What Kind of Time Is This

Somewhere in Moscow, a kid leans over a phone. The same scene plays out in New York, in Paris. Nothing much happens—they scroll, they film each other, they exist in that particular mode of digital presence that’s become so unremarkable we’ve stopped noticing how completely strange it is.

Filmmaker Nadia Bedzhanova’s short Wasteland looks like a loose collage of internet kids killing time, but I think it’s something more durable than that. A few decades ago—not even that long—none of this existed. The idea that you could be standing anywhere on the planet, pull a device from your pocket, and in that exact second share your life with people thousands of miles away: photos, voice messages, video, real-time. Unfiltered. Decorated with cat stickers.

We forget to be astonished by that. We adapted so fast that the miracle dissolved into routine, and now it just feels like the texture of existing. Bedzhanova’s film holds the camera still long enough to let the strangeness surface again. These kids aren’t doing anything remarkable—that’s exactly the point. Ordinary life, transmitted instantly, globally, constantly. When someone looks back at 2015 from a distance, this is what they’ll find: not the headlines, but the hum of a generation that wired itself to the world in real time and called it Tuesday.

That’s a beautiful thing to have documented. Very beautiful.