Digital Midnight of the Old World: May 12th, 1995.

The last Friday night of the Analog World is slowly being resurrected by the least expected group of people in today’s society. ‘Digital Midnight’ occurred, and no one noticed. For quite some time.

There was a place that existed a long time ago, on a very different landscape, with a very different set of people who nourished that place and who curated the world around them. But then the unthinkable happened. They let it die. They did it while smiling, excited and clapping and ready to embrace something new. It happened right in front of everyone, and the entire world just shrugged it off and pulled out their credit card.

There were Friday nights and long weekends in the past where the television shows, the news and gossip of the busy week was something to get away from. All the phone calls you needed to make were usually done by 6:30pm and when the plans were set and the places arranged, those escapes all began and happened without constant checking, texting back and forth or picture posts along the way. People had their friends phone numbers, pager numbers, home addresses to get to, and routes ahead all memorized. We knew these little pieces of info and could regurgitate them at a moment’s notice. We did it without thinking about it. It was an automatic response, or a form of technological conditioning and that was the way we lived.

Most people had a ‘Thomas Guide’ Mapbook tossed aside on the back seat of their car if they were going somewhere new and needed to look up some random, distant place. The world wasn’t smaller back then either, it was just more well known. At least in the physical sense on knowing. We could see from all sides, all angles and our peripheral vision was endless. We touched it, hugged it, rubbed it often. It was like when you see a tarnished brass statue but there’s the one tiny bright spot that everyone rubs for good luck. The entire world was like that. There were bright spots all around us like signposts. We engaged and physically connected to the world around us. We had to as there was no other choice. But then it decided to move inward, both in the literal and the figurative. Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers were still talking about that journey over on PBS on Sundays if you had nothing better to do than tune in. Maybe that was the first precursor to acknowledging something larger was going on unnoticed.

What is the mysterious it that I keep referring to? The it was the analog, real world. It was the world before Netflix, smartphones, Uber rides, Facebook and Instagram posting, before a hundred thousand other apps and distractions and most importantly, before the real birth of that thing called the internet. It was the world of physical, gripping handshakes, face to face meetings, cassette tapes, compact discs, VHS Movies, Blockbuster Stores, Movie Theatres (and especially their lobbies and the patios out front where you would often meet).

We had our own language as all generations do, but it wasn’t digital-based, it wasn’t L33T, and it wasn’t shorthand by any means.

We stood leaning against our kitchen counters, talking in a low, private voice and called each other from the phone hanging on the wall which had a spiral cord that looked like an endless pigs tail and was often color-matched for the sake of it. Remnants of art deco, another period that also vanished. We picked up public payphones out in front of 7–11’s and called our parents for a ride home, or girlfriends to meet on some late-night rendezvous.

This was also the same world where large Malls were starting to tip into the abyss of decline. The death of compartmentalized shopping stores across the urban landscape had been decaying since the late 1980’s and the slow crawl just kept at the same, steady pace. And with every new death, there would be a new moment of hope and reinvention hoping to keep physical shopping IRL afloat. This was part of the spreading weakness of the Old World which we are still trying to figure out and cope with. This was where we lived before everything, every space and everyone become fully digitized. And in that time, many, many things vanished. To many of us who were just living our life, out on the periphery and not the ones making the change, it felt like the world around us was disintegrating, not growing. Much like the Thanos snap from Marvel, but not in an instant, but over a period of a few very memorable years.

As I’m scribbling this out tonight, I was confronted by several articles regarding the birth of the internet hitting 50 and what that means for all of us as a society. But that’s misleading, and sadly, just not true. The internet hasn’t turned fifty yet. Not by a long shot. Sesame Street actually turned 50 this year, however, but not the Internet, and I don’t recall any mentions of the Internet during that first season of Sesame Street, either.

In May of 2020, the monster we have all around us in this ever-consuming relationship will turn 25. Twenty-five. Two Five. The internet that has grown into behemoth, all-consuming proportions and invaded every aspect of our life is the internet of the consumer, not the internet that was being gestated in schools or by the government, prior. Our internet came to us as a product and as something exciting and friendly. The bacterial virus nature of the internet was something we purchased software from John McAfee in order to protect ourselves. Symantec had caused ripples in the consumer market when Grandma and Grandpa’s dummy-station PC in the dining room of America became over-infected and scary and full of pornographic pop-ups. It was the first seeds of distrust. We saw the problems of the internet as part of a small anomaly and a fixable problem, but not the over-riding symptom of the whole. We just didn’t have any clue back then.

The Government, Big Business and the growing Tech industry could’ve kept the lid on the emerging development had they had just a few more paranoid people in control. Profit-motives, however, ruled the day and the technology boom exploded culminating into the first real tech bubble. But even after it turned downward, it continued growing even larger after. It wouldn’t be hampered, slowed, stopped or put back in its bottle. Had they done so, we would be living in a very different reality.

But we’re not. Those paranoid types were pushed aside by the bright minded technocratic thinkers like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and an army of others, all vying hard to sail across the digital space like Kevin Flynn in Tron to get ‘In There!’ prevailed.

“In there is a new world! In there is our future! In there is our destiny!”

Technology reached almost full saturation levels. Wars were being directly affected on the battlefield by public awareness and outrage on social media, twitter, instant video sharing from far away regions showing bloodshed, chaos, corruption and death unfurled. It was unedited and fully available for anyone with a connection. The saturation had become so complete that the noise from social media has been tuned down by Governments who have learned to use the same devices the public once held aloft Excaliber like, and fashioned that awareness and power into a neuvo-type of Spear of Longines, wielding ultimate power over the masses and holding the lower ranks at bay in a well-dressed, subscription based class war. Yes, the revolution is being televised, and you are subscribed as we speak.

But that one point in the past, before it all changed? Did we experience digital midnight?

Friday night. May 12th, 1995 was the last Analog weekend of the modern world. IT professionals, Scientists and some tech journalists will pedantically try to argue otherwise, but it just isn’t so. Not even close. The average citizen in society, in any society and on any continent didn’t interface with what we see as the internet until roughly a number of days later, but definitely not before. Yes, it’s almost that precise of a date. That Friday night was the last night of the old world as most of us back then understood it. Yes, there were hard-working students in a few Universities around the world building what would become the internet, but the average person didn’t interact online until May of 1995. TCP/IP came online around the 15th of May, AOL very quickly shifted from charging people an exorbitant hourly rate to get on the “World Wide Web” to a much-lower monthly fee. Those little colorful printed discs began showing up in your mailbox from then on, and for roughly the next decade. ‘You Got Mail!’ was the ubiquitous catchphrase that was so pervasive it even spawned a film about the growing level of personal digital interaction. The first widely used browsers became accessible almost immediately after, and the common person began to access the net. This is where it began. Not in the basement of UCLA back in 1968 as some historians would try to insist. You’ll also get an earful about DARPANET and several other key items in history, but that was the period of pre-launch development. That was when business was still telling consumers that ‘No one will need a computer in their home’ or that it would be impossible to have the world fully connected. So many people just couldn’t see it. It was a box at best for kids to play games on and chase a multicolored dot through a maze. But once the lid was lifted, there was no putting it back. That was our ‘Digital Midnight.’

A few years later, the entire world was fully entangled with the spider legs of the internet in everyday life. Internet Cafes sprang up everywhere and Starbucks grew exponentially. The consumption of coffee as the beverage of choice, which only helped increase productivity began shaping the brave new world for the better. At that time, I went to school and learned how to program COBOL and worked furiously on the Y2K bug that had the world gripped in fear of shutting down over a minor programming short-coming, but which came out as more of yet one more collective shrug. I enjoyed those years. I worked on being Microsoft Certified, but laughed once I had jumped through that hoop and found out quickly how useless it was because of the excessive rate of constant change going on around everyone. In a few short years, every man, woman and child was aware of the web and could quickly gain access, whether that was at home, in their school, or at a public library. The world had successfully logged on.

In 1999, the Matrix came out and it was the first time that someone had asserted that the blanketing of technology across the social space might have long-term, detrimental damage or serious consequences for civilization as a whole. It was a philosophical suggestion put forward by the artists. Just as they had throughout all of human history. But back then, everyone laughed it off and took it as entertainment that had a few cute perspectives, but nothing more. Some very fascinating books were written about it and those authors even made it on to NPR for a few quaint conversations. However, as a whole, the digital space at 5 years old was everyone’s favourite new toy.

The whole discussion going on now regarding screen-time, or the perils of anti-social behaviour problems in the youth with video-game addiction and aggression would’ve sounded like dystopian, horror-edged Science Fiction.

No one wanted to hear that and no one was listening. It would take an entire generation born after the world had become fully digitized to wonder about, with real interest, what the world was like before it was lost into the world of Kevin Flynn’s digital imagination.

With the Matrix films, the prime archetype Neo, became an actual new legend of the digital era like a Paul Bunyan with a disk drive and embedded himself in the collective conscious. The act of unplugging from the entire grid, getting back to real life no matter the cost, or how difficult it might be to exist in, became a strange new myth. The question had been asked, and it would take time to seed, grow and be slowly realized.

Time passed and the digital space ‘in there’ continued to grow. A whole generation grew up engaged in the same ongoing war overseas, fueled by politicians, consumerism, the chase of petroleum and the bottom line.

Children went onto a battlefield, some to die, in a far off place that had been declared not by their parents, but by their grandparents.

The world wavered, wobbled and busted at the seams. Progress and consumerism went forward hand in hand, and some of the thinkers in the crowd quickly realized that actual freedom had been distilled down to a cynical version about choice in the marketplace. Those that had more choices felt more free than those that didn’t. Clearly something awful was afoot and a wrong turn had been made along the way, but for the most part no one could put their collective finger on it as to where. And so, for some time, everybody argued. They grumbled and yelled. They blamed each other and pointed fingers and it sounded like one of the cautionary chapters in a children’s book your parents might read to you at bedtime. Pop culture said ‘it was all good’, but we all knew it wasn’t.

Slowly, very slowly, maybe around 2008, during the crash, a change happened. People once again began being more interested in the physical world via crafts, gardening, sustainability, home-based art endeavors, home cooking, craft breweries and so forth. Things and practiced that flourished outside of the world of code and keyboards. That was what initially grew from the seed planted by Neo and Morpheus about what comes from ‘unplugging.’ All of these new things embraced the early American spirit of self-reliance, hand-crafted design, excellence and satisfaction in something tangible.

People’s interest in ‘gadgets’ as a thing had likely reached its zenith.

A small, outlier group within the Millennials and some of the younger Gen X’ers, had decided to divest themselves of social media and all things New World. They openly and clearly stated their desire to get back basics and live in the real world, or … the Old World. The place we had all grown up in, but had unknowingly abandoned because of the passive introduction of an encompassing Digital Landscape. A decade on, there are far more people engaged in hand building their own furniture, living in smaller, more efficient homes — an obvious rejection of the McMansions sought after and fought for by their parents. Many make and distribute their own clothes. They don’t purchase the same items as many generations before them and have been blamed for destroying a hundred or more businesses, cultural icons, restaurants, sporting events and everything else that was a cliché mainstay in between.

Many say that these old things struggled and died because they had outlived their usefulness in society and couldn’t be sustained, while others argued that they were rejected as being symbols of something more abhorrent to society. Harley-Davidson, among other manufacturers remain struggling to entice young buyers to their wares and have almost given up, deciding to double-down on older generations by providing nostalgic, retro offerings as a last ditch effort to stay alive.

We now have a younger set of 20-somethings who live in a precarious world, where they’re entering into a much bleaker landscape than any other American generation before them, with crippled opportunities and dwindling prospects for a strong future ahead. Their desire to leave not a minor footprint in their lives, or adhering to ‘Leave No Trace’ principles also applies to the digital life around them. They’re more likely to be shutting off their Facebook accounts, or never having them to begin with. Not being on Twitter. Using basic operation flip-phones instead of ultra-functional smartphones. They tend to avoid big-box retailers, fast-food, high interest loans of any kind, and focus on work, school and hobbies, solely.

Will these be the people who will work to reset the world back to the way it was? Will the newer wave of young people born within and completely surrounded by the Matrix-as-reality in their daily lives, be the ones to disconnect and curate the world around them so that when the rest of us catch up and get back to real living like it used to be, they’ll be there ready and waiting? Will we ever be able to find ourselves standing back on the fine line of those two worlds that once existed and stand and straddle the divide by choice, instead of being thrust across the threshold by force or temptation? Is that a possible reality in the modern era? Can we exist both in the Analog and with the Digital? Or is this just another momentary blip of resistance along the long path towards heavy modernization and technological enfoldment?