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I save old newspapers. No, I'm not one of those obsessive packrat geezers with magazines and newspapers stacked to the ceiling, surrounded by feral cats. Really, I'm not. I recycle these papers every five years or so, ruthlessly.
That's one of the nice things about the Internet. You can bookmark thousands of Web sites, stacking them up to the ceiling, and nobody even realizes you're an obsessive packrat. You could even have hundreds of virtual feral cats dashing around on your server. Who would know?
The Scrap Heap of History
Recently I was weeding out old periodicals when I came across an article in my local newspaper about dot-com logos. The first paragraph read, "The alarm goes off ... and Dot Consumer sleepily climbs out of bed and puts on her Pets.com sock puppet slippers to pad to the shower, drying off with a Bikini.com towel.... She downs a bowl of sugary flakes in a Hamsterdance bowl, then stuffs her AskJeeves calculator into her Yahoo backpack" ("Licensed to Sell," San Francisco Chronicle, August 7, 2000).
Well, you get the idea. This creepy little scenario was meant to show that dot-com firms were pushing for "brand awareness," and we were all about to enter a brave new world of "slippers, posters, T-shirts, key chains, and greeting cards."
Of course, a few months later Pets.com was toast, and its sock puppet (I assume) is now another mascot on the scrap heap of history, along with the California Raisins, the Nauga, and Jar Jar Binks action figures.
Dot-coms themselves may be dropping like flies, but I suspect some of them will live on as bookmarks, dead sites, and haunted sites, with only HTML, Flash animation, streaming audio, and action figures to remind the user that they ever existed at all.
Can I Get a Tab?
In that regard, I remembered a clipping I'd saved from 1997. Well, I'd thrown the clipping away, but I soon found a version of it on the Internet from American Demographics. It starts, "Burma Shave, Brylcreem, Pepsodent, Ovaltine, William's Lectric Shave, RC Cola, Barbasol, Hai Karate, Black Jack Gum. At one point, these brands were widely recognized and frequently purchased. Many have now faded or become 'ghosts' of their former selves" ("Making Old Friends New," American Demographics, December 1997).
Many of these ghost brands are still being sold. Ovaltine, for instance, has a new life as a hot chocolate alternative. Topol toothpaste is still in existence. And remember Tab? I always thought of Tab as a beta model diet cola, the granddaddy of sugar-free soft drinks, now extinct. But as it turns out, people still drink it and even crave it. Look for it in your supermarket, right next to Fresca. (If Metrecal shows up on the shelves again, however, I may start to worry.)
Even brands that seem doomed - Colt firearms for example, eclipsed by Uzis, Glocks, Berettas, and anti-handgun activists - may have a second life. Confronted by a changing and hostile marketplace, rather than opening fire, Colt has been working on "smart guns," which use a microchip that recognizes (theoretically) a weapon's licensed user, and will not fire for anyone else. Oh, and they have Samuel the Bear, a kind of handgun sock puppet. Who knows? Maybe Colt .45s and Samuel the Bears will join the ash heap of history, or show up on eBay, the ash heap of history's marketplace. In the modern marketplace, death is just a state of mind. What survives depends upon your definition of survival.
All DSLs Lead to Rome
Take the dodo, the stupid flightless bird that passed into oblivion in the 19th century. You might say the marketplace killed the dodo, or at the very least, an imperialism-western expansion-navigation techniques combo. (The prevailing theory is that dogs, rats, pigs, and monkeys brought in by explorers killed off dodos by devouring adults, stealing their eggs, and out-competing them for food.) But if modern science can put hair on a billiard ball (and I'll just bet it could if it tried), it can certainly revive a dimwitted, flightless bird. Plans are made to match what fragmentary dodo DNA exists with an extant species ("DNA Science Could Rebuild Dead Dodo," The London Sunday Times, March 21, 1999).
So who knows? In our lifetime, we may have enormous, clumsy, waddling fowl impeding our progress to public transportation, where nasty, dirty pigeons impede that progress today. I can't wait. And someday, perhaps, an enterprising soul will gather the scattered bites and bits of Spiv, Global Network Navigator, Pseudo.com, and iGuide, to recreate an Internet glory that rivaled that of ancient Rome - that is, the bloated Rome shortly before it was overrun by lean and hungry barbarians.
In the meantime, on Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean where the dodos first evolved, excitement mounts. Seeneevasen Ponnusamy, the Mauritian deputy high commissioner told The London Sunday Times, "The dodo is highly regarded in Mauritius...." One could say the same about Pets.com, I suppose, or at least its sock puppet.
Ian Shoales lives in San Francisco, where he does not hoard old newspapers. He considers himself a collector.
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