The Last Museum
Illustrations by Koren Shadmi.

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Tech

The Last Museum

On the edge of obsolescence, the last millennials of Silicon Valley are planning a mighty memorial to the era of social media.

Today we look West, gathering around our screens and social feeds for the latest announcements from Silicon Valley. It's something we do more and more often, as our technologies edge ever faster into obsolescence. Just like our selves, or so it feels, as we stand between generations, on the edge of a future whose ineffable hardwares we can only imagine. It's tempting to build things, just to remember.

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— The Eds.


A memory: When I was just thirty years old in 2030 and had, in the estimation of history, peaked as an entrepreneur, I hosted one of my regular lunches-with-interns in the inner cafeteria of my company, QQQube. At that lunch one of the engineering interns—a typically arrogant boy-man, overpaid, big fluffy hair and a small moustache—managed to bustle his way into a spot to my left.

Eventually I asked him what he did outside of work, and braced myself to hear about some boring startup or bio-hackerspace. Instead, he grandiosely admitted to being a "structural explorer" in what he referred to as the "MIT tradition," (I assumed then he was on his way to a brass rat), and after I asked him to explain that, he told me about climbing the Steve Jobs statue in the middle of the Apple Ring.

As the other interns listened in annoyance, he told us that he had found his way into the underground garage below the Ring hidden inside an automatic linen truck. It was that dumb and simple, the oldest possible intrusion technology, finding a less-secure point of entry. He waited for hours, crept out of the truck, and followed a service tunnel that had been outlined to him by a sympathetic ex-Apple intern who had been passed over and forced to work at Kik Finance.

I asked about the security monitors, heat trackers, and badging systems. "I wore a dazzle shroud," he said, and shrugged.

He found a hatch that led into the pedestal beneath the statue. From there, unobserved, he climbed the interior of the 400-foot tall colossus of Jobs that rises from the middle of the Apple Ring. "It's nearly 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty," he told me, as if that fact had not already entered the entire popular consciousness of the Valley and the world. The statue is clad entirely in synthetic sapphire atop a semipermeable bioluminescent flexible display—at the time it was built, the largest single continuous screenclad surface in the world.

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"It's like an elevator shaft without an elevator. And there are all kinds of toeholds, it's a climbing wall. I had my sucker shoe clips and my sucker pants so it was cake." So up he went until finally he reached the collar of the giant sapphire turtleneck and, ultimately, entered the head of Jobs.

"What I saw there was crazy." He paused to make sure we were giving him the appropriate level of attention. "The inside of the head is like a tiny museum. There is an ancient Macintosh and an old Apple II, and all this stuff, like iPhones still in box. A whiteboard with all these schematics. Everyone has signed the walls. I had to look it up but they're all Apple executives." He unfolded a small sheet and flicked it until, yes, we saw the whiteboard.

It was news; I'd never heard about this secret room in Jobs's head.

"Lots of Tims and Johns and Steves and Susans and Sarahs," he continued. "I think, this is something they probably do with executives, make them climb up and then sign their names."

"Did you sign your name?" I asked.

He smiled. "My tag, sure. Lower right-hand corner." Something for some anonymous corporate historian.

The rest of the story was one of slipping down, remaining invisible, getting back into the truck. "The truck was nasty," he said. Apparently overnight it had auto-unloaded and loaded from clean linens to dirty towels from the staff gyms.

"I posted out some photos looking out from behind his eyes," he said, "and I didn't even hashtag them, but they were pulled right down. Apple, right?"

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One of his fellow interns asked: "What could you see up there?"

"I mean, man, I could see…280?" he said.

We didn't hire him.

I am not at my ranch, nor my Beijing office, nor the lesser office in Brooklyn, but here, back home, in the Old Valley. In a few minutes we'll pull off the highway and into what used to be Pruneridge Shopping Center. I can see the Jobs statue out the window of this car, rising up from the center of the Apple ring.

Pruneridge has gone the way of all physical stores. In its place stands a massive set of overlapping, complex, structurally-interlinked steel polyhedra that required sixty-thousand hours of continuous computer time to model. Ten billion microscopic mirrors catch the light and reflect it in various soothing patterns. There is one mirror per living human on this earth.

This is MoST, the Museum of Social Transformation. It is mine, but soon it will belong to the world.

I will tell you how I got here.

In the 2020s, I was a regular college graduate, building apps, selling products to medical services holding companies, living in a coder's squat in Mexico City. Then my girlfriend and I made an app that let you share fridge space in crowded apartment buildings. We pivoted that into an organ-matching app, of course, and sold it to a medical services firm for what seemed like a large sum but was, in retrospect, not. Nonetheless I had a year's salary. The girlfriend left me for a guitarist, so I rode my bike for a while. I got very into social art objects.

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One of them, which I called QQQube, took off as a product. There are a number of stories about who actually created QQQube and why, and many people have taken credit for its success, some deservedly and some less so, but I ask anyone who doubts me to go to the source code history. I wrote the README and the first lines of code.

Those first six years were lean and brutal. We had funding but our earliest partners couldn't fully understand the vision and kept wanting us to focus on some existing market. They didn't get that QQQube wasn't a means of doing something but the ends.

But then we monetized. QQQube6. And of course now everyone knows QQQube9.

By the time QQQube9 came out I was 30 years old and felt 90. Even my virtual doctors were shaking their heads and giving me frowny faces. We had 1,400 employees. Over 1.4 billion people interacted with and engaged with QQQube content, back when 1.4 billion was a lot of users. So I sold.

"This is the best thing for the users," I wrote on Medium. "It's the best thing for me too. And the best thing for QQQube as a semi-conscious global commercial cube-based personal-improvement entity."

After the acquisition we moved onto the main Facebook campus, but the fit wasn't right. Zuckerberg was in his 40s and the world was moving past social networks. Twitter had imploded into a graveyard of yearning brands. They'd all been too rich and too powerful for too long, and there wasn't much left to do but mind the store and make acquisitions.

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But they didn't want me in the codebase. And I watched as my brightest people took their payouts and started new companies. I had ten billion dollars, ten billion in 2030s dollars. QQQube was doing better than ever.

Why was I staying?

Then came my daughter, Augusta. A convenient pretext to be out of the office. A week after she was born I jumped into my OneCar and, even though I had about a dozen pro-forma meetings that afternoon—I blocked my time into 7.5 minute chunks—I just asked the car to wander the Valley.

Okay, said the car. Wandering the Valley.

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It brought up some standard tour and drove me from corporate campus to corporate campus. Ghosts. Here was HP, here was AMPEX, here was where the first Google Car was tested, here was a garage where they made motherboards in 1979. This was where one operating system or another was born. Until finally it pulled in at Xerox PARC and gave me a potted lecture about the history of the user interface.

What struck me was how close it had all been, before everything spread out, before we all started drifting in our ever-larger auto-cars up and down from Portland to Los Angeles. It had been such a small world, people literally driving in their cars from idea to idea, from lab to lab, campus to campus, in the pursuit of ideas and wealth and understanding, until a sort of nuclear thought bomb went off in the 1980s, when my father was a child, and the Valley became one of the hot, bright centers of the world.

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My automatic tour concluded at the Computer History Museum. A fine institution. It has the pride of place in the neighborhood, and I've given money to it like everyone. But that afternoon I wanted it to speak to me, and I couldn't make it do so. It was like visiting the Cloisters, or wandering the Louvre. Here I was, absolutely on the receiving end of the revolution it describes, but as I walked through the halls I couldn't find myself. I saw magnetic cassettes that held computer chess programs, and old plastic computers that were barely more powerful than the smart motes in my cough suppressant. A docent explained logarithms. Here is a mouse. Here is a screen.

But the work I had done, the reason I and so many of my friends were now decabillionaires, had been in organizing ideas—in molding concepts into semi-tangible things. This institution was built to venerate Jobs and Gates. But their work was so focused on repeating old mistakes: let's make a word processor that works like paper, let's make presentation software that works like overhead transparencies. It seems so infantile, in retrospect, to attach a printer to a computer. Like attaching a big metal ringer-bell to a smartphone.

I'd grown up on Zucks and Sheryls and Bizs and Evs. Connectors. I built QQQube on their ideas.I had nostalgia and warm memories not of some old gray box but for a dancing cat that sang the alphabet and read to me at night; I had nostalgia for my first thousand friendhope messages. I had warm memories of encapsulating my Higglestown Junction wormfire and giving it to a girlfriend via a USB charm, when I was twelve, and watching her take out her starter earring and put it into her ear, where it would vibrate whenever I was nearby. These are the sweetnesses of my life. When I grew up I didn't want to make software that ran on phones. I wanted to craft giant augmented speaking hypercube retinal projections that optimize various inboxes.

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Who would tell my story? Our story?

When you have had an unbearably large liquidity event, the world starts to flow around you. And the word "liquid" is right. My phones and sensors bloomed with countless apps that were basically only for me, or for a few dozen people: jet-and-bus-sharing apps, various specialized car services, a concierge app that helped me buy gifts for when I was being especially negligent towards my wife and daughter. I realized when someone tried to get me involved in a private zoo-sharing plan that it had gone too far. I didn't want to own a fractional giraffe. I wanted to understand the world, not buy it. I wanted to climb up inside the heads and look out.

Construction on MoST started three years ago, officially, but it actually started 15 years ago, on that afternoon drive.

In the large open area/cereal bar that we use for major meetings I decide on a proper chair instead of a beanbag. The whiteboards are lowered.

Two people are here, assistants to ensure that Zuck's new holo-presence rig is working. Who knows where he is; it's always easier, I've found, not to ask.

Somewhere, in some database somewhere, he is still my boss. I never actually quit. I realized I didn't need to.

In a moment Sergey will show up too, someone from the old guard, taking the stairs three at a time in his cybertoes. Jack will appear in his suit and his glorious gray beard, and the rest of them.

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I can admit, can't I, that at age 45 I still thrill in the company of this old breed of millennials? These are the people who made my world. Of course I never felt like I belonged. But the construction of this long-overdue museum has brought us all together, people who bore witness to something huge and strange, something that will never come again. We're equals now. Yes, Sergey will mention Stanford; yes, Zuck will occasionally mention Google Plus and laugh. But so much liquid has flowed under these bridges.

Someone who works here is pouring water from a clear pitcher into individual glasses. Someone else who works here is checking the lighting.

The director of the museum is a young woman with a Ph.D. who has worked at five or six science and technology museums around the world. She's not quite my age. This is the apex of her career. Her Ph.D. was on transitional platform/media entities like QQQube. I don't agree with much of it; academics can't understand the choices you have to make to ship a product. But even if I can quibble I don't doubt her commitment. Her name is Petra. If she told me that she had personally polished each one of the ten billion exterior nanomotor-powered mirrors I'd believe her.

I went to see my daughter a few days ago, at her mother's small compound, to tell her about this event. To her it's all ancient history. She grew up post-social, post-screen. Everything she's known has either happened because something sensed she wanted it to happen, or via various beams of light directed straight into her retinas.

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We had a bad year with her, an ugly adolescent year in which she took up with some of the stranger kids from Choate Stanford started huffing SpongeFlake.

My ex-wife and I talked with the therapists that are mandated to weigh in on childcare decisions and we collectively determined she would leave Choateford and attend an online program with immersion Mandarin, and pick a non-digital sport for social activity. She chose equestrianism—which, I mean, I brought that on myself? Suddenly instead of kids wearing lipstick on their eyes she was bringing home horsey girls with big smiles. Which, thank God.

"Daddy, let me show you something," she said.

So I went up to her room where she has a sand table and a large set of smart horses, each one coupled to a real horse she owns. She picked them up and stroked them, meaning that in some stable I own a horse was having its muscles neuro-agitated, was hearing her whispers in its ears. Horses have big ears.

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She explained something about the horse-human linkages that she was seeking to create. Apparently she wanted new sensors, some new way of perceiving life through the eyes of a horse called Cupcake. I said of course, of course. If it's safe, do it. It feels so weird to me, the way that she is always stroking the walls, signals passing in and through her body.

I have the same wires and retinal drillholes, of course, but I just use them to read the news.

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I pretend to understand her world because it is expected of me, as a visionary. If I am honest, I am not a visionary any longer. My daughter wants to see the world through the eyes of an avatar horse named Cupcake.

I was told by one of her minders that she necked with a stableboy. Which means there are still stableboys. Which is comforting to me, even though I never saw a horse except from a car window until I was out of college.

Getting old is weird.

I told her I'd be glad to help her neurally link with Cupcake. I asked her if she'd come to the museum opening, and she said yes, and we embraced. Life is sweet.

There is an exhibit at the MoST that I truly love, for little kids. There are hundreds of pegs, and on the pegs are different things: some pegs have cats on top, some pegs have computers. There are pegs with little colleges and pegs with different kinds of currency embedded in plastic. And the way you play the game is that you run little bits of string, just plain, dumb, old-fashioned string, between the pegs, and every time you wire one thing to another you get a number showing you the total number of possible connections between these objects.

Kids love string.

So they crawl around and wire up all the cats together. Cats communicate by smell! And another kid takes the computers. Computers communicate via the Internet! But then they hit the end and the docent points out, wait, you didn't score enough points. How do you win?

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And then the kids crawling around on the floor realize that the way you win is by wiring it all together. Connect CatNet to the Flags, connect the flags to the colleges, connect the currencies to the flags. Connect the Eiffel tower to the currencies. As the networks overlap and combine the score goes up and up until finally a bell rings. It takes about two minutes. The kids can see everything become one single centralized network. They love it.

Listen to me, Marissa says, you should consider raising your own chickens.

There is a particular kind of Ball jar, says Jack, that I prefer for my preserves.

Peter tells us how he's had his blood replaced.

And Zuck, via holopresence, explains how acupressure can make it more comfortable when you wear a sensory rig in high altitudes.

And then we get down to business. The business being that we will hold a huge party, a celebration of the migration from a world of hardware and operating systems into a world of abstractions and data, where the people are connected to horses, flags, and cats, and most importantly to each other.

I'm not the only person this week to have had a strange visit with a daughter, to understand that the world of our children will be stranger even than our world was to our parents. Deep down we are all people of the screen, but the generation coming after don't own cars. They don't own phones. They rent access to communities. They design tastes and sounds. They network naturally. A young man walks down the street and a voice comes into his ear, and he stops and says to a young woman in front of him: "Cynda wants you to get milk."

Some part of me keeps screaming, "why does he need to tell her? Why doesn't someone just tell Cynda directly to get the milk?" Why, when we are surrounded with technology, would anyone build inefficiency into the system, involving more humans, making a mess of what should be a simple process involving robots and drones?

But they are who they are, and what am I going to do about it? Blog?

We open in a month. Fifteen years of labor to create something beautiful and honest, something to tell the true story of the last almost-half-century. When the museum opens, surrounded by security, with all the people who changed the world inside, admiring the exhibits, celebrating our heritage, the moment those screens light up and the mirrors start to reflect the glowing light of the Jobsian colossus, the great screenclad statue in the middle of the Apple Ring, casting its glow across the valley—when the doors open, that's when the entire thing will be, absolutely, and irrevocably, obsolete.


This dispatch is part of Terraform, our home for future fiction. Illustrations by Koren Shadmi.