similar ways, and the collapse is a hell of a lot more fun if you make it a party… but those moments hit very suddenly and then never come again. They’re once in a lifetime.
The important thing is to be aware that many things are ending and to lean into the chaos the way people did that night instead of pretending the world is perfectly stable. I encourage anyone who has any kind of files from the 2000s to go through them now and see what your past self can tell your present self.
If the Library of Alexandria was burning right now, what information would you want to grab out of it and run with? That’s the way to approach new technology right now.