Let's say that, after you die, you don't end up in heaven, or hell, or the body of a seagull,
Let's say you wake up in a massive, circular museum. Like a donut.
The museum is named after you.
Outside is an endless white expanse. Nothing else.
You look ahead. The museum is so big you can't even perceive its curvature.
And on every pedestal, in every glass box, in every room-sized exhibit,
Is a day of your life.
Represented by the plush that fell off a railing you never got back,
by your diploma,
by your diploma after you burned it in a panicked frenzy,
by a gilded statue of your best friend,
by your diary pages, by your grocery lists, by hasty notes you made on your phone,
by home videos, by your artwork, by your memories--ever-so-unreliable, but still here.
The day you graduated, the day you ran away from home to burn your old life down and start over,
The day you saw your newborn child for the first time, the day you decided you wouldn't HAVE children,
Your days spent dull, alone in a corner,
Your days spent with your friend, with your friends, with the man who laughed at your joke, with Everyone.
A dazzling, sparkling trophy room of all your academic or athletic acheivements,
Next to an even brighter one, the shelves lined with all the handmade, scrappy, silly gifts your loved ones had made for you over the years,
Every good day, every bad day, every day of your life...
It's all here.
This love letter from the universe or god or whoever else chronicling all of your life in exhaustive, loving detail...
...What happens when you, exhaust, the detail?
.

.

17776 is probably my favorite story ever. Maybe. I'm not sure actually, but it's a thousand percent up there. It's a really well executed piece of net art that I feel is at least a little emblematic of the potential online storytelling can have, even if it's perhaps a simple implementation of it. Still, I feel the overall simplicity of the story, being made up almost exclusively of colored text and Jon Bois's trademark Google Earth Bullshit™ is rather inspiring. You really can just put something on the internet and have it touch the lives of the many and the few. Sure, the story had the advantage of being written mostly by an already prominent internet figure, but I'm not really someone who likes getting hung up on numbers anyways.

Ages ago, I remember talking about it through the lens of the theme of "boredom". Ironically, I think this is a really trite way of analyzing the story.

17776 is about humans, which seems obvious but time and time again it proves that it is about human nature before anything else--football, space technology, handheld LCD games. It's about what human nature boils down to, albeit in an incredibly optimistic sense: just kinda having fun!

With nothing "new" left on Earth for humans to discover, they initially do what any scifi setting prompts its participants to do: advance. Flying cars, space travel, that capitalistic desire for growth. Growth isn't a bad thing! It's quite good in fact. But 17776 argues that it is not our purpose. We weren't made to see "everything". The immortal population of the story has all the reasons to explore, yet none of the drive, because, well, why would they? They have everything they need here on Earth!

Now, the limitation of 17776's setting is, of course, that it is a story that takes place "after" the story has concluded, after any and all major change has been exhausted. We, of course, do not have this luxury, and thus it's more difficult to fully adopt the philosophy the story proposes. But I mean, considering one of the in-universe hallmarks of how change can be destructive--at least, as destructive as something can be in 17776--is a capitalist allegory, I wouldn't say it should be disregarded as a whole...?

You might say, "Ana, you've been making up a guy to get mad at for a full paragraph!" And like, yeah, I don't talk to enough people to know their scalding hot takes on the funny JuICE story, but shut up let me have this.

What was I saying? Right, go read 17776. Again. I know you just got back from reading it the first time (...right?) but ooooo you wanna reread it so bad ooooo...