Nostalgia for 2021

Missing (2023) — Directed by Will Merrick and Nicholas D. Johnson

When did Google stop working? Was it this year? Maybe, a few years ago? Or maybe it never actually worked, and I am just remembering the years of my youth as I wish that I had lived them? I know what I am supposed to do: I ask Google Gemini.

Great, that is helpful. I am right and wrong. I then asked, “Am I going crazy?” The answer is unequivocal. Gemini says: “you're definitely not going crazy!” Thank you! Still, for some reason, I do not trust him.

But then I spent Sunday night in the manner that is my wont, especially if I have consumed any alcohol on Saturday. I watched some half-decent movie, just because the Netflix algorithm offered it to me as suggested entertainment. This was a godsend. God sent it to me. Now, I know that I am not crazy.

The plot of the film, Missing, relies on two pieces of ideological infrastructure for its forward propulsion. First, we all live on the internet. Second, the internet is functional.

It is not much of a spoiler to reveal that in this film, an eighteen-year-old girl searches for her mother, who is missing. The ending doesn’t make any sense, but that’s not the point. The point was to keep you glued to the screen until you get there. Since the protagonist is a teenager, and her mom disappears after traveling to Colombia, she spends a lot of time on the computer. She googles things, she makes contact with a man in Cartagena, she looks through news reports. She is young and smart. She googles a lot of things.

Over and over, during the film, two thoughts occurred to me with simultaneous intensity. 1. That would have worked 2. That would not work today. As she uses the computer to do something, there is a moment of blessed confirmation — yes! The functional internet that I remember was real. And — no! It does not exist anymore. In one scene, she puts several names into the search bar (using quotation marks to indicate exact searches) and finds a court document showing they are the aliases of a convicted conman. If she tried that in 2025, she might find a bunch of sponsored links to services that charge you to access public information, and don’t even work. In another scene, she looks up a specific official in Colombia by his job title — today, she would get an “AI Overview” (I tried) explaining where the position came from, that ends with this phrase: “AI responses may contain mistakes.” I could go on, but you get it. You have tried to use Google recently.

A very brief investigation reveals they wrote the film in 2021. It also reveals that if it is not exactly a sequel, it “takes place in the universe of” Searching (2018). So, perhaps they were using the idea of the internet they had back then, or were working from their own memories. The fact remains — only four years ago, a functional internet was accepted by screenwriters as the baseline reality upon which to construct a story. Nostalgia always entails a distortion of the past, because all memory relies upon a process of discarding what is unimportant or cannot be integrated and endlessly re-remembering what is cherished or cannot be overcome. I don’t really have memories of Google working, because I too accepted its functionality as baseline reality. I have memories of the things I found. Come to think of it, it was Google that initially convinced me that I no longer really need to remember things. It is well understood that two individuals may have wildly differing recollections of what life was like in 1982 in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, for example. But I don’t think I was supposed to find a film from 2023 to be so jarring.

In 1998, the founders of Google famously wrote that any search engine powered by advertising revenues would be “inherently biased” and contrary to the interests of the user. Twenty-seven years and approximately $1.9 trillion dollars¹ in advertising revenue later, it is clear that the maximization of search engine effectiveness is a distinct goal from the maximization of profits. They don’t need it to be as good as it can be. It stands to reason that they just need to be slightly better than the top competitor for home page of the internet — really, they just need to remain a more cost-effective destination for ad placement than anywhere else.

Amusingly, a major piece of character development in Missing is that the mother, a hapless Boomer, uses Siri for everything and frequently screws up using technology. Of course Siri, launched in 2011, is just as much “artificial intelligence” as the large language models ChatGPT and Gemini and “Grok,” in that they are all computer programs that you have to address in the second person. In the film, talking to your little computer like it is a person is for babies, while the tech-savvy protagonist fires off keyword searches and efficient little commands. You can do more with ChatGPT than you could with Siri, of course (I have never used Siri), just as you could do more with Siri than you could with Jeeves. But all of these are nifty little computer programs with access to the rest of the internet. To the extent that I find ChatGPT useful right now, it is for searching for things I used to look up on Google — because I try first on Google, and then remember that Google does not work. ChatGPT will almost always get it wrong, but you can correct it (training the program for free) a few times until it comes close.

In the film, the protagonist uses Google Translate to speak to a man in Colombia, quickly typing and reading while on the phone. That is plausible if you know more or less how Spanish is pronounced. These scenes caused no cognitive dissonance for me, because Google Translate still works, because there is no reason to break it. The more useful Translate is, the more time you will spend on the service. In the case of Search, it is precisely the opposite. The movie was pretty good.

1. Google makes most of its money from advertising, but not all of it. I used Gemini to calculate this figure, so if it is wrong they can’t get mad at me.