Thoughts About Nothing #2
A gimmick for when I have no ideas or no time to write for myself.
Given that I am still splitting my time between writing and consulting for a fashion brand to pay for my mortgage and luxurious (not at all) lifestyle, I usually dedicate myself to my newsletters on the weekend.
However, between binge watching the new Top Boy — which, if you are a crime junkie like me, I highly recommend — and writing for other people, sadly my brain didn’t produce anything worth publishing and shipping out.
Surely I could have prioritized better, but hey! sometimes plots are just too thick to let go.
Though, as I started Things I Thought About mostly to test myself and keep myself accountable while injecting longevity into a personal project, I couldn’t skip a week.
So I am resorting to the trick I trialed a few weeks back, where I repurpose old essays that were originally made for other platforms/magazines/blogs.
This time around, I am exhuming something I worked on for my friends at Ism. Shout out to Carlos and the whole Fairfax crew from 2010-2012. Great memories :)
This essay was originally written for Community Volume 2, but you can also read it here.
Then & Now, 2021
An ever-growing community of peers and friends intertwined by a single connection.
If you were born in the late ’80s or early ’90s, chances are you spent the free time after school trying to figure out how to establish an online presence while leveraging on your IRL network and seamlessly connect the two to establish a metaphysical synergy at the intersection of digital and analog life. Your perception of reality and physical connection started changing swiftly. For the first time, you were faced with quick communication, strangers, and fabricated personas.
Building a friendship circle seemed easier and the filter provided by the screen of whatever rudimental device at your disposal made the process of breaking the ice easier.
Picture this, it’s a warm spring day in 2007. You’re in high school. The internet has become a widespread commodity, everybody you know now owns a connection or has a web-linked phone. The digital revolution came fast, it crept up on you. You barely remember what it was like prior to this phantasmagorical innovation. Party Like a Rockstar by Shop Boyz is blasting in your ears out of the cheap earphones connected to your candy-colored iPod nano as you kick off your favorite sneakers and throw your backpack on the couch.
You downloaded it from LimeWire so the track sounds a little dirty and it has some weird vocal overlaps.
“I am hoooome” you yell. No answer. You are home alone, your dad is at work, your mom is nowhere to be found, your siblings, if you have any, must be out with her. Thrilled by the freedom of this moment, you open the fridge, check what’s been left for your nutrition, and pick out some savory leftovers. A buzzing noise comes from the left pocket of the khaki Dickies part of your school uniform. It’s an AIM notification. Your crush has pinged you, your heart starts beating because it’s the first time you see their screen name appear on the blurry plastic shield of your device.
“Wat u doin’? Meet me at the mall” the message reads. Puzzled yet excited, the first thought in your head is why couldn’t they ask me while we were at school, literally face to face?
It’s the first time you realize things aren’t going to be the same, connections are starting to become different, more transcendental. Online communication is safe yet frightening at the same time, everything you say is now forever. You flip your T-Mobile sidekick close and lay it on the kitchen counter. You will answer later. There’s something you are more stoked about right now. A new song has just come out and you MUST change the soundtrack to your MySpace to keep it popping and fresh. You have 10 new friendship requests.
Moreover, your hip online best friend just put you onto something that will change the course of your life forever. Hypebeast and the forums. You grew up fascinated by sneakers and clothing, some of your childhood friends also had an interest in them but not as much as your newly discovered online community.
The time you once spent on video games, you now spend in front of the family’s desktop, fighting your siblings off for priority usage. You must log on to speculate about limited release items. Today is the day you will learn about obscure Japanese brands, Nigo has become your main inspiration and reason to be.
You cracked the code for the sickest Myspace background, you start making friends from other cities and spend hours trying to figure out who should be on your top 8. Your high school crush kinda gets overshadowed by the network you are building.
Maybe you picked up skating too. One day, inspired by people online, you decide to screen print some t-shirts, the next day you start receiving requests from school peers. You are now a brand owner. Your best friend’s dad is a photographer so they own a lot of camera equipment. You ask them to sneak out some of the cameras to shoot your lookbook. You’d like to share the images online. Your friend agrees, you pick the train tracks as a background for the shoot, it seems like the trendy thing to do.
The bright hues of the graphics you hand drew are stressed by the hyper saturation of the filter you apply before publishing the images online. It’s a success. People start talking about it on the forums, messages flock to your AIM.
You receive requests from your prohibited dream destination, Japan.
Your wish is to hang out with all of these digital friends in real life. Some go to different high schools but they are in the same city, some are in neighboring counties, some live in a whole different state, sometimes country. You rack up the courage and start linking with them at the local hot spot.
Time goes by, your friendship with these silly, fictional handles gets deeper and you get comfortable enough to start addressing them by their parent-given name.
You go to parties together when you are not online discussing clothes, art, music for hours.
Supreme, Stussy, Diamond Supply & Co., the first hype collaborations start dropping and you can’t get enough. You pick up odd jobs to afford these covetable pieces. Finally, you feel understood. The hybridity of your online/offline community feels refreshing. You have a family you can effortlessly plug into when needed.
Fast forward to 15 years later, the names of the tightest cyber family members are still in your contact book. Year after year, their juvenile online handles transformed into their preferred nickname, sometimes they went full government.
You jumped from MySpace and Hypebeast forums to Facebook then Twitter and Instagram bringing your community along, progressing as the digital landscape evolved proving more and more outlets for discussion, sharing, and interconnection. Some members of the community went on to become established artists, photographers, designers. Others, you lost along the way but remember fondly. A smirk appears on your face thinking of the times you lost sleep to vigorous online discussions.
Perhaps, sometimes that bond grew so strong that you were invited to their wedding. Maybe you were there when their first child was born.
When you get together you reminisce about the old times and interrogate one other about the widespread success in your friend’s circle. Isn’t it mesmerizing how everybody went on to do something cool with their career?
The tight-knit community you managed to organically build as you graduated from adolescence into adulthood rarely dispersed. But if you stop and think about it, when did we start acknowledging the nature of this seamless web of connections as a “community”?
How has its meaning changed over the course of the new millennium? Can online friendship fruitfully become a genuine offline connection nowadays? Or has the term community just turned into marketing jargon for brands and corporations looking to acquire the trust of those who can possibly help them inflate their profits, stripping the idiom of its original ability to group people together thanks to a common need for aggregation?
By definition, community means a group of people who live in a specific location, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage, but in this day and age, when everything is for profit, are we genuinely still looking for a fitting community purely out of the obsessive need to belong?
All of the above images are part of my personal archive and were taken between 2010 and 2012.
Many memories were lost when I lost access to my old MacBook’s iPhoto, but they live in my head and will continue to do so until the day I am long gone.
Los Angeles will forever live in my heart as the place where I got my head start in streetwear and culture. It’s where I formed the interests I still have to this day and some of the friendships and relationships I still hold dear to my heart.
If you were there, you know what I am talking about. If you weren’t, well… I am sorry.
Had to be experimental!
I loved this, thank you :)