I was born two years before the USSR ceased to exist. The largest country in the world disappeared overnight, replaced by the new largest country in the world, Russia. But the footprint it left took longer to be washed away. I grew up with a duvet cover printed with a world map prominently featuring the ex-nation, reading books and atlases that were published after I was born but before it vanished, and voraciously consuming science fiction that assumed the Soviets would continue to exist far into the future.
The USSR isn’t the only such artefact, of course. Randall Munroe, author of the webcomic XKCD, once put together a flow chart to date almost any world map made since the 19th century to within a few years by answering some simple questions. Does it show Constantinople rather than Istanbul? Does Tokyo exist but not South Africa or Rhodesia? Is Bolivia landlocked? Then your map is from between 1884 and 1895.
Such quirks are a valuable part of dating historical artefacts – and exposing historical frauds. For scholars of the 21st century, now and future, an equivalent rich text is being built in front of our eyes.
Flags dot the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, east London, exhorting visitors to follow the venue on social media, with icons for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. When a future archaeologist uncovers the tattered scrap of pink fabric from a midden on the outskirts of Nova Londres, that quartet will help them nail down the date as easily as my duvet featuring the USSR and a unified Germany.
The presence of TikTok sets the upper bound for age; the app didn’t even exist before 2016 and exploded in popularity in 2019. Printing a logo on a flag to be hung around a park wouldn’t have happened before 2020 at the earliest.
The lower bound is that pesky Twitter bird. The social network was officially rebranded as X in the summer of 2023, but the change didn’t stick. Like so much to do with Elon Musk’s leadership, the execution was half-arsed, with Twitter branding persisting throughout the site for months. But as the spring of 2024 came around, the rebrand started to bite. The social network began automatically redirecting all visits to Twitter.com to its new X.com domain and even started to rewrite posts to change all links to Twitter.com to read X.com.
By this summer, even the stubborn holdouts had dropped the bird. Some had replaced it with the official logo form for X, a double-banded 𝕏 glyph. Others simply abandoned the platform altogether, particularly if they had built any technology that used the social network’s posting tools, once free, now paid-for.
If our future archaeologist is prepared to accept broader date ranges, then even a single social network can give a hint. Shortly after I joined this paper, we added writers’ Twitter handles to the bylines on the website; this year, we removed them, marking the end of the long 2010s.
In the real world, there’s more than just social sharing icons to go on for dating digital artefacts. In 2017, for instance, a corruption investigation into the daughter of Pakistan’s then prime minister was granted a key piece of evidence after investigators noticed that documents dating from 2006 were written in Calibri, a typeface only released to the public in January 2007. The web of lies spun by Craig Wright, who spent years falsely claiming he was the creator of bitcoin and suing anyone who said otherwise, was too big to be torn by any one thing, but including a code library released in 2013 in a file supposedly created in 2009 didn’t help.
But there’s something specifically poignant about those icons. Like the USSR, the dominance of Meta and its social networks feels unassailable. Can anyone seriously imagine a world where Instagram is toppled from its perch, or one where Facebook switches off its servers?
And yet the USSR did collapse, ending – like so many things – gradually then all at once. Perhaps the closest we’ll get is the fall of Twitter, a service that could have trucked along vaguely unchanged for a decade longer if a mad billionaire hadn’t decided to throw a significant portion of his entire wealth into running it into the ground.
Or, perhaps, the web is actually still in a period of flux. The USSR was almost 70 when it collapsed; of the largest companies in tech today, only IBM has beaten it. Apple and Microsoft are more than halfway there. The rest, including all the icons plastered over that pink flag, are barely out of their childhood. The big platforms being targeted for their gatekeeper powers by the EU and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority do hold power in the here and now, but when their ascendancy is so recent, who can honestly be confident that their time at the top will last longer than their rise there?
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But be careful what you wish for. The USSR is gone, replaced by the Russian Federation, a warped reflection of its predecessor. The biggest companies in the tech world might not be on top for ever, but there’s no guarantee we’ll love what replaces them.
What I’ve been reading
Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead
A blogpost the length of a book, Situational Awareness is former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner’s deep and detailed argument that artificial superintelligence is coming soon, inevitably. It won’t convince a full sceptic, I think, but it makes a powerful case that saying: “This will be big, but not civilisation-altering” is wishful thinking.
Moonbound
The third novel from the writer and technologist Robin Sloan is a richly literary fantasy set 13,000 years in our own future. Imagine the One Ring was the narrator of The Hobbit and turned out to be a wearable AI buried beneath the earth for millennia and, well, you aren’t much closer to how this indescribable book feels than you were when you started. But it’s good.
Damn Them All
I have just devoured the second volume of this smart, stylish occult crime comic from Simon Spurrier and Charlie Adlard. Something’s gone wrong in hell and it upends London’s gangland in the process.
Carmageddon
Daniel Knowles’s enjoyable polemic against the personal automobile was preaching to the choir in my case, but it makes a point that needs to be emphasised more: electric vehicles and self-driving cars won’t alter the fundamental harm of one person using a multi-tonne vehicle to get around a city.
