If you listen to the experts, much of the place I’m from is not a place at all. Suburban Michigan is full of winding roads dotted with identical houses, strip malls stuffed with chain restaurants and big-box stores, and thoroughfares designed for cars, with pedestrian walkways as an afterthought.
How will Facebook celebrate its 20th birthday? Perhaps it will create one of those cute video montages they like to generate at significant moments. Starting with a tinkling piano soundtrack, a couple of breathless friend requests, and some self-conscious, tentative writing of “hello!” on other users’ walls, it might then pass quickly through moments of chronic oversharing, passive-aggressive, stalking of exes, and horrified untagging of yourself in unflattering photos.
Cultural upheavals can be a riddle in real time. Trends that might seem obvious in hindsight are poorly understood in the present or not fathomed at all. We live in turbulent times now, at the tail end of a pandemic that killed millions and, for a period, reordered existence as we knew it. It marked, perhaps more than any other crisis in modern times, a new era, the world of the 2010s wrenched away for good.
