Ten Little Missions
December 2012 was coming, which apparently meant the world was ending. Or that was what the internet jokes said—the Mayan calendar had had enough, and someone needed to write up ten last things to do before everything went quiet.
So there was this pony riding the Berlin S-Bahn that needed to be documented and shared on every platform. Take your pants off. Do it for no reason—Hollywood was doing it, so it had to be important. Run into a crowded reading room and yell that everyone needs to leave immediately, no time for explanations. Watch a soap bubble that had frozen solid. These were the opening moves.
The weird ones stuck. Write an essay about a killer beetle that uses its dead enemies as armor, then stand up in front of your class and read it. That’s not a suggestion, that’s a creative writing prompt buried in a joke. Wear a mask during sex—Dieter Bohlen, Freddy Krueger, Osama bin Laden, surprise her with it. Politely introduce yourself to trucks. To everything. The absurdity had a logic all its own.
And then there was the real instruction: if the world is actually ending, sleep with your best friend. Shit on your boss’s desk. Eat a cheeseburger and let the diet die first. These weren’t jokes. Or they were, but they meant something. We were all playing at what we’d do if there really was no tomorrow, and somehow that felt important to articulate.
Ali G was still the best character Sacha Baron Cohen ever made, even ten years on. This was a fact. Nyan Cat needed to be on a hoodie. You needed to buy them for everyone—your parents, your siblings, your grandparents, Ferdinand. The specificity mattered. The joke was that we all knew exactly what this was.
The whole thing was perfectly 2012. Viral meant something specific then. The internet was still a game we could all play together, full of stupid in-jokes and instructions you’d never follow and lists that served no purpose except to say: we’re all here, marking time together. Whatever happens next, we made this joke together. We shared this pony. We pretended we’d do these things. And that was enough.