Your place in the wave

Most charts ask you to take in information and think about your own life afterwards, once you look away. These pages ask for both at once. When your own dot sits on the line, each entry stops being something to learn and starts working as a cue. A keyword such as Walkman, Facebook or ChatGPT is enough to bring back where you were, who you were with, and what it felt like. The memories are already yours. The page gives them somewhere to land while you are still looking.

David Pinto, who made these pages, compares it to getting film of yourself surfing: you see where you were in the wave while you remember how the ride felt. He calls this reflexive reading. The screen was a window onto other people’s history. With your dot on it, it becomes a mirror in which you can find yourself.

The point is social placement. We all take part in how things spread, whether or not anyone writes our names down. Histories record the moment a technology or an idea broke through and the few people named at that moment. Every wave also carried people who were there before it broke: using it early, talking about it, passing it on. The tinder marks those years. If your dot lands there, you were part of the conditions before the flame.

The hundredth-monkey story, in which one more monkey learns a trick and the whole troop suddenly knows it, is a parable rather than a finding. Its first ninety-nine are real in every adoption curve, though, and almost none of them are remembered.

Older readers have more of each wave stored, so this works best alongside someone of another generation. Compare where your dots fall and tell each other what each one brings back. Reading is relational: what one person remembers changes what the other sees.

This is also what the beach is for. Success gets recorded after the fact. The beach tries to make the preconditions visible before anything happens: the flint, the tinder, and the people already gathered when the spark arrives.

On this page the scroll is the slider. The line under the bar is now: the bar gives the year, how old you were, and how far each technology had spread. Each ribbon starts as tinder, a brown thread while fewer than one in six had it, catches at the spark, and widens into colour as it becomes ordinary. AI is still at its spark.

To try it: scroll slowly. When a word catches, notice what comes back before you look at the numbers. Then tap that technology’s chip, e.g. Colour TV: it follows the line as you scroll, and a second tap at the year it reached you sets it.