One year ago, ESPN announced that it was shutting down the sports and pop-culture Web site Grantland. I was on a hike with my wife and son when I heard the news, and I remember hustling us back down the hill so that I could get to a computer and start printing the site out, page by page. I was sentimental in part because I loved writing for the site, even though I never quite understood what it was supposed to be—it was in a constant state of becoming. Since then, other beloved Web sites have ceased operations, among them Gawker (which was sued into oblivion) and the Toast (which was feted, on its last day, by Hillary Clinton), and each time the reactions have taken on a familiar shape: fans mourn, then pick apart the strange mix of intention and accident that gave these sites their distinct perspectives, then question why we couldn’t keep them going.
Yesterday, Twitter announced that it would begin phasing out Vine, the video platform that limited users to six-second compositions, which looped endlessly. Six seconds was a seemingly arbitrary limit. How much of your world could you show in far less than the time that it takes to read this paragraph? But the constraint proved inspiring: it forced users to color inside the lines, but wildly, weirdly, freely. Vine sparked a particular kind of ingenuity; it fed a preference for artful, absurdist non sequiturs rather than polish. It was a place where young people, especially kids of color, made fun of themselves and their teachers, showcased new dances, rapped local hits, shared in-jokes and pranks, portrayed the perils of falling asleep in class or dealing with a freakout about customer service at the Apple Store. Vine users kept raising the bar for this very specific form of human comedic achievement. One day, someone uploaded a loop of a guy doing backflips at a donut shop and breaking a dangling sign, which gave us the iconic punchline “Back at it again at Krispy Kreme.” These little videos didn’t aspire to the craft of TV or movies. They were about speed and the surreal possibilities of everyday life.
Twitter’s decision to shutter Vine seems to have resulted from a handful of factors. While Vine has produced a small universe of stars, they’re primarily people who use it as a springboard to work elsewhere. Twitter has also had a challenging time monetizing Vine’s young, amateur user base; similar video-sharing applications, especially Instagram and Snapchat, have been much shrewder at forging alliances with corporations and advertisers. And Vine’s popularity among basketball and soccer fans as a sort of crowdsourced instant-highlight reel certainly didn’t help either. Twitter’s over-all growth has plateaued, and attempts to find a prospective buyer have been unsuccessful.
The Internet is a space where we’ve grown accustomed to the lightning rhythms of coming and going, of course. But it’s easy to forget that so many of the basic pieces of today’s culture were the result of accidents, of people messing around with platforms such as Vine, which was ostensibly supposed to be Instagram with moving pictures, and instead inventing a new, strange, and sometimes indecipherable aesthetic language. Vine’s end isn’t just about losing data; it’s about losing a vernacular, a mode of self-expression.
The entertainment industries of the previous century are criticized these days as slow-moving and self-regarding, blind to where the culture is going. Yet much of today’s economy is built on notions like “disruption” and pivoting, on making hasty escapes and cutting losses. From this perspective, there’s no point in archiving the past or dwelling on its minor revolutions; the problems they’re solving are always in the future.
We get reminders of this each time Soundcloud, a crucial site for the dissemination of new mixes, sweeps for copyright infringements and purges lifetimes’ worth of d.j. mixes, or whenever rumors threaten the gray-zone legality of YouTube, one of the great repositories of postwar culture. Or consider the case of the novelist Dennis Cooper, who lost an entire novel, hosted on a Google blog, because of a single, anonymous complaint. (After weeks of criticism, Google agreed to return the files to Cooper.) It’s wrong to assume that all this culture will continue to be available—or that it’s even been backed up. When someone does preserve these pieces of Web ephemera, it feels like a triumph: last week, the Museum of Modern Art acquired the original set of a hundred and seventy-six emojis, which was released in 1999 by the Japanese phone company NTT DoCoMo. And, on Friday, the Internet Archive announced plans to begin downloading and collecting a library of Vines.
We’ve proven to be adaptable. There was another major announcement yesterday: Apple’s new line of MacBook Pro laptops won’t feature traditional USB connections, meaning that those who want to connect a device—such as last year’s Apple iPhone—using a USB port will need new cords or adapters. Curiously, the new MacBook Pro does include headphone jacks, which the latest model of the iPhone eliminated, with visions of an all-wireless life style offered in their stead. While there are performance-related reasons for all these decisions, the upshot, in the short term, is more things to buy. Perhaps we’ll grow accustomed to wireless earbuds and speedy new ports, and maybe I already sound like an old person because I haven’t adapted yet.
But that announcement highlighted our reliance on the tools we are given, and how quickly they can be taken from us, replaced with new, supposedly better ones. Scrolling through the #RIPVINE feed on my phone, seeing dozens of things far funnier than what made me laugh when I was seventeen, I couldn’t help but notice that the location of the gatekeeper had drifted, from the record-label headquarters on the back of the album sleeve, or the studio logo at the beginning of the movie, to the very window through which I’m able to take in the amateur genius of young black and brown kids, staving off boredom and terror, gleeful under the spotlight of gas-station fluorescents.