Image Credit: Allison Gould
As we return from our winter hiatus with our first posts of the decade, this week The Junkyard gets into the retrospective spirit. We asked five friends of the blog – Peter Langland-Hassan, Margherita Arcangeli, Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin, and Bence Nanay – to reflect on the previous decade and give us a “Top Five” list relating to imagination. There were no other requirements – we thought we’d give them free rein to come up with whatever they wanted, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s an interesting set of ruminations. We’ll be running one of these lists each day this week. Next week, we’ll resume our regular weekly postings.
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A post by Bence Nanay.
It was not a decade ago, but twenty years ago, in 1999, when a somewhat overdramatic David Bowie said this in an interview on BBC Newsnight:
I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. […] It’s an alien life form.
That was pretty spot on. I’m no David Bowie, so there were a lot of things I could not imagine in 2009 that came to be true by 2019. I’m not saying these were unimaginable per se (maybe they were imaginable to a supreme being like Bowie), but not to me and not to most people I know.
Here are 5 things we could not have imagined in 2009:
1. A hit philosophy sitcom. The Good Place (NBC) is one of the most popular sitcoms running, starring Kristin Bell (ten years ago just after hitting the big time with Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and with Ted Danson, for crying out loud!
2. Under-roasted coffee everywhere. OK, maybe I should have seen this coming. I first heard the spiel about how not roasting the coffee beans too much brings out their individual flavor and all that back in 2005, from none other than Mike Martin, ahead of the curve as always… But even in 2009 it seemed like a passing fad very much limited to coffee-connoisseur hotspots. Not anymore.
3. Shitshow in politics, wherever you look. I don’t want to write more about this – definitely don’t want to write about the main shitshowman…
4. Star Wars again. And Disney’s Star Wars at that. You might have seen that coming after Disney’s takeover of Marvel in Summer 2009. But Baby Yoda and resurrected Palpatine? (This was an intentional spoiler, by the way, so that you can go back and read Neil Van Leeuwen’s excellent previous post on spoilers.)
5. The Junkyard Blog. Not only could I not imagine a highly popular blog entirely devoted to imagination in 2009, I couldn’t imagine it in 2017, when Amy first told me about wanting to do this. So here is to the next 10 years of Junkyard!
Bence Nanay is BOF Research Professor at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Cambridge University. His current project is on the integration of the philosophy, psychology and neuroscience of mental imagery, funded by the European Research Council.