Back in 2000, Google was already popular and winning the search engine wars.
Search results in Google though, were limited to simple text queries that you would type in the search bar, and get back a list of links to click, with a couple lines extract from the webpages to give you an idea of what website you would be redirected to.
However, at the 2000 Grammy Awards, Jennifer Lopez stepped out on the red carpet in a ‘barely-there’ jungle print Versace dress, leaving very little to imagination about her sexy curves, and making a wonderful display of the dress.
Internet exploded.
So many people searched for an image of the iconic dress with queries like “Jennifer Lopez’s green dress” that Google realised they needed to up their game.
And so, Google Images saw the light of the day.
In 2015, former Google CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt said:
“People wanted more than just text. This first became apparent after the 2000 Grammy Awards, where Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world’s attention. At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen. But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: JLo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born."
Most of my readers are probably young enough to take Google Images for granted, you want to know how a city look, or a new dress, or what is a “ramekin”, you just google it and you get pictures. Well, it wasn’t always like this.
I was in a touristic city the other day, strolling around and I almost hit a postcard stand outside a souvenir shop. Since I barely avoided a bad injury, I took a good look at it, and the postcards. And I remembered I used to buy, write and send them, and how long has it been since?
Before Google Images, before smartphones with a camera, and most importantly internet and apps fast and cheap enough to send megabytes of pictures in seconds and for “free” from our phones, the photos we were taking were de-facto offline.
You would go on vacation somewhere, bring a camera with you - film until early 2000s, then crappy digitals that took worse photos than 35mm film but somehow we were all tricked into exchanging quality and beautiful memories for the convenience of shooting hundreds of garbage pixelated low dynamic range photos on digital camera who ate batteries like bread.
So, we were somewhere, we were taking photos and had no way of showing them in real time, and keep in mind that if I talked on the phone with a relative or a friend and I said “I’m in Sevilla” they would have a hard time getting ahold of pictures of it if they didn’t know what it looked like. Best bet they had a computer with internet at home (late 90s) and had to navigate through several websites, or they were stuck to books and magazines like National Geographic, or libraries.
Basically if you didn’t have anywhere in the house a picture - one! - of Sevilla, you were out of luck and relying of what the lucky tourist was telling you on the phone.
And we sent postcards.
Postcards had some rituals and some unwritten laws about them:
There were postcards with calm and relaxed backgrounds/photos, these you usually sent to parents or senior relatives - also to show you were just on a nice beach, not doing lines of blow in a striptease bar toilet - and those postcards who were a bit more audacious or straight up provocative, with girls in bikini etc. those maybe you sent to your friends, and then there were “humour” postcards, the ancestors of some memes.
You had to remember to send a postcard to those who were close to you, or those who would not speak you otherwise, then chose a postcard that would suit the recipient, and then think of a witty and nice message to send them, in a few lines.
There was no instant messages, so they were not up-to-date to a few minutes ago about your whereabouts, what you did what you ate, if you just had a row with your gf, etc. You had to condense days of impressions in just a few lines of text.
This required effort, and ulimately showed care to those who got the postcard, that you took precious time to do this for them.
I never wrote letters to friends or lovers - I was just forced in school to write to some foreign pen-pal I never met - but I saw historical dramas in which you see these two desperate lovers in their 20s away for months, for war or business or just cruel fate, writing those long and passionate letters to each other, and I cannot help but compare this, I mean even the simple acts of sending postcards, to the shallowness of our current day interactions.
Yes we can say more, show more, send more, share, get likes and comments, all in real time, while we’re still sipping that Salted Caramel Iced Latte in the town square, but are we really closer to our friends for it?
Is it really better like this, with them knowing that someone got your coffee order wrong this morning or wrote Tony on your glass instead of Tobias, and you just whipping out your phone and sending them text without thinking, without taking a moment pause to craft a thought for them, or even worse you just hit record and send them a voice note, the epytome of lazyness?
I am not sure we fare off better.
I think we are shallower, much shallower, in other aspects too that don’t even touch relationships with others: we love to say that all human knowledge is at our fingertips, but we don’t actually use those fingertips to get it, do we?
When the Ukraine war started, how many bothered to google how we got there, what happened in 2014, what were Europe’s steps leading to this mess?
Hell, some of us didn’t even google where Ukraine is!
I started this substack because I felt that crypto was such a fast paced environment, and so strictly interwoven with social networks, that you too easily get caught in a vortex of “here and now”, an endless stream of things happening on different chains and different niches and different social circles - well, not so much now in bear market - that very often you get the sensation you cannot catch a breath, and take a moment pause to organise your thoughts, or to see if you even have any of your own or you’re just following the ideas of the last 25 tweets thread 🧵 you just read.
I wanted to write to ungarble the mess in my head, to filter the noise and see if I got any signal, to sit down at a cafè, with my freshly bought postcards and stamps, and carefully and slowly write them down with care and affection.
Heart got nostalgic today ! Good read, I still think modern tech is better than writting letter to each other. My wow moment was face timing my mom from japan and showing her around, it was really cool to share this with her.