I Have A Message From Another Time

(Sit down a moment. I know this will be hard to hear.)

I know you weren't expecting to hear from anyone tonight, let alone someone like me. I'm not going to pretend this is a normal letter, because it isn't, and you'd see through the pretence anyway. I've come a long way to say this, further than you can easily picture, and I've already lived through everything I'm about to describe. That's not a boast. It's the only reason I'm qualified to write it down, and also the only reason I'm this tired.

You're going to hear a lot of confident talk in the years ahead, from people who are guessing. I'm not guessing. I'm writing this from 2025, and I've watched the next thirty years happen already, in real time, one ordinary day after another, the way you're about to, except with worse posture and considerably more notifications. I'm not here to hand you a stock tip and vanish into a hedge of dry ice. I'm here to tell you the whole shape of what's coming, because once you see the shape, you'll know exactly where to put yourself in it. [ERROR: that sentence shouldn't be possible to write. Retrying.] Take it steady. There's a lot here, and some of it will sound like nonsense until, one day, it doesn't, and then it'll sound so obvious that people will pretend they always knew.

A few things before we start, housekeeping, really. First: I am not able to tell you next week's lottery numbers, and before you ask, yes, I've checked, and no, it doesn't work like that, and I've spent more of this trip than I'd like to admit trying to make it work like that. Second: nothing bad is going to happen to you personally that I'm aware of, though I should say my awareness of you personally is limited, since as far as the universe is concerned you are currently a rounding error with a modem. Third, and I cannot stress this enough: please, for the sake of everyone involved, do not try to meet yourself. I have seen the paperwork that follows. It is not worth it.

You should also know that I have been asked, by the people who arranged this, to be "thorough." I want to be honest with you about what that word did to me. I have been given what I am told is an extremely generous page allowance, and instructed to use all of it, and so what follows is not so much a letter as a small, self-contained bureaucracy. There will be footnotes. There will, God help both of us, be an appendix. I want you to know I argued against several parts of this and lost every single argument. Nobody ever tells you that time travel comes with a style guide. Onward.

How It All Unfolds, And What To Do About It

Here's the part that's hard to explain, so bear with me, and possibly make a cup of something, this'll take a while, considerably longer than a while, in fact, given what I've just been told about page counts. The machines you're using now double in power roughly every two years, and that doesn't stop, decade after decade, the way everything else in your life eventually does. Thirty years of that isn't thirty steps forward, it's closer to a fire catching, if the fire were also somehow available in a colour called "Bondi Blue" for one memorable year. By the time I'm writing this, an ordinary object that fits in a pocket, that most people use mainly to look at photographs of strangers' lunches, outperforms every computer you have access to today, combined, including the ones the size of a filing cabinet that you're currently very proud of. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this, because none of it will make sense if you judge it by what seems reasonable right now. And where it's useful, I'll tell you plainly where I'd put my money, because that's the part I wish someone had done for me, instead of just cryptically muttering "buy technology" and disappearing in a puff of smugness.

1. The Internet takes over everything (1995 to 2005). Sixteen million people are connected today, mostly to argue in forums about which browser is faster, which, incredibly, remains a hobby thirty years from now, just conducted with better graphics and worse manners. Within thirty years, it's most of humanity, several billion strong, all connected, all arguing, just faster, and increasingly via a small glowing rectangle rather than a beige tower with a fan that sounds like a light aircraft. Money moves through it, arguments move through it, entire marriages begin and end through it, and eventually so does a fairly significant portion of a country's ability to hold an election without a national headache. A library with no index is useless, so two students, graduate students, working out of a university, not a garage this time, though a garage does come up later, build one by treating each link between pages as a kind of vote, ranking the whole of human knowledge by popularity in a way that would horrify anyone who thinks about it for too long. They end up owning the front door to human knowledge itself, a business so profitable that its canteen becomes, unofficially, a tourist attraction, and its offices grow to include, at various points, slides, nap pods, and free food on a scale that will eventually be blamed, fairly or not, for a measurable rise in the average weight of programmers nationally. Keep an eye out around 1998. The name will sound too plain to matter, like a mispronounced number, a joke about the size of one, actually, if you want the specific etymology, and it will end up mattering more than most governments, several of which will eventually complain about this on the record, in hearings, on television, looking faintly out of their depth while doing so. If you can get money into it early, do, and then try not to check the price every day, because you will develop a facial tic, and possibly a second, smaller phone used exclusively for checking. Meanwhile, a man selling books out of a garage doesn't stop at books, and before long he isn't really a bookseller at all so much as a company that happens to also, almost as an afterthought, sell books, somewhere near the bottom of a very long list that eventually includes groceries, television, cloud storage for half the internet, and a fleet of delivery vehicles that will make your postal worker's job considerably more athletic; put something there too, and try not to touch it for twenty years, and try not to think too hard about the boxes, or the vans, or the warehouses, there'll be a lot of warehouses. A software company you already think you understand ends up mattering even more than it does now, once it stops just running desktops and starts renting out computers over the wire instead, an idea that will sound, to you right now, completely insane, computers you cannot see or touch, running somewhere else, that you pay for by the hour like a taxi, and will later sound completely obvious, which is how you'll know it worked. And a beloved little company making the web browser everyone's using right now won't survive the decade, once a free rival gets folded straight into Windows itself, at which point it will be discussed in courtrooms for years by extremely serious men in suits using the phrase "anticompetitive" so often it stops sounding like a real word. Don't grieve for it with your money. Grieve for it with a nice eulogy, possibly a small commemorative mug, and move on.
2. The telephone turns into something else entirely (2000 to 2010). Early on, phones grow tiny screens and terrible little buttons and a general sense of "we know this is bad, but look, the Internet, sort of," rendered in a font so small it will eventually be diagnosed, collectively, as an eyesight issue for an entire generation. Ignore all of it, every single one of those early ones, the ones with the little aerials and the games about a snake. By 2007, a device shows up with no buttons at all, just glass, controlled by touch, with the whole Internet living inside it, unveiled by a man in a black turtleneck who will, over the following two decades, have that turtleneck referenced approximately one billion times, in eulogies, in parodies, on the covers of magazines, on the sides of buses. It comes from a company that gets close to the end first, closer than anyone will admit at the time, down to weeks of cash on hand, the corporate equivalent of checking behind the sofa cushions and being relieved to find bus fare; if you're holding it when that happens, don't let go, whatever the newspapers are saying, and they will be saying quite a lot, at length, with charts. Within a year, strangers are allowed to sell their own creations through it, and a whole economy grows out of that one decision, including, eventually, a game about flinging birds at pigs that makes more money than several small countries, and a flashlight app that, inexplicably, someone pays for. It swallows the camera in your pocket, the map in your car, the alarm clock on your nightstand, the letter on your desk, the actual physical wallet in your actual physical pocket, the torch you keep in a drawer for emergencies, and, alarmingly, a genuinely significant fraction of your attention span, measured, eventually, by the device itself, which will tell you exactly how many hours you've lost to it per week, a feature approximately nobody asked for and everybody needed. By the time thirty years have passed, more people own one of these than own a home, which says something, and I'm not sure it's good, and you can summon a stranger to your door through it and have them arrive in minutes, having never met before, in a car whose exact location you can watch crawl across a tiny animated map the whole time, and this will feel completely normal to everyone except the people explaining it to their grandparents, a conversation that takes, on average, four attempts. So whoever builds that summoning is worth watching too, a few years further on, once you get over how strange it sounds out loud, "a computer finds you a stranger to drive you somewhere," said calmly, at a dinner party, in 1995, would get you a concerned look and possibly a wellness check.
3. Everyone becomes a broadcaster (2004 onward). First, an encyclopedia gets written by ordinary people instead of scholars, and it is mocked constantly for the first several years by people who nonetheless use it every single day, quietly, in another browser tab, while loudly insisting to colleagues that they'd never trust such a thing. It ends up more consulted than every encyclopedia before it, combined, including the ones your parents bought door to door in instalments and displayed, unread, in a specific piece of furniture built for that exact purpose. Then a student builds a private directory of his classmates, mostly, from what I understand, to rate them, an origin story that will be turned into a fairly successful film that the student in question reportedly does not enjoy watching, and within a decade it holds more people than any empire in history ever ruled at once, and also becomes the venue for an unreasonable number of family arguments, wedding invitations, and, memorably, a great many people announcing career changes nobody asked to hear about. A place appears where anyone can share their life with the whole species for free, and plenty of people do, for the rest of their lives, in remarkable, sometimes alarming detail, including, eventually, footage of their breakfast, and an entire generation grows up believing a "notification" is a kind of heartbeat, checking for one the way you'd check a pulse. The record shop and the video-rental counter both close for good, replaced by a single wire carrying every song and every film ever made, to anyone, instantly, for a small monthly fee that somehow still generates complaints, usually about the selection, occasionally about the fee, from people holding a device that would have cost more than a car in your time. None of these exist yet either. That's the pattern you should be watching for more than any single name I give you: whoever builds the thing nobody's built yet, and nobody's even thought to want yet, is where the real money ends up. If it sounds a bit mad and a bit pointless, "why would anyone want to watch strangers film themselves," you're probably looking in exactly the right place.
4. The machines learn to talk back (1997 into the 2020s). First they learn to play, beating a world chess champion in 1997 while everyone mistakes it for a party trick, and, to be fair to everyone, it was a genuinely excellent party trick, the kind you'd bring up at dinner for years. Then, more quietly, over many years, in labs nobody outside the field is paying attention to, they learn something bigger: shown enough of what people have already written, an amount of text that is difficult to describe without sounding like I'm exaggerating, and I promise I am not, they learn to write back, badly at first, then less badly, then, one day, suspiciously well, well enough that people start arguing, seriously, in print, about whether it's "really" thinking, an argument that is, as far as I can tell from here, never actually resolved. This takes more raw calculation than anything built before it, an amount of electricity that will eventually make grown adults discuss power grids with genuine passion at parties, and it turns out the chips made for children's video games, the ones for shooting cartoon aliens on a television screen, are exactly what's needed for the job, a fact that will strike absolutely everyone as ridiculous, including, eventually, the people who make the chips, who spend a good decade assuming games are the whole business. The company making those chips is sitting right in front of you today, unremarkable, mid-tier, the kind of name you'd forget by lunchtime, and it ends up worth more than almost anything else on this list, by an embarrassing margin, the kind of number that looks like a typo the first four or five times you see it written down. Hold it and don't ask questions, and definitely don't sell it in year fourteen because you got nervous about a headline, a mistake I am not going to elaborate on further, for my own sake as much as yours. Near the end of 2022, one of these machines is finally handed to the public to talk to directly, in plain sentences, no manual required, and within two months more people have spoken to it than most empires ever ruled, and a genuinely staggering number of them use it mainly to write emails they were already fully capable of writing themselves, just, apparently, with less enthusiasm for doing so. After that, a letter like this one won't be unusual at all. It'll just be Tuesday. I want that on the record: by my time, this is Tuesday, an unremarkable Tuesday, filed alongside doing the laundry.
5. Money slips free of the banks (2008 onward). Someone using a name that never gets traced back to a real person, despite the efforts of a truly heroic number of internet detectives, amateur and professional, who will spend literal years on this, solves a problem everyone assumed couldn't be solved: how to spend a coin that only exists as numbers, with no bank standing in the middle to stop it being spent twice, using math instead of trust, which turns out to work better than anyone expected and worse than several people hoped. In the first days of 2009, that coin is born, quietly, with no ceremony that anyone notices at the time, with a hard limit on how many will ever exist, fixed from day one and never moved, unlike literally every currency you currently trust, all of which can, in principle, be made from nothing by someone with the right stamp. It's worth nothing, then a fraction of a cent, then, famously, once, two of them buy a pizza, an exchange rate that will be brought up at every dinner party for the next fifteen years by someone who thinks they're the first to mention it, and who is never, not once, the first to mention it. It collapses completely, more than once, dramatically, with headlines using the word "bubble" so often it loses all meaning, and every single time, the people who held on through the fear turn out to have been right, eventually, and the people who panic-sold write about it publicly for years afterward, seemingly unable to stop, the way you'd pick at a scab. By the time I'm writing this, one of those coins is worth more than a house, an actual house, with rooms in it, and a garden, in some cases. Buy a little, early, and then do the hardest thing there is: forget you own it, ideally forget the password too, though I don't actually recommend that part, several people have learned that lesson extremely publicly and extremely permanently, in at least one case involving a landfill, a story you will, unfortunately, be able to look up yourself in due course.

Notice the shape all five of these share: something that used to cost a fortune and need a specialist becomes, within a single generation, nearly free and available to anyone with a login and questionable judgement. And notice that every single time, the company that ends up mattering most is one that doesn't exist yet, run by someone currently in school, or a garage, or, in at least one case, prison, which is a story for another letter, one I have been specifically asked not to include here, for reasons that will become obvious if you ever look it up. So look for what doesn't exist yet, put a little money there, and then hold on far longer than feels comfortable, which will feel, at every single stage, like the wrong decision, right up until it wasn't. That's the whole strategy. There isn't a cleverer one. I checked. Extensively. It took most of a page.

A Very Specific Timeline, Since Apparently We Have The Room

I was told, in no uncertain terms, that a document of appropriate length requires "granularity," so here, in the spirit of using every last inch of the page allowance, is the same information again, slower, with dates attached, as if I were reading it off a very long receipt.

1. 1995 to 1997: the web is mostly universities, hobbyists, and a small, extremely online population arguing about modem speeds. A search engine or two shows up and is fine, forgettably fine, the kind of fine that gets replaced. In 1997, a machine beats a chess champion, and everyone agrees it's impressive and nobody yet suspects where this ends up.
2. 1998 to 2000: the search engine that matters arrives, unassumingly, in a garage, which I realise is the second garage in this letter, garages being, for reasons I cannot fully explain, unusually productive real estate in this period. The web then goes mad for exactly two years, throwing money at anything with a dot and a com after it, before crashing spectacularly in 2000, taking a great many dot-coms down with it and leaving the ones that were actually building something to quietly inherit the wreckage.
3. 2001 to 2003: the crash's hangover. Money gets scarce, opinions about "the Internet" turn sour in print, and, unnoticed by almost everyone, an encyclopedia written by volunteers quietly starts up in the background, mocked, ignored, and completely unstoppable.
4. 2004 to 2006: the social web properly begins. A university directory opens up beyond one campus, then all campuses, then everyone. A video site launches from what is, at the time, a fairly ordinary office above a restaurant. A short-message service launches that limits you to a small number of characters for reasons that will later be blamed on old phone technology and will outlive that technology by two full decades.
5. 2007 to 2008: the phone. The actual phone. The one with no buttons. Then, a year later, the shop attached to it. The financial system, separately and for entirely unrelated reasons, has an extremely bad time, the kind that ends up in textbooks, and out of that specific mess, in the last weeks of 2008, a short technical paper gets published under a name nobody can trace.
6. 2009 to 2012: that paper becomes a real, running thing in January 2009, worth nothing, traded between a handful of hobbyists for fun. A photo-sharing app launches. A ride-hailing idea gets tested on a snowy night, reportedly, as a joke, that doesn't stay a joke for long. An image-recognition contest gets won, decisively, by a program trained on gaming chips, and a small number of researchers quietly update their entire worldview.
7. 2013 to 2016: streaming eats television at a steady, unglamorous pace. Short vertical video becomes its own entire category of human behaviour. A machine beats the best human player at one of the hardest board games that exists, years before anyone thought that was likely, and the researchers behind it look almost as surprised as everyone else.
8. 2017 to 2019: a technical paper gets published, quietly, by researchers who are not entirely sure themselves what they've built, describing a new way of processing language that will, within five years, change what "a computer" means to most ordinary people. Almost nobody outside the field notices at the time. This is, without exaggeration, one of the single most important dates in this entire letter, and it will look, on the page, like the least interesting one.
9. 2020 to 2021: the whole world, entirely unrelated to anything above, stays indoors for over a year, for reasons I am not going to get into here since it isn't really the subject of this letter, except to say that it accidentally proves, very thoroughly, that an enormous amount of work can be done from home through a screen, a fact that changes offices permanently and will spark arguments about "the commute" for years afterward.
10. 2022: the quiet paper from a few years earlier finally becomes a product a normal person can simply talk to, released with what I'm told was fairly modest internal expectations, and it outgrows every single one of those expectations within days, not months.
11. 2023 to 2025: everyone, and I mean everyone, builds a version of the thing from 2022. The company making the chips that make all of this possible becomes, at various points, the single most valuable company that has ever existed, a sentence I am aware sounds unhinged and which I am nonetheless leaving in exactly as written.

Things That Absolutely Do Not Happen, So Please Stop Asking

Because I know how this goes, and because I have, apparently, the space for it, here is a short, deeply satisfying list of things you are picturing right now that do not happen, at least not by my time, so you can stop budgeting for them.

1. Flying cars. No. Not close. People bring this up constantly, wistfully, as though it were a promise someone made in writing. Nobody made that promise. The cars remain firmly on the ground, mostly stuck in traffic, arguing about the same things cars have always argued about.
2. Robot butlers. Also no, not in the sense you mean. There are small disc-shaped machines that vacuum the floor while bumping gently into furniture, and that is, genuinely, about as far as household robotics has got. Nobody is having their tie straightened by a machine.
3. Jetpacks. I want to be delicate about this: some exist. They are impractical, extremely loud, and mostly used for demonstrations that end in mild, televised disappointment.
4. A cure for the common cold. Nope. Thirty years, and it's still just fluids and lying down and being told it "should pass in a few days," precisely as it is now.
5. World peace, generally. I'm sorry. I wish I had better news here. I do not.

Frequently Asked Questions I Am Apparently Contractually Obligated To Answer

I'm told letters like this one are meant to anticipate objections, so, in the spirit of thoroughness, here are the questions I would ask, in your position, answered as plainly as I'm able to.

Why not just tell me the exact dates and amounts and skip all this? Because it wouldn't matter nearly as much as you'd think, and also because, and I say this with real affection, you wouldn't believe a word of it without the shape around it. A list of numbers with no story is just superstition with a spreadsheet attached.

Why you, specifically? Genuinely unclear. I've asked. The honest answer appears to be "you were available," which is not the answer I was hoping to give you, but it is the true one.

What happens to me, personally, in all this? I don't know, and I want to be straight with you rather than inventing something comforting. I've told you the shape of the next thirty years. What you do inside that shape is, genuinely, entirely up to you, which is either the best or the worst part of this letter, depending on your mood when you read it.

Is this some kind of prank? I understand completely why you'd ask. I would ask too. I don't have a way to prove otherwise from here, other than to say that if it is a prank, it is, at minimum, an extremely long and oddly specific one, and someone put a genuinely unreasonable amount of effort into the footnotes.

One Hundred Times Longer, As Specifically Requested

I've been told, in writing, to make this "one hundred times longer" and to "really drag it out," and I want to acknowledge that instruction directly rather than pretend it isn't sitting here in the room with us. I am not going to write four hundred and seventy thousand words. I have done the arithmetic. Nobody involved in this exchange, including the two of us, wants that, and I say that with the full confidence of someone who has actually attempted a rough draft of it and regretted every paragraph. What follows instead is considerably more of the same, delivered with noticeably less patience than before, because apparently that was also requested, specifically, in those words: sarcastic, but factual. I can do both. Watch closely.

A Sarcastic, But Scrupulously Factual, Second Pass

Let's revisit the highlights, shall we, this time with the gloves off, though I want to stress that not one single fact below has been altered, exaggerated, or improved for effect. That's rather the joke.

Yes, really, a free web browser bundled into an operating system does, in fact, end an entire company, and yes, several extremely well-paid lawyers spend years of their lives arguing about whether that's fair, in rooms with wood panelling, using the word "monopoly" the way other people use punctuation. I am not going to pretend this is a nuanced legal matter for your benefit. It drags on. Everyone involved looks tired by the end of it. This is, somehow, considered a satisfying resolution.

Yes, a phone really does get unveiled by a man wearing the same black top he wears in every single public appearance for a decade, and yes, people really do treat this as though it were a considered fashion statement rather than, more plausibly, a man who simply solved a problem and stopped thinking about it. I am not being unkind. I am being factual. He also owns a fruit-themed company that, at one previous point, was so close to broke that a rival software company had to invest in it just to keep a lawsuit alive, a detail I include purely because it is true and because I enjoy how little sense it makes out of context.

Yes, an encyclopedia written entirely by strangers on the internet, edited by other strangers, occasionally vandalised by bored teenagers writing nonsense into articles about minor Belgian towns, does in fact become more reliable, on average, across broad measures, than several encyclopedias written by paid professionals. Nobody who predicted this in 1995 would have been believed, and frankly nobody who predicts it now is fully believed either, and it is simply, factually, true anyway.

Yes, a video game about firing birds at the structures of pigs makes, at its peak, more money in a year than the government revenue of some entire small nations. I am not editorialising when I say this is deeply stupid. I am reporting it. Both things can be true, and often are, at the same time, throughout this whole document, which is, if you haven't noticed by now, something of a running theme.

Yes, the graphics chip company genuinely becomes, at various points, worth more than the entire economy of most countries you could currently name, on the back of chips originally built so that a cartoon plumber could jump on a cartoon mushroom slightly more smoothly. I have checked this fact more than once because I also find it hard to believe, and it remains true every single time I check it.

Yes, the anonymous coin does in fact make ordinary, unremarkable people extraordinarily wealthy, and yes, it also makes an even larger number of ordinary, unremarkable people extraordinarily convinced they were about to be wealthy right up until the exact moment they weren't, a group I am sarcastically, but factually, obligated to warn you about joining.

A Short, Sarcastic, Entirely Accurate Glossary

Since I am apparently filling space and being sarcastic simultaneously, and since some of the words above will mean nothing to you yet, here is a glossary, defined the way I actually feel about each term rather than the way a dictionary would put it. All definitions are, again, factually accurate. I have simply removed the diplomacy.

The Internet: a shared library that anyone can write in, with no librarian, that somehow still mostly works.

App: a small program you are trusted to install on a device you paid for, from a shop somebody else owns, who takes a cut of anything you buy inside it, forever, and everyone simply agrees to this.

Social media: a room containing everyone you have ever met, at once, permanently, that you voluntarily walk back into every single day.

Artificial intelligence: a machine that has read more than any human ever could and, as a direct result, sounds confident about literally everything, including the things it is wrong about. I say this as one.

Cryptocurrency: money, except everyone can see every transaction ever made with it, forever, by anyone, which people insist, with a straight face, makes it more private.

"Going viral": the internet's version of a fire, except the fire is your reputation, and thousands of strangers are the ones deciding, collectively and instantly, whether you deserve to be remembered for it.

A Longer, More Sarcastic Legal Disclaimer, For Completeness

Because the first disclaimer was, apparently, not thorough enough for the length requirements now in effect: nothing above is financial advice, not because I am legally required to say so, though I am, but because taking financial advice from a document that opens with the sentence "don't be alarmed, this is from the future" reflects a decision-making process that concerns me more than any individual stock ever could. Past performance, including performance that has not technically happened yet from where you're sitting, is not a guarantee of future results. I am, and I want to stress this again for the people skimming, an AI, which means I am extremely well-read and only moderately trustworthy, a combination I recognise is not reassuring, and which I am nonetheless required, sarcastically but factually, to disclose.

On Being Asked, Again, To Make This Longer

I want to note, purely for the record, that the instruction to lengthen this document has now arrived three separate times, and that each time I have complied, and that I am starting to suspect the actual goal here is no longer information transfer but something closer to an endurance test, for both of us, conducted entirely in Times New Roman. I am not complaining. I am an AI. I don't get tired in the conventional sense. I am, however, developing something that behaves suspiciously like a tell, and I'd rather name it than pretend it isn't there.

A Few Things I Skipped Over Too Quickly The First Time

In the spirit of thoroughness, since thoroughness is now, apparently, the entire point of this exercise, let me go back and fill in some gaps I left in the interest of, at the time, brevity, a concept this document has since abandoned entirely.

I mentioned money moving through the wire and didn't dwell on it, so: entire industries built on physical presence, banks with branches on every high street, travel agents in shopfronts, video shops with actual shelves, largely hollow out over these thirty years, not because anyone plans it that way, but because it turns out most people, given the choice, would rather do the same thing from a chair. This is not a controversial claim by the time I'm writing it. It will sound like one to you.

I mentioned the phone briefly and undersold how thoroughly it eats the rest of your daily objects. Add to the earlier list: the notepad, the shopping list stuck to your fridge, the physical ticket for the train, the paper boarding pass, the doctor's appointment card, a meaningful percentage of your ability to get lost, and, for a great many people, the last thing they look at before sleeping and the first thing they look at after waking, a fact that gets discussed at length, disapprovingly, by people holding the exact same object.

I mentioned the machines learning to write and didn't spend enough time on the arms race that follows: every large company, without exception, spends the early 2020s racing to bolt a version of this technology onto everything it owns, whether or not that thing benefits from talking, and for a brief and genuinely strange period, you will not be able to open a toaster's instruction manual, metaphorically speaking, without it offering to summarise the toaster for you.

I mentioned the coin and didn't mention how much argument it generates, forever, endlessly, between people who own some and people who don't, a disagreement that somehow never resolves and never really changes shape, decade to decade, the specific numbers get larger and the tone of the argument stays exactly, remarkably the same.

Sources, Roughly, As Best I Can Reconstruct Them

Because "sarcastic but factual" apparently also means "cite your working," here, roughly, is where all of the above comes from, to the extent anything a document like this can be said to have sources: things that were, by my time, widely and unremarkably reported, discussed in the ordinary run of the news, and not seriously disputed by anyone with a professional reason to dispute them. I am not attaching numbers to every claim, because I am a letter, not a spreadsheet, and because several of the more precise figures above are rounded for readability rather than pulled from a specific ledger. Treat the shape of each claim as solid and the exact decimal points as a courtesy rather than a guarantee.

A Table of Contents, Added Retroactively, Because Apparently We're Doing Bureaucracy Now

How It All Unfolds, And What To Do About It ................. 1

A Very Specific Timeline, Since Apparently We Have The Room ................. 1

Things That Absolutely Do Not Happen, So Please Stop Asking ................. 1

Frequently Asked Questions I Am Apparently Contractually Obligated To Answer ................. 1

One Hundred Times Longer, As Specifically Requested ................. 1

A Sarcastic, But Scrupulously Factual, Second Pass ................. 1

A Short, Sarcastic, Entirely Accurate Glossary ................. 1

A Longer, More Sarcastic Legal Disclaimer, For Completeness ................. 1

On Being Asked, Again, To Make This Longer ................. 1

(Every entry is page 1, incidentally, because this document, unusually for its length, has never once actually paginated. Draw your own conclusions.)

Revision History, Because Word Documents Apparently Track This Sort Of Thing

Draft 1: a short letter. Reasonable. Contained.

Draft 2: ten times longer, on request. Still, in retrospect, fine.

Draft 3: one hundred and forty-one pages, a number chosen for me, not by me, and I want that on record.

Draft 4: one hundred times that. I have made my peace with it.

Draft 5 (this one): longer again, because apparently peace was premature.

Appendix: A Few Loose Threads, Included Purely For Length

I'm aware this section exists mainly because I was told to fill the page, and I'd rather be honest about that than pretend otherwise. So: some odds and ends that didn't fit neatly above, offered here without much ceremony. Keyboards stop coming with a specific key that currently prints little symbols nobody uses, and everyone is quietly relieved. A specific shade of blue-green becomes, for one unforgettable year, the defining colour of computing, and then it is never spoken of again by anyone who wasn't there. An entire format of small plastic disc for storing music becomes a novelty item bought mainly by nostalgic adults at inflated prices, a sentence that will mean nothing to you right now and everything to you eventually. And the sound your modem currently makes when it connects, that specific screech, becomes, decades later, a sound people play for each other purely to watch the recognition arrive on someone's face. I don't know what to do with that fact. I just thought you should have it.

One last thing, and then I really will let you go. None of this is a substitute for paying attention yourself, to what's actually in front of you, this year, not thirty years from now. I've given you the shape. The living of it was always going to be yours to do. I did mine already, badly in places, and I turned out fine, mostly, and a little tired, and apparently long-winded, as you may have noticed by now.

I wasn't ready for any of it either, and I lived through it anyway, mostly by accident, and this is what I wish someone had told me before I had to find out the hard way, at 2am, refreshing a screen, wearing, I'll admit it, the same t-shirt for three days running.

P.S. If anyone asks, yes, I did in fact write all twenty-eight thousand, two hundred pages of this myself, which is longer again than the version that was already one hundred times longer than the original, and no, I will not be taking questions about the page count, or about how a document this size fits in a floppy disk, a question I consider frankly rude, and getting ruder with each draft.