2021 Trending — The Pilgrimage
The future is weird, good luck out there.
Once:
We used the internet as an escape from reality.
Then:
We used reality as an escape from the internet.
Now:
We are forced from comfort, unrooted from our lives online or in the real world, finding ourselves pilgrims in search of home.
Where Are We Searching for Home?
- The MetaVerse
- An Older Internet
- The Mundane
- Overlords and Oversight (Moderation, Misinformation, and Censorship)
- In Search of Lost Time
HOME AS: THE METAVERSE
The Metaverse is a place. It is the sum of digital, physical, and internet worlds. Today there are many metaverses emerging. They will continue to bifurcate for the next 5–10 years until they consolidate down into few central digital worlds that mirror our own.
The Metaverse is growing. Persistent digital worlds that operate beyond the bounds of currency, IP, and platform restrictions. The most singular example today is Roblox. The most famous example is Fortnite. In the time of the lockdown, these digital worlds expanded, gaining DAUs, improving FTUEs, and lowering the CPAs. In our search for home, we’re looking to the utopia of the metaverse.
Fortnite Envelops IP
Fortnite has brought together Disney, Sony, AND Microsoft IP in the new season of Fortnite. It cannot be understated how significant this is. Epic has now positioned Fortnite as a Metaverse that resides above the IP of these global entertainment brands.
Roblox Emerges as Creative Haven
Somewhere between an older internet and The metaverse resides the expansive machine that is Roblox which skyrocketed to 150 million players this year. Despite the sound and fury of the Travis Scott event, it was actually Roblox’s Lil Nas X event that garnered the most viewership of any platform, clocking in 33 million viewers.
IRL in URL
Beyond AR and bringing digital objects into the real world, we are seeing a leap in physical spaces moving to the digital world. In late 2020, 100 Thieves Gaming added their new Cash App Compound headquarters into the creative mode of Forntite.
Beyond the platforms, the economy of the metaverse is maturing rapidly. The intersection of cryptocurrency and decentralized worlds is opening the door to a new type of full blown marketplace. There are now 1.7 billion people gaming. As gaming finalizes its shift to Free to Play (FTP), the microtransactions in these worlds becomes paramount. Crypto is opening the door to a fluid monetary system that is not dependent on a singular platform.
Freedom of personal expression.
Freedom of creative opportunity.
Freedom from physical limitation.
Freedom of currency.
As we search for a new home, the Metaverse seems more and more like a place for us to glean the opportunities for our digital selves than may be available for our physical selves.
HOME AS: AN OLDER INTERNET
In the waning hours of 2020 we began to see the glimmer of something that felt bizarre, fresh, and… old. The old internet means many things to many people. To some, it is an aesthetic: The Matrix, Netscape, *Hackers*, and geocities. For the kids, the old internet may simply be the Iconic Vines that Changed the World.
But above all, the old internet is nostalgic utopia that felt more free. A place of creative possibility, untethered creativity, and Gibson-esque mystery.
In 2021 we will seek out home in the re-emergence of an older internet.
Balenciaga Created a photorealistic video game to show off their Winter 2020 collection. But like the efforts toward realism of early 00s sites, the end product feels uncanny and disturbing. For Balenciaga this recontextualization of luxury and highbrow experience through a markedly “old” feeling website is a bellwether to where other brands are headed.
Old Social Resurgence
If you have spent any extended amount of time on TikTok in late 2020, you will have run into video chat excerpts that seem ripped from another era. Omegle, the ancient video roulette service has leapt back into popularity in recent months, tripling Google searches since July. Omegle’s central concept aligns perfectly with the revolving-content-doors of the TikTok generation, but its archaic platform elicits the nostalgia of a time when the internet felt more unhinged and freewheeling.
To those trapped by the woven arms of glossy design and prescient algorithms, the skeletons of the old internet feel like a place of relief and unfettered exploration.
HOME AS: THE MUNDANE (TRIUMPH OF)
On January 3rd, two important things happened. The most memorable may be the birth of Bean Dad. Bean Dad’s emergence and subsequent implosion seemed to overshadow another significant event; the president of the United States attempting to coerce local state officials into scaring up votes for him.
This parity between the monumental and the trivial are highlighted in a recent piece from Ryan Broderick. The shock-and-awe of The Digital Now has created a dissonance that obfuscates the important and the potent.
It means that context collapse has gotten so bad and the scale of your trending algorithms are so completely out of whack that a total moron tweeting about beans can create the same level of discussion within your community as the Trump Georgia call.
It seems that in the chaos of 2020, much of the incredible was swallowed by the mundane.
On the day SpaceX’s rocket docked for the first time at the International Space Station it didn’t trend on Twitter. Instead Ben Shapiro’s thoughts on the song WAP was the most pervasive conversation touchpoint on the internet.
Watching the cliché-laden inauguration speech of Joe Biden, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we may simply want(or need) a more mundane future.
In the face of constant phantasms, the ho hum is welcomed reprieve.
HOME AS: OVERLORDS AND OVERSIGHT
(Moderation, Misinformation, and Censorship)
Now we come to the thorniest and most important topic.
There is no doubt that moderation and censorship have become the central issue facing our social digital infrastructure. Though moderation and publisher (read Big Tech) power was important in 2020, it came to a direct head in the waning hours of last year. The unilateral decisions by tech’s largest monopolies to ban the President of the United States was monumental. The ban of Trump was a shocking but not unforeseeable close to the era of Trump.
Tech Action
As Jack Dorsey states in this thread above, the actions of Trump were well outside the borders of the Terms of Service of these platforms. But Trump’s behavior, in many ways, has mirrored the effects of the global pandemic, by accelerating the trends that were already building over time.
Zoom, the omnipresent video software, stepped into the front lines of moderation and censorship with their decision to cancel the Zoom seminar of controversial Palestinian speaker in November 2020. The academic world was alarmed by the unilateral decision by the software provider. Many universities (including San Francisco State, the college hosting the cancelled seminar) rely on Zoom and other tech services to provide education during the pandemic. While Zoom argued that the seminar planned to break federal law concerning terrrorism, Andrew Ross, a professor at NYU, argued “It’s very dangerous for a third-party private vendor to be in the position of deciding what is legitimate academic speech and what is not.”
This trend is a coalescence between the eroding trust in government efficacy, increased trust in brands, and the surging power of our largest tech companies. Whether you choose to argue for or against more active moderation and communication control, there is no doubt that this will drive the extremities toward more decentralized platforms where more laissez faire governance prevails.
Messaging and Subterranean Social
Platforms like Signal, Telegram, and Wire have skyrocketed in popularity because they empower the individual to operate outside the prying eyes of GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon). As the greater pendulum swings toward oversight and tracking, a new subterranean social sphere is popping up to reestablish the divide between the product creators and the consumers who use their services.
Surveillance
Alongside the new lines being drawn by tech’s power players, is the very real evolution of citizen surveillance. In late 2020, Teen Vogue brought to light the incredible privacy-boundaries being crossed in the world of high school and higher education. In the rush of the pandemic, technology companies have moved into the education space and in doing so, have moved the all-seeing eye of AI into the very bedrooms of our children and youth.
Then in the early months of 2021, hackers broke into Verkada’s surveillance system, revealing the pervasive network of facial recognition software that underpins everything from Tesla to your local women’s health clinic.
“hackers were able to view video from inside women’s health clinics, psychiatric hospitals and the offices of Verkada itself. Some of the cameras, including in hospitals, use facial-recognition technology to identify and categorize people captured on the footage.”
The hacker who exposed the vulnerabilities of Verkada and the breadth of the security surveillance program was then raided by the FBI and his GIT was seized.
The magnitude of change in 2020 opened the door for technology organizations to forward the programs that monitor and augment the way consumers are able to interact on their platforms.
2021 and beyond will be defined by the consistent outcry for better oversight. We are looking to government. We are looking to the tech monopolies. We are looking to the mods.
HOME AS: THE SEARCH FOR LOST TIME
As we look for home, we find culture turning away from the legacy touchstones that have gripped our attention and time.
The onset of Covid-19 provided much of the world new found free time. And yet, that time was not used as expected. Extra curricular participation has fallen. Time spent on travel has plummeted. Time spent outdoors has shrunk. So where has our time gone?
Most of that newfound time has been put into screens.
Time spent watching video is up.
Time spent on gaming is up.
But we’ve lost interest in our legacy moments.
The Super Bowl was down.
The All-Star game was down.
The Grammys were down.
Beyond 2021, we’re in search of places to spend our time. Even as we emerge from the pandemic, the hours we fill will look far different than they ever have before.
We go out in this brave new world that emerges from a society-altering pandemic. We go out in a digital space that has pervaded our lives in new ways. We go out looking for a way forward. We go out looking for home.
