Era Appropriate
People got tired of the future. Some of them got very organized about it.
The Janky Time Machine has a feature I’ve never fully appreciated until now: it goes where I tell it. Roughly. The hysteresis drift put me down a few calendar years from now in what appears to be someone’s home office — warm lamp, clean desk, the deliberate quiet of a space that’s been carefully curated. On the desk: a Commodore 64 setup. Not restored. Not displayed. Running.
There’s a word for what I’ve landed in. I’ve been hearing it since I got here: era-head.
Somewhere between now and my primeline, people ran out of patience with the future. Not dramatically — no manifesto, no movement with a name at first. Just a collective, distributed exhaustion. The AI updated again. The interface changed again. The thing you’d finally figured out was deprecated again. And at some point enough people, independently, arrived at the same conclusion: they already knew how to live in 1985. They were done learning new ones.
The era-heads are organized now. The taxonomy takes a moment to follow: you don’t just say you prefer old stuff. You declare. The 1985 crowd is distinct from the 1972 crowd, who are distinct from the 1953s. There are authenticity debates. There is definitely gatekeeping. A 1985-head who uses cloud storage is considered a poser in most circles, though factions exist that permit exceptions for anything the infrastructure requires. The social tells are specific: a ‘72 doesn’t stream music; a 1985 avoids touchscreens when hardware alternatives exist; the 1953 crowd is intense about appliances. What unites them is the decision — one era, claimed, defended, lived in. The rest of the present is ambient noise you don’t have to engage with.
TALKIE/64 is scene merchandise1. It’s not a research tool. It’s what you buy when you want your AI — and you do still want one, apparently, just not a new one — to only know what someone in 1985 would have known. The corpus stops before the internet. Before everything that came after everything. Five disks. Load time is part of the experience — the drive spinning, the pause, the anticipation.
The Janky Time Machine’s phase variance indicators are blinking at me from the corner. It is, technically, the most era-inappropriate object in the room. I keep not mentioning it.
The floppy drive clicks. The screen says: READY. ⬛
Which is, apparently, the sound the future is supposed to make — if the future is somewhere you already decided to stop.
Again, still smitten by this LLM trained on pre-1930s data. Go have an old-timey chin wag with it > https://talkie-lm.com/introducing-talkie
I was always proud that my great uncle had a cassette-deck era of Commodore computer!