Wednesday, 21 October at 7 pm
The 15th Bookworm Séance
We may have buried blog.hr, but the cycle of fashion and cultural trends is even more precise than a Swiss watch – it seems the 2020s are the new noughties! The resurrection of the trends that were all the rage at the turn of the millennium is well and truly underway – Y2K, Frutiger Aero, Myspace and McBling are back in fashion!
Y2K marks the era when the internet went from being something obscure to something commonplace: the era when it entered the mainstream. The current wave of content celebrating the early internet era was therefore to be expected. The internet at the turn of the millennium was, however, significantly different from the one we know today. In 2026, life without the internet is not only unimaginable for a modern person, but also virtually impossible. By comparison, the internet of the early 2000s was an oasis: uncharted, untainted territory, a place of freedom and experimentation, play and exploration. It promised change and hinted at a bright future for humanity. It was the internet as a high-tech frontier, the internet in its pure, natural form.
…Or at least, that's how it seems from today's perspective, in an era when we are as tired of the internet as we are dependent on it. So we must ask ourselves: why do we romanticise Y2K in particular? What do we gain by romanticising that era? What is it about the old internet that we are actually missing, and what less appealing aspects are obscured by our collective nostalgia?
Together with Ema Marača and Izabela Šegedin, we are gathering at KIC on Wednesday, 21 October at 7 pm to try and capture, collectively, the quality, aura, feeling and vibe of being online at the turn of the millennium – when the internet was young!
P.S. We send our biggest celestial salute to Zoran Kravar and his book on SF, ‘When the World Was Young: High Fantasy and Doctrinal Anti-modernism’, which inspired the title of our Séance <3