The Present Day's Colonization of The Past - Parts 1 and 2

Part 1

I find myself dwelling on the past, constantly. Sometimes in a reminiscent sense, more often in a sort of analytical sense. We all got here somehow, it was never that we just appeared where we are presently - there was a long and often intentional string of events that lead us to the present moment. Just as such, the moment we’re presently in will always lead to the future whether we like it or not - but I digress.

I think about the past often. The aesthetics of yesteryear are a sort of hot commodity these days, in a sea of designs handcrafted by algoritihms and corporate hackfrauds who got a piece of paper from a college and they were the hottest shit on the block - there have been numerous great resurgences in by gone design philosophies, driven by a want for something both familiar and safe - and new and subversive.

In the same sense, you see everyone speaking about how things were exponentially better back then - "the good old days" that might never return.

I’m not here to say otherwise, things were categorically better - quanitifably so even - what concerns me is the blatant misrepresentation of the past through the present’s "rewriting of history".

Let’s pivot for a moment.

Everything I’ve just said could apply to many new attempts at doing things "the old way", but I’d like to focus in on a very specific instance of this all that I experienced in my own life recently.

About 15 years ago, there was an application on the Nintendo DSi called "Flipnote Studio". It was animation software. Now that’s novel, what was moreso novel was the officially ran, online, Flipnote Distribution Service that Nintendo ran - Hatena.

This was an officially moderated service - and it was very good. I had to fax Nintendo from my mom’s workplace to get onto it - this is a real thing that you can look into, many others had to do the same thing.

It was something you could only have experienced had you been there, in 2009 watching stickmen fight and seeing people draw themselves as Zangoose and Eevee OC’s and all that jazz. It was good, clean, and innocent fun - you couldn’t even swear without fearing Nintendo’s wrath.

I have fond memories of Hatena - but it shut down around 2013, and in it’s place came a whole host of bootleg competitor services.

For the sake of brevity, you must take me at my word - they were haphazardly moderated by chronically online Internet people - meaning that they immediately became hotbeds for both manchildren and pedophiles.

I have a friend who was embedded in one of the services, even fought a sort of "Little Civil War" in one. Terrible stuff, but all of this was a decade ago.

Hatena came up in conversation with him - and he swore up and down that "Even in the Hatena days, it was all just stickmen fighting - and kids getting groomed into deviancy."

This is, of course - retarded.

Herein is the point in all of this. This man’s well is poisoned. This man has allowed experiences from more recent events in his personal timeline to poison the reality of things that he didn’t really know much about (He wasn’t on Flipnote Studio until the bootlegs started popping up). I feel that many people do this with the Internet as a whole.

The difference between a well funded, well moderated, official service ran by a major Corporation, for kids - specifically with kids in mind - and a string of small, bootleg, servers ran by strange autistics from all corners of the globe, with no corporate affiliation, with no verified and accountable moderators or leadership, who appealed to an aging demographic who "couldn’t let go of the past", and who eventually garnered an audience mostly removed from the original userbase of Flipnote Hatena - those differences are night and day.

The time periods themselves, the delivery of media to the userbases of various websites, the culture we lived in, the demographic makeup of not just our country - but the Internet at large - all of those things were different in 2009 compared to just 7 years later in 2016.

No one was "Gooning" in 2009, especially not people on Flipnote Studio. No kids were getting "Groomed" on Flipnote Hatena in 2009, now a few years later on the bootleg servers - undeniably they were - but it’s apples to oranges.

Let me focus back down and try to make a point out of all of this.

I am fearful that the attention span and collective memory of the masses are both getting shorter and shorter - and thus recollections are being outsourced towards things like documentaries and video essays - as well as very loud, sometimes very angry people, with a vested interest in misrepresenting the past to fit their present gripes and narratives.

I feel like I’m going to be cutting this short here, because I have to get up, get ready, and go to work soon - but I don’t see any way to fix this, and I am terrified by it. The past is a sort of sacred thing to me. History is a sacred thing to me, and we all owe the present to the past that built it - and pre-emptively ceding ground in the past to people who didn’t show up until later seems like a very bad decision tactically.

Part 2

Having thought for a day or so on the topic, I’m ready to make an addendum.

I believe one of the main things I have a gripe with is the ideas from the present infiltrating past recollections, primarily because of how those ideas formed.

Ideas formed differently back then, as there was far less centralization of informational authority - or even centralization of informational distribution.

As such, there were simply more ideas and perspectives on topics back then which were not memetically poisoned by centralized information sources.

Now, we see these centralized information sources retroactively poisoning the old wells. Some may call it "Correcting The Record" or something of that nature, but in essence it is an attempt to make a product of a by gone era a new product of the current era.

A few examples off the top of my head pertain to the way we tell stories and the ideas behind them.

There was a time when the concept of a ghost interacting through technological was not too far fetched. Now, you don’t hear about that happening as often. Alternatively, if you do - it’s not generally from an American perspective.

In an age where a significant portion of Americans still believed in ghosts, spirits, an eternal soul, etc. - it would not be uncommon to think that something would remain after death, capable of interacting with new and emergent creations within the physical realm.

Now? AI skinwalking as dead people. Minds copied or uploaded to some sort of cybernetic, freak, human / machine, synaptic, interface. Throw a bunch of words at the screen to obscure the author’s vague / nonexistant understanding of the technology they’re trying to talk about.

The "Basilisk" is one of the most aggregious examples of this. Absolutely no one was talking about Roko’s Basilisk before Wendigoon went and opened his mouth about it. Within the span of a few years it had become such a large, trending, topic online that Black Mirror referenced it in an episode (the Thronglets episode).

Another example, tying in with the ever-present atheism we see everywhere these days, is the abject rejection of "magical" concepts, and their replacement with chemical ones. From that aforementioned Black Mirror episode I can draw an example. The main character "rewires" his brain through the use and abuse of LSD - somehow doing psychadelics makes the "Thronglets" speech understandable.

Give me a break.

The primary avenue by which the past is retroactively poisoned is either through remakes and rehashes of old properties - or the creation of new "mockbuster" type properties that attempt to emulate the original properties, while eventually outing themselves as mere "crude facsimiles" of the old properties.

You see this a lot with "PSX" horror games.

All style, no substance - and generally speaking the developers do not seek to truly emulate the source material on a technical level, or even in some capacity related to writing or lore - it’s just low poly counts with intentionally scaled down textures, for some reason in HD.

It’s webseries’ on YouTube set 20 years ago, but everyone uses language that didn’t enter the common vernacular until 2015. It’s "slow burn" BS skinwalking as a grindhouse flick. It’s your favorite show from when you were a kid, but nothing looks the same, everyone sounds different, and instead of everything being a "one off" episode - it’s now serialized and engineered to try and get you to binge watch it all in one go.

And so on and so forth.

As time drags on, the recollection of the true and honest "Good Old Days" gets hazier and hazier. There’s still hope that the proper recollection could be re-instated, but not while the loudest wheels present are still squeaking.