Inspired by the post about the hieroglyphs the one dude hoped would last forever.

People always talk about future historians being confused at memes and old forums, but surely a lot of catastrophic events could just wipe out the internet wholesale, right? If something REALLY COOL posadist-nuke like a giant meteor wiped out everybody, what if aliens came along and were deeply confused that our culture seems to end randomly in the mid 2010s, subsumed by an internet whose only remaining shreds are references in big scientific studies?

The history textbooks on our dumb asses would surely read "and the humans all talked into screens and used "hyper links" to share information and opinions. Very little is known about this obscure human ritual as no evidence can be found of its existence beyond scattered references in ancient texts contemporary to its existence."

Thinkin bout the impermanence of the internet rn

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
    ·
    6 months ago

    God, two years ago I had an idea for a story about archaeologists in 2222 (after a huge geomagnetic storm / solar flare / whatever you call it circa 2100, among other things) trying to learn about trans culture in the 2020s by essentially diving into flooded coastal cities and trying to find old hard drives or SSDs and trying to recover the data despite the damage done to them. This just reminded me of that. It sounds like a really interesting premise but I also don't think I have the skills to write it myself.

    • ashinadash [she/her]
      ·
      6 months ago

      Alas thou must, this sounds like it fucks. Reminds me of the mac archive of a 90s trans website from a while ago.

      • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
        ·
        6 months ago

        I haven't heard of that, please tell me about it.

        Also, to be clear, that story idea was meant to be the fifth and final story in a series of short stories about trans shit in the near-ish future, of which I only wrote the first one-and-a-half stories. The first four stories were all going to be parodies of different things — Papers Please, Half-Life 2, Kin-dza-dza!, and Gurren Lagann, with individual scenes or details inspired by other things — and they would together show the gradual transformation of a fictional US state as it gets progressively more transphobic, eugenicist, and fascistic over the course of the 21st century. While each story was going to be very comedic and biting in its satire, and each story would end with some sort of victory over the oppressors... Well, the fact that things kept getting increasingly horrible just made me feel like the fifth and final story being a sort of epilogue would be a nice conclusion, even if said epilogue didn't actually have much of anything apparent to do with the other four stories.