What WhatsApp Would’ve Been
The eighties come back around every few years—synth-pop, neon, pixel art, the whole thing. And you get this flood of nostalgia where suddenly everything from back then seems better. Cooler. More authentic. But it’s selective nostalgia. You remember the vibe and completely forget what was actually hard about living there.
Talking to someone in the eighties meant one of two things. You either ran into them by accident on the street, or you called their house on the landline. Their mom picked up, or their dad, or the answering machine. There was no texting. No way to send a quick message and change plans last-minute. You had to figure everything out in advance or just hope you’d be there at the same time. That was the actual reality.
Someone made a video of what WhatsApp would look like if it existed back then with period-appropriate technology. It’s blocky and harsh—jagged pixels, minimal color palette, stripped down to nothing but pure information. Brutal-looking. And it still works. You understand it immediately. It just looks wrong.
What gets me is thinking about how much infrastructure had to be built just to make free texting possible. Decades of phone lines, satellites, eventually an entire global network. We engineered our way into the ability to interrupt each other faster. That’s either genius or completely insane, probably both.
Sometimes I miss being unreachable. Sometimes I don’t.