Wasteland: What It Felt Like

I spent 2015 glued to my phone like everyone else—Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, YouTube, WhatsApp, Twitch. The apps blurred together into background radiation, and by then I’d stopped questioning it because it had become the default. You learned to live inside those feeds the way you learn to live in any environment, until it just was.

What strikes me looking back is how recent this all is. Decades earlier, pulling out a phone and sending video to someone across the world in real time would have seemed impossible. Yet by 2015 I wasn’t even thinking about it. Just pull out the iPhone, shoot, add cat stickers, send. Uncensored, real, immediate.

I watched Nadia Bedzhanova’s short film Wasteland around that time. It’s just kids in Moscow, New York, and Paris documenting their days—nothing precious, nothing organized, just the mundane stuff of being alive and young and connected. But it’s a time capsule. She captured something true about 2015, what it felt like to document everything in real time, without a filter between the moment and the world.

Looking back, there’s something accidentally historic about it. I wasn’t documenting for history, just living and posting. But the immediacy—what I did showing up on screens across the world instantly—made it real in a way nothing before had been. That’s what Bedzhanova caught. That’s what matters about the film.