DID WE ALL DIE IN 2012? ======================= A completely serious investigation into an obviously ridiculous question. I have been thinking about something lately. What if the Mayans were right? No, I do not literally think the world ended in 2012 and we all got dumped into some cheap simulation running on a neglected Dell server in the basement of the universe. But culturally? Something sure as hell feels different. I grew up watching decades actually LOOK different from each other. The 1980s arrived wearing fluorescent colors, high-top sneakers and sunglasses that had absolutely no business being that large. Everything said AWESOME across the front of it. Malls were temples. MTV looked like it had been assembled from spray paint, cocaine and a Commodore Amiga. Then the 1990s showed up and threw all of that in the dumpster. Suddenly everybody looked like they were going camping. Flannel. Drug rugs. Hiking boots. Earth tones. Coffee shops. Alternative music. Everybody apparently owned something from L.L. Bean whether they had ever actually seen a forest or not. You could practically smell 1994. And then the Internet arrived. Not today's Internet. The REAL Internet. AltaVista. Hotmail. GeoCities. IRC. Personal homepages covered in animated GIFs. Guestbooks. Web rings. People bought computers and suddenly discovered that they could publish something to the entire planet without asking anybody for permission. That was astonishing. Then Google came along and actually made the gigantic mess searchable. Broadband showed up. Digital cameras got cheap. MP3s escaped from hard drives everywhere. Wikipedia appeared. YouTube happened. Cellphones mutated into smartphones. For about twenty years, every time you turned around somebody had invented some completely new way of doing something. And then... 2012. Remember 2012? The Mayan calendar. End of the world jokes everywhere. People pretending to worry about whether December 21st was going to end civilization. Then the date came. Nothing happened. We woke up. Went to work. Turned on our phones. And apparently just kept doing 2012 for another fourteen years. Look around in 2026. The cars look newer, but they are still cars. The televisions are flatter. The phones are faster. The cameras have gotten ridiculous. Amazon can put something on your porch before you have finished regretting buying it. But the fundamental shape of everyday life feels remarkably familiar. Somebody transported directly from 1985 to 2000 would have been completely overwhelmed. Somebody transported from 2000 to 2015 would have had a lot of explaining to catch up on. Take somebody from 2012 and drop them into 2026 and you mostly have to tell them that Twitter changed its name and everybody got even angrier. That is weird. THE ENDLESS PRESENT ------------------- The strangest part may be culture. Every decade used to seem determined to embarrass the decade before it. The 1960s did not want to look like the 1950s. The 1970s certainly did not look like the 1960s. The 1980s exploded out of the 1970s wearing neon. The 1990s immediately declared neon illegal. Even the early 2000s had their own strange shiny silver world of translucent electronics, flip phones, nu-metal, pop-punk, reality television and websites covered in blue gradients. So what exactly does 2026 look like? Half the time it looks like 1986. Or 1996. Or 2003. Synthwave. Retro gaming. Vinyl records. Cassette tapes. VHS filters. Pixel art. Y2K fashion. Movie sequels. Movie remakes. Television reboots. Old bands touring. Old games remastered. Old toys reproduced. Old aesthetics rediscovered by people who were not alive when they were new. Modern culture increasingly seems to wander around in its own attic looking for something interesting. There is actually a philosophical term related to this idea: "hauntology." One version of the idea is that modern culture has become haunted by futures that never arrived. Instead of constantly creating radically new visions of tomorrow, we keep recycling yesterday's visions of tomorrow. That sounds absurd until you notice how much of modern science fiction still looks like somebody remixed Alien, Blade Runner, 2001 or Star Wars. The future became retro. THE INTERNET ATE THE INTERNET ----------------------------- Something else happened along the way. The early Internet was chaotic. That was the point. Millions of people built weird little corners of it. Some guy in Ohio had a website about vacuum tubes. Some woman in Oregon maintained the world's most obsessive collection of information about antique sewing machines. Some teenager built a Final Fantasy page with MIDI music playing automatically in the background. Some lunatic ran a Gopher server from his basement. Nobody had permission. Nobody needed permission. You wandered around. You discovered things. Then slowly the Internet was paved over. Google. Amazon. Facebook. Apple. Microsoft. A handful of enormous companies became the entrances to almost everything. Instead of exploring a strange electronic city full of individually owned buildings, we moved into five gigantic shopping malls. Convenient? Absolutely. Efficient? Usually. Interesting? That is another question. THE RECTANGLE ------------- Technology did not actually stop advancing. That is important. In many ways it accelerated. Reusable rockets routinely land themselves. Gene editing became real. Artificial intelligence can write software, generate images, compose music and have conversations. Robotics is advancing. Medical technology is advancing. Computers became absurdly powerful. But most technological progress now reaches ordinary people through the same object: A rectangle. Your rectangle got faster. Your rectangle got a better camera. Your rectangle learned another trick. Your rectangle can now talk to an artificial intelligence. But it is still the rectangle. Compare that with earlier technological transitions. Typewriter to computer. Film camera to digital camera. Telephone to cellphone. Paper map to GPS. Television schedule to streaming. Encyclopedia to Wikipedia. Record store to MP3. Those were changes you could FEEL. Modern technological progress frequently happens somewhere deep inside a server farm and appears to the user as a new button. The machinery underneath civilization is changing dramatically while the surface stays strangely familiar. WHERE DID MASS CULTURE GO? -------------------------- There is another possibility. Maybe culture did not stop. Maybe culture shattered. In the 1980s, millions of people watched the same television networks. Millions heard the same songs. Everybody knew the same commercials. Everybody saw roughly the same movies. A ridiculous new fashion could sweep across the entire country. That created something recognizable as THE 1980s. Now everybody lives inside a personalized stream. Your Internet might contain woodworking, ham radio, synthesizers, weird movies and raccoons. Someone else's Internet contains makeup tutorials, Korean pop music and competitive gaming. Another person's Internet contains nothing except political arguments and videos of people pressure-washing sidewalks. There are people with millions of followers that most of the country has never heard of. Culture may not have disappeared. It may simply have fractured into ten thousand tiny cultures. From inside one of them everything seems active. From far away the entire era looks blank. SO DID THE WORLD END? --------------------- No. Probably not. I checked. The coffee still works. Gravity appears operational. My electric bill continues arriving with depressing reliability. But I increasingly think 2012 marks something interesting. Maybe the Mayan apocalypse was simply misunderstood. Maybe the world did not end. Maybe the shared cultural timeline did. The giant conveyor belt that carried nearly everybody through THE SIXTIES, THE SEVENTIES, THE EIGHTIES and THE NINETIES finally broke apart. Now we live in something closer to an endless present. Everything is available. Every decade is available. Every song is available. Every movie is available. Every style can be resurrected instantly. Nothing completely disappears anymore, which also means nothing completely replaces what came before. That might be why the future sometimes feels like it stopped arriving. But perhaps the interesting stuff is still happening. It is just happening somewhere smaller. In garages. In basements. On homemade servers. Inside tiny music scenes. Inside strange GitHub projects. On forgotten protocols. On independent websites. On computers being forced to do things their manufacturers never imagined. Maybe innovation did not die. Maybe it stopped being broadcast to everybody simultaneously. And if that is true, perhaps the answer is not to wait for some corporation to invent the next cultural era for us. Maybe we have to build the weird stuff ourselves. So if you are reading this through Gopher in 2026, congratulations. You may already be part of the solution. The world didn't end in 2012. The monoculture did. Welcome to the Endless Present. -- nitetime.net A drop of ink in a binary ocean.