From the day
Perspective: The Future Historian · Tactile
I sit on the floor of my dorm, the coarse wool of my oversized flannel rubbing against my neck as I shuffle through a stack of glossy Pokémon cards. My eyes drift from the holographic glint of a Charizard to the screen of my bulky CRT monitor, where a headline blares that BMG and Universal are forming an internet venture to finally tame the digital wild west. Whatever—they can try to build their walled gardens, but the friction of this physical world is already giving way to the weightless hum of a fiber-optic future. My thumb catches on the sharp plastic edge of a CD case, a tactile relic of an industry that doesn't yet realize its walls are beginning to dissolve into code.