The Future is Rick Astley

So, here it is, and I realize that there is almost no way that it will stand up to not one but three posts spent stalling; but I actually want to go back to one of those little bouts of dissembling, and talk about the Ultimate Rickroll.

Please understand, I was an early-nineties adopter of the Internet, first via Prodigy then via America Online; I fell in love with the actual, more-or-less direct, browser-based Internet via an FAQ for Final Fantasy VI.

Please also understand that to me, computers are magic. I know CSS and HTML fairly well, I am at least a pretty competent user of most applications and can figure a great many out without an instruction manual; but to me the way in which computers function is almost always alien and confusing on some level, if only at the root level of machine language. So I get a thrill out of new technology and new applications of the old stuff that a power-use might not.

All this is to set the tone for what I have to say about the Ultimate Rickroll, which is that I find it so fascinating because it is such a distillation of what I love about this modern age—the ease of transfer between online and offline realities.

When I started playing with the Internet, the closest thing to grounding the Internet in the offline was email (or, if you want to get technical and more than a little jejune, printouts). While I'm sure there are power users who will tell me you could order things online at that stage, the best I ever found was scans of mail-order catalogs or the occasional roleplaying sourcebook. I remember reading some pretty execrable hypertext fiction at that point, too, and playing a passable but boring online game that purported to be linked to the movie Twelve Monkeys, as well as a few home-brewed RPGs and platformers downloaded off FTP sites. In short, barring non-visual, non-aural contact with a living person, and the occasional file download, what you found online was mostly stuck there.

Then came, at least in my experience, Amazon. A person could go to a website, select a book, pay for it with a credit card and have it delivered to their home. There is a lot to lament about this set-up—the lack of human contact, the damage to independent bookstores—but at the same time, I had to applaud it because it was another way in which online and offline were merging. As major stores started to use websites for their mail-order services, and as Amazon branched out into other things besides books, I could feel myself sliding into the future.

Wednesday night, I had the somewhat strange privilege of visiting uWink. To keep the explanation brief, it is a restaurant wherein touchscreen computers are mounted to each table, and are used to order your food, pay your bill, and play a variety of games by yourself, with your tablemates, or with other groups in the restaurant. When I say it is used to order your food, I mean that it takes the place of the menu and the first half of your encounter with your server; they bring you your food, and your drink refills (which are also ordered via the touchscreen), and they assist you with technical problems. In other words, with the obvious exception of glitches, which the waitstaff are at least nominally equipped to fix, the experience is a seamless integration of local intranet and human interaction; one facilitates the other. It definitely had the light-and-shadow play of something Hollywood trendy, and the food was only pretty good for its price, but there was something glorious about the whole experience. It really did feel like the restaurant of the future, though their future takes some of its cues from The Jetsons, and when I can afford it I'll definitely go there again. I didn't exactly know why this experience made me so giddy—it was not that much of a shift from the normal restaurant experience, except with board games added, but something about the way it was presented, and the simple fact that this was a new application of only semi-modern technology, made it breathtaking.

Then came Thursday, and the Thanksgiving parade, and what I have already termed the Final Rickroll. Go ahead and take a moment to view it, and then I'll explain what I mean.

There we go. Now, the thing about this that took my breath away is that it is one of the next steps in the bridging of the on/offline gap. My aforementioned examples—commerce and service industries—and the other major examples, like online journals or instant messaging programs, are translations of old ideas through new technology. The rickroll, and its predecessor the duckroll, are pranks, yes, but pranks which depend entirely on online technology to work. I can imagine ways in which something like a rickroll could be perpetrated in flesh and blood, totally offline, but by and large the analog rickroll seems like it would be so difficult to pull off as to not be worth the payoff. Then Cartoon Network goes, and manages to stage a real-world rickroll; but here's the kicker for me—that joke wouldn't have worked if we hadn't had the Internet to spread it. It took an online phenomenon and found a way to make it work offline, but its functionality depended on a portion of the viewership understanding what a rickroll was (note, please, that the announcer on the YouTube video I linked says the word "rickroll" but doesn't bother to explain, which I think speaks volumes). In other words, after years of us figuring out how to use the Internet to do what we did anyway, this is a small example of the Internet giving back; and that, in conclusion, is why I have such great appreciation for the Final Rickroll.

We're moving into the future. I mean, we already have a black President; now we just need a flying car.