SpaceCollective

» see spacecollective.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The front page was a dark sphere with light moving behind it, the words THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING above the site's name, and a single button marked ENTER. Behind the button was a website where people wrote long pieces about where the human species was going. It went public at the end of 2007 and the writing never really stopped until the site did.

Rene Daalder started it. He was a Dutch director, born on Texel in 1944, who had come up as a protege of Russ Meyer and spent decades in and around Los Angeles making films and music pieces for people as far apart as Supertramp and the Sex Pistols. His original idea was an internet version of Carl Sagan's Voyager Golden Record, a message about life on Earth beamed outward on a schedule. He worked out fairly quickly that a story told in one direction does not survive contact with a medium where everyone can answer back, and brought in Folkert Gorter, an interaction designer, to build something that would hold a conversation instead. Josh Pangell wrote the technology underneath.

What it became was an unfashionable thing to run in 2007, the year the iPhone shipped. Rick Poynor wrote about it in Eye in April 2010 and put the contributor count at around 2,500. Universities and design schools started running coursework on it. The slogan, which was far too long for a slogan, described its users as forward thinking terrestrials living the lives of science fiction today.

~ the record ~

~ the citizen astronauts ~

The material was organized under headings that tell you the whole temperature of the place, Citizen Astronauts next to Runaway Infrastructure. Daalder also ran a video series on it called The Future of Everything. The reading list in the background was Sagan and Marshall McLuhan, people who had worked out how to talk about enormous subjects in the language of the culture rather than above it, and the site was openly trying to do the same job for its own decade.

Daalder died on 31 December 2019. The site stayed up and stayed online through 2020 and 2021, serving the same front page with the same sphere, which is what happens to a website whose hosting is paid and whose founder is gone.

~ the child that outlived it ~

The members needed somewhere to publish their own work, and the tool the team built for that grew past the thing it had been built inside. The same people turned it into Cargo, the web publishing platform that art directors and photographers have been using to put portfolios online ever since. Cargo is a going concern. SpaceCollective is not.

The last capture of the full site is from 12 January 2022. By 8 March the address was serving a card with the site's name, the years 2007 to 2022, and the line "More info will be posted soon." In May the domain briefly slipped and showed the message Cargo displays for an address that has not been configured yet, which is how you can tell what the headstone is built on. More info never arrived. Four years later the card is still answering, the promise swapped out for a different line: "Embrace the alien within."

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