Blocked Numbers and Busy Signals
The eighties keep cycling back, and every time they do my brain goes warm and useless. Synth music stripped of human mess, neon gradients, pixel games that everyone claims to be playing out of love rather than nostalgia fatigue. The decade has been so thoroughly aestheticized at this point that the actual lived experience—the bad parts, the mundane parts, the parts nobody would voluntarily revisit—has been sanded away and replaced with a mood board.
What I actually remember, or what I think I remember, is the texture of unreachability. You wanted to see someone, you called their house and their parents answered. "Is he home?" You made plans and you kept them because there was no mechanism for canceling at ten minutes’ notice. No text to send, no read receipt to ignore. If you didn’t show up, you had to explain yourself in person at some point, which was its own kind of accountability. The message you sent was your presence.
A video imagining what WhatsApp would have looked like running on 1980s technology has been floating around—green-on-black, pixelated, brutal in its simplicity. It’s a joke, obviously, but it inadvertently makes the whole thing look more weighted than what we use now. Each message feels like it cost something to compose. The latency is visible.
The eighties weren’t better. Memory just has better editing software than we give it credit for.